He served his full sentence and was released.

He is no longer in Iran.

He is alive and he is free and he is serving God.

And that is enough.

the people of this church, these tens of thousands, these hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iranian men and women and young people who have encountered the living Christ in the most inhospitable environment imaginable and have held on to that encounter through every kind of pressure.

They have been praying for Iran for a long time, not just for their own safety and survival, though those prayers are real and appropriate.

They have been praying for the transformation of the nation and for the people of Iran as a whole, including the officials, including the guards, including the judges who have sentenced them to encounter the God who transforms.

They have been praying for a day of opening, for a moment when the wall of control that has separated the Iranian people from free access to the gospel would begin to crack.

I believe that day is beginning.

I believe that with everything in me.

Now I want to speak to my fellow Iranians.

Every Iranian person hearing or reading this or whether you are inside the country or part of the tens of millions who make up the diaspora scattered across the world from Los Angeles to London to Toronto to Dubai.

Whether you are a believer or a skeptic or a Muslim or someone who has long since stopped believing in anything at all.

Whether you are watching events unfold with hope or with fear or with the particular exhausted cynicism of a people who have seen too many things promised and too few things delivered.

I am speaking to you.

I want you to know something about your country that the 40 plus years of the Islamic Republic have sometimes obscured but could never destroy.

Iran is a great people.

I mean this not as nationalism but as genuine conviction.

The Persian civilization is among the oldest and deepest in human history.

Iranian poetry, Iranian philosophy, Iranian science, Iranian art.

These are not minor contributions to the human story.

They are central to it of the capacity for spiritual depth that is woven into the Iranian cultural DNA, the mystical hunger that runs through Persian poetry from roomie to hes.

the reaching toward transcendence that is in the very fiber of the culture.

This is not incidental.

It is the fingerprint of a people that God made with a specific capacity to seek and know him.

And for over 40 years that capacity has been captured and distorted by a system that weaponized religion on that took the name of God and used it to justify imprisonment and execution and surveillance and the crushing of human conscience.

I am not telling Iranians anything they do not already know.

They know it better than the world does.

the protests of 2019, the woman life freedom movement of 2022 and its aftermath, and the ongoing expressions of a people who have said at enormous personal cost that they want something different.

All of this tells the world that the Iranian people have been living inside a gap between what they are and what their government tells them they must be.

And that gap has become intolerable.

I want to speak specifically to Iranians who are Muslim because I am aware that what I am saying carries complexity in that community and I do not want to dismiss or minimize that complexity.

I know the history.

I know that Christianity has at times in its institutional history been associated with empire, with conquest, with the imposition of one culture’s religion upon another people by force.

I know that for many Iranians, Christianity has been associated with the West and with the political interests that have sometimes used the West’s cultural exports, including religion, as tools of influence.

I understand why that association creates suspicion, and I am not asking you to ignore it.

But I want to ask you to look past the institutional and political history of Christianity and look directly at Jesus.

Not the Jesus of the Crusades.

Not the Jesus of colonial mission.

Not the Jesus of American evangelical politics.

The Jesus of the Gospels.

The Jesus who was born in an occupied territory under the control of an empire that his own religious establishment was compromised by on the Jesus who spent his time with the people at the margins, the poor, the sick, the disreputable, the ones the religious authorities had written off.

The Jesus who told his followers that the greatest commandment was love, not conformity, not political loyalty, not the performance of ritual.

Love.

The Jesus who was himself arrested by a collaboration of religious and political power and who was executed by a state that found him threatening.

The Jesus who on the cross said, “Father, I forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.

” That Jesus is not a foreigner to the Iranian experience.

that Jesus is someone that the Iranian experience, the experience of living under religious and political repression, of being imprisoned for conscience, of having love weaponized into control, has particular capacity to understand because that Jesus has been with the underground church in Iran through every year of its existence.

He has been in every interrogation room where a believer refused to recant.

He has been in every cell in Evan prison where a man or woman prayed alone in the dark.

He has been at every kitchen table where a small group of believers passed around bread and cup and said, “This is his body.

This is his blood given for us.

He is available to every Iranian person who is searching.

