And I think it matters to explain it accurately because people often imagine a dramatic singular instant, a door swinging open, a man walking free.

What actually happened was a process of weeks.

Legal paperwork, conditions attached to conditions, the posting of bail through property that a member of Miriam’s extended family offered at real personal risk to themselves because putting up property to secure the release of a man convicted of the charges I carried is not a neutral act in Iran.

There were meetings with officials.

There were documents to sign, conditions of release, restrictions on my activity, reporting requirements.

The lawyers involved on both the state side and mine were navigating a bureaucratic structure that moved slowly and required patience.

The conditions of my release were specific and significant.

I was to report regularly to the intelligence services.

I was not to engage in any religious activity that the state considered illegal, which in practice meant I was not to do any of the things that had defined my life for the previous decade.

I was not to speak publicly about my imprisonment.

I was not to leave the country and my passport was confiscated.

That last condition was the most important in terms of what it meant for our long-term future.

I was free inside Iran.

I was not free to leave Iran.

The cage was larger, but it was still a cage.

I walked out of Evan prison in the early months of 2020.

I will not give a more specific date than that.

The world that I walked into was a different world from the one I had left 8 years earlier in ways that went beyond the changes that 8 years naturally brings.

Iran in early 2020 was a country that had lived through the aftermath of significant protest movements, through continued economic contraction under sanctions, through a public health crisis that was beginning to accelerate.

And I was a man of 43 walking back into it, carrying eight years of a particular kind of living that had changed me in ways I was only beginning to understand.

The first thing, the absolute first thing was marryiam.

Not across glass, not with a phone handset between us and men monitoring what we said in person in the same space.

Close.

I have tried several times to write about that moment and I have not found words that are adequate to it.

And I think that is because some things should not be reduced to words.

I will say only that eight years of being separated from the person you love most in the world, seeing them only through glass in monitored conditions and then having them actually present physically close.

That reunion was one of the most profound experiences of my life.

We held each other for a long time.

Neither of us spoke.

There was nothing to say that was more true than the simple fact of being there together.

Adera was 16.

He was taller than me, which took a moment to adjust to.

He stood back a little when I first came in, not with coldness, but with the particular carefulness of a young man who was protecting something in himself that had been formed during my absence, and that he was not sure how to offer to me yet.

I understood that immediately, and I did not push against it.

I had thought about this moment many times over the years, and I had decided that however it looked when it came, I I would not try to force it into the shape I had imagined.

I let him come to me in his own time.

And he did.

Slowly, over weeks and months, we rebuilt something, not the same thing we had before.

He was no longer the 8-year-old boy I had been taken away from.

He was a young man with his own interior life, his own formed character, his own questions about God and about me and about everything that had happened to our family.

We had conversations that were sometimes difficult and always honest, and I valued every one of them enormously, including the difficult ones.

Sharon was 12.

She was the one who came to me immediately without hesitation and held on.

I held her back and I closed my eyes and I thought, “She is real.

This is real.

I am here.

” There is a specific prayer of gratitude that has no words and that is simply the state of being overwhelmed with thankfulness for the ordinary miracle of the thing you were not sure you would have again.

I was in that state for a long time in those first hours.

The days that followed my release were disorienting in a practical sense that I had not fully anticipated.

8 years is a long time.

The rhythms of daily life in Iran had continued while I was absent.

Technology had moved.

The social landscape had shifted.

The particular texture of life in Thran was both familiar and changed.

I had to relearn ordinary things.

How to use the current phone interfaces.

How to navigate systems that had been digitalized in my absence.

How the practical infrastructure of daily life had changed.

These are small things and I say them not to make them into a bigger deal than they are but because I think it adds to the honesty of the picture to acknowledge that reintegration after long imprisonment involves a strangeness that nobody warns you about.

What was not strange was the community.

When I came home, the believers I had left behind were still there.

The network had changed.

People had moved.

Some had left Iran.

New people had joined.

The structure had shifted in response to years of pressure.

But the core of it, the people who had been carrying it through those years or were there.

They found ways to reach me quietly, carefully in the first weeks after my release.

And the meetings we had, small, careful, in private homes, had a quality of reunion that I think only people who have been through the fire together can understand.

The Iranian underground church, which I had left in 2012, was in 2020 larger, deeper rooted, and more dispersed than it had been when I was arrested.

This fact alone told me something significant.

and the state had arrested me and dozens of other pastors and leaders over the years between my arrest and my release.

It had raided gatherings, confiscated materials, imprisoned people, and applied sustained pressure on the community.

And the community had not shrunk.

It had grown.

This is not because Iranian Christians are reckless or naive about the risks.

It is because the hunger that drives people to faith in that context is more powerful than the fear that the state uses to suppress it.