” not as a western cultural import, not as a political alignment, as the living God who speaks Persian.

He who sees Iranian faces, who knows Iranian names, who has been present in Iranian darkness for longer than anyone has kept count.

I want to say something to Iranians who have lost their faith entirely, who grew up in a Muslim household and whose experience of religion, formal, coercive, political, hypocritical, in the way it was practiced by those who held power, drove them away from the whole concept of God.

I understand that journey more than you might expect me to.

I was not far from it myself in a different way before I encountered something that broke the category I had for religion.

The God I met in a dream before I knew his name.

The God who sustained me through 8 years in Evan prison.

The God who brought my family out of Iran.

He is not the God of the system.

He is not the God of the regime.

He is the father who runs toward the returning child and he is the one who was in the far country looking for you while the religious establishment was managing the temple.

If you have been hurt by religion, specifically by the religion used by the Islamic Republic to justify the things it has done to the Iranian people.

I want to say your anger is not irrational.

What was done to Iran in the name of God was a wound.

It is legitimate to be wounded by it.

But the wound is not the whole story.

And the God who allowed himself to be crucified by religious and political power is not the God who used religious and political power to oppress you.

He is on the other side of that equation.

He always has been.

Now, let me speak to the believers who are still inside Iran.

My brothers and my sisters who are meeting right now in someone’s apartment in Tehran or Isvahan or a city I have never visited, sitting quietly together, reading the word in low voices.

He praying prayers that cost them the kind of security that most Christians elsewhere take entirely for granted.

I see you.

I know what your life is.

I have lived it.

I know what it is to leave a gathering and scan the street before you step out.

I know what it is to see an unfamiliar face in the group and feel your entire body tighten.

I I know what it is to hear about a pastor being arrested and to carry both grief for them and the practical fear that their networks are now known and that yours might be connected.

I know all of it.

And I want to say to you, what you have been carrying is not a small thing.

What you have been doing in those rooms, in that hiddenness, in that costly faithfulness, it has not been wasted.

It has been accumulating before God in a way that I believe we are about to begin to see the return on.

on the prayers you have prayed for Iran’s liberation, political and spiritual, have not evaporated into the ceiling.

They have been heard.

I am not in a position to tell you exactly what is coming or exactly when, and I will not pretend to be.

But I believe with everything in me that the moment we are now in is a hinge point, a turn, a chapter beginning that is different from the chapter that has just closed.

I am not telling you to be reckless.

Hey, the transition happening now in Iran is not simple or safe.

The forces that sustain the Islamic Republic system are not dissolved by the death of one man, however much that man embodied the system.

There will be a struggle for what comes next.

There will be danger in that struggle.

Please be wise.

Protect each other.

Protect the vulnerable people in your communities.

Do not take unnecessary risks in the name of optimism.

Uh but do not let wisdom become an excuse for the kind of fearfulness that holds back what God is wanting to do.

There is a difference between wisdom and paralysis.

Walk in wisdom.

But walk.

I want to speak to the international Christian community.

the churches in America and in Europe and in Africa and in Asia and in Latin America who have prayed for Iran, who have given to organizations that support persecuted believers, who have in some cases carried Iranian names and Iranian cases before their governments in advocacy.

Thank you.

I mean that the prayers of the global church for Iran have mattered in ways that are sometimes visible and often invisible.

I know from my own experience that being prayed for by people I had never met across the world was a form of sustenance that I cannot fully explain but that I can absolutely attest to.

But I also want to say something that may be harder to hear.

The Iranian church does not need to be treated as a mission field that requires the West to rescue it.

I have sat in church settings in Europe and America where Iranian Christianity is discussed with a kind of benevolent pity that however well-intentioned contains a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Iranian church actually is.

The Iranian church is not a fragile refugee community waiting for stronger believers to come and stabilize it.

It is one of the most spiritually vital, tested, immature expressions of Christian community in the world today.

It has produced in the fire of persecution a quality of faith and a depth of character that many comfortable western churches have simply not had the conditions to develop.

The Iranian church has things to teach.

The global church needs to be humble enough to learn from it, not only to minister to it.

What the Iranian church needs from the global church is partnership.

A continued