When people have genuinely encountered the living God, the machinery of state repression is not sufficient to take that from them.

I had proved that in my own life.

Tens of thousands of others across Iran had proved it in theirs.

I want to say something about the practical reality of Christian life in Iran that I think is important for people outside to understand.

The restrictions on religious minority communities in Iran are woven into the fabric of the legal and social system in a comprehensive way.

It is not only imprisonment, though that is the most extreme expression of it.

It is also the impossibility of registering as a Christian in official government documents if you were born Muslim which means that legally in the eyes of the state you do not exist as a Christian or it is the inability to access certain jobs or opportunities if your faith is known.

It is the social pressure from family and community.

The potential for family members to report you.

the reality that in certain contexts your faith being discovered can result in divorce, disinheritance, loss of child custody.

It is the education system that teaches your children that your faith is apostasy.

It is the accumulated weight of living inside a legal and social framework that does not recognize your right to believe what you believe.

I say this not to produce despair but to calibrate the scale of what Iranian believers are living with and then to say they are living with it and not only surviving it thriving in it in the way that genuine faith thrives under genuine pressure which is different from the way it grows in safety and comfort.

Uh there is a quality of Iranian Christianity that has been formed by these conditions and that carries a depth and an authenticity that I believe God will use significantly in the chapter that is now opening for that country.

I spent approximately a year back in Tran before we left.

I will not detail the specific process of leaving because as I have said the people who made it possible are still inside Iran and their safety depends on that information remaining private.

Uh what I will say is that it involved a chain of trust, a careful sequence of movements, real risk at multiple points, and the hand of God in ways that I saw clearly in the moment and that I see even more clearly in retrospect.

Miriam and the children came out separately from me.

There was a period of several days during which I did not know where they were and could not make contact.

I want to be honest about what those days were like because in some ways they were harder than anything I had experienced inside Evan.

And that is a strong statement that I make deliberately.

Inside Evan, the suffering was mine.

The fear was for my family, but the experience was mine to carry and mine to manage with whatever resources I had.

In those days of not knowing where Miriam was, where Dara and Sharan were, whether they were safe, the helplessness was total.

And I had no cell to sit in and no ability to even direct the prayer at a problem I could clearly see.

All I could do was trust.

And trust in those days was not an easy, fluid thing.

It was a grinding, desperate, momentby-moment choice.

They arrived safely.

We were reunited outside Iran.

And the relief of that reunion was again one of those experiences that I do not have adequate words for.

We held each other in a way that people hold each other when they understand fully what they almost lost.

On the country we eventually arrived in in Western Europe.

I will not name specifically.

We are here.

We are safe.

The children have adjusted in the way that young people do, which is both a mercy and its own complexity.

Darra is now in his 20s, building a life, wrestling with questions about faith and identity, and what it means to be Iranian in a place that is not Iran.

Shirene is a young woman who carries her faith with a quiet settled confidence that makes me more proud than I have words to say.

Miriam has rebuilt a life here with the same disciplined strength she has always had.

We are together.

We are free.

And that is not a small thing.

I began to speak publicly relatively soon after arriving in Europe.

Not because I felt entirely ready, but because the opportunity came and the need was clear.

I spoke in churches, at Christian conferences, at advocacy events focused on religious persecution.

My English was limited at first, and I used an interpreter for many of those early engagements, but the story transcended the language.

I discovered in those early speaking engagements something that I have continued to discover every time I share this testimony that what God does in people’s lives in extreme conditions is not only for those people.

It is for the wider body.

It is a deposit of testimony that the whole church needs access to.

And I was carrying something that people needed to hear.

And then came March 1st, 2026.

I was at home in the morning.

We had woken early.

Miam and I both wake early as a matter of habit formed over years and never quite released.

I was reading and Miam was in the kitchen making tea.

My phone was on the table.

It began to register messages one then several in quick succession then a continuous stream from Iranian friends in the diaspora from people in the network from believers whose names I knew all of them saying the same thing in different words was dead I put the phone down and did not pick it up again for several minutes I sat very still I was aware of my own heartbeat in a way that you become aware of it when something very significant has just entered the room of your life.

People have asked me since what I felt first.

I think there is an expectation but especially among people who know what I went through under the system that Kamani represented that my first response would have been relief or vindication or some version of triumph.

I want to tell you honestly that none of those were my first response.

My first response was grief.

Genuine uncomplicated grief for the loss of a human life.

A man who whatever he did, whatever he represented, whatever machinery of harm he presided over was a human being created in the image of God.

A man I had prayed for in the most literal and sincere sense through years in Evan prison.

I had prayed for Kam.

I had asked God to reach him.

I had meant those prayers.

And now he was dead.

And I did not know.

I cannot know what his end looked like in the eyes of God.

That unknown itself was something to grieve.

I wept.

I am not ashamed to say that.

I wept for a man who had been the human face of a system that had taken eight years of my life and had marked my children and my wife in ways that will not fully heal in this lifetime.

I wept because that is what the gospel teaches me to do.

Because I had learned in a prison cell that love is not conditional on the other person deserving it.

And that prayer for your enemies is not a performance but a genuine reaching toward God on their behalf.

And the man I had genuinely prayed for was gone.

After the initial stillness, I went to marry him.

I told her I needed to find something.

She knew what I meant.

I found the worn Quran that had come with me out of Iran.

This physical object that had been with me through all those years, its margins filled with my private notation, the record of the dreams and the impressions and the prayers of 8 years of imprisonment.

I sat with Miam at our kitchen table and I opened it to the relevant entries.

I read them to her.

the dream of the structure of authority, the thing that came from above, the rupture, the opening.

She listened without interrupting.

When I finished, there was a long silence between us.

And then she said quietly that she believed God had given me those dreams, not for my own private keeping, but for a moment like this one.

for a moment when the Iranian people and the Iranian church would need a voice to say this is not random.

This is not only geopolitics.

I something is happening here that is bigger than the events themselves.

There is a hand in this and there is an opening on the other side of the rupture.

She was right and I knew it as she said it.

It was time to speak.

I want to speak directly now.

I have told you where I came from, what happened to me, what I saw and heard and felt in those years of darkness.

What God showed me in the margins of a prisonisssued Quran, in the handwriting of a man who was not sure he would ever be free again.

I and I have brought you to this moment, this extraordinary, fragile, history-loaded moment in which the man who embodied more than any other single figure the system of religious and political control that kept Iran in a particular kind of captivity for over 40 years is gone.

And I want to talk about what I believe that means.

Not primarily in political terms.

there are better qualified people for that analysis.

I want to talk about what I believe it means spiritually and what I believe is now possible in Iran in a way that has not been possible in living memory.

But before I speak about the future, I need to tell you more about the present reality of the church inside Iran.

Because without understanding that reality, the significance of this moment cannot be fully grasped.

The underground church of Iran is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of modern Christianity.

And I say that as someone who has lived inside it, not as an outside observer drawing on statistics.

The numbers that researchers and missions organizations site, estimates suggesting that between 1 and 2 million Iranians may be followers of Christ with a vast majority being converts from Muslim backgrounds.

These numbers correspond to a lived reality that I have witnessed.

This is not a small, fragile, fringe community hanging on by its fingernails.

This is a movement.

It is alive in Tehran and in Isvahan and in Shiraz and in Mashad and in smaller cities and towns across the country.

It exists among university students and among workingclass families and among professionals and among the rural poor.

It has no central organization that can be decapitated by arresting a handful of leaders.

It is diffuse, reliant on the Holy Spirit rather than on institutional structures.

And this perhaps more than any other single factor is why decades of state suppression have failed to kill it.

Let me tell you about the people I know who are part of this community.

Because I think abstractions about a movement can let you keep a comfortable distance from the human reality.

I think about a woman I will call Fariba.

She came to faith in her late30s after a marriage that had broken her in multiple ways and a period of depression during which she had been genuinely unable to find any reason to continue.

She encountered the gospel through a friend who risked significant personal safety to share it with her.

She did not make a quick emotional decision.

She investigated over months, asking hard questions, refusing to accept easy answers.

When she came to faith, it was with the conviction of a woman who had done her work.

She lost her extended family support in the process.

Her parents considered what she had done a shame on the family, and her brother stopped speaking to her.

She continued, “On the last I heard of her, she was quietly, carefully sharing her faith with others in her neighborhood and had seen three people come to Christ through her.

One woman who had been on the edge of taking her own life.

One man whose marriage was being restored.

One young person who had been drawn into a destructive set of relationships and had found his way out through the community.

Faribba introduced him to this is the Iranian underground church.

Person by person, life by life, get extraordinary personal cost.

I think about a young man, barely 20 when he came to faith, who had grown up in a religious family, who had been given a thorough Islamic education, who had known the former religion from the inside and found it insufficient.

He had looked at the Islamic Republic’s version of faith, the religion used as a tool of political control.

I the religion of the morality police and the compulsory hijab and the public floggings and the execution of people for things that God never asked to be enforced this way.

And he had concluded, not irrationally, that if this was what God looked like, he wanted no part of God.

And then someone showed him something different.

Not a western Christianity imported whole from another context.

But the Jesus of the Gospels speaking in Persian aren’t addressing questions that were specific to his experience as a young Iranian man.

And something happened in him that he had not expected and could not dismiss.

He is still inside Iran as far as I know.

He is still meeting quietly with a small group.

He is still praying for his country.

I think about brother Cameron who I have already mentioned.

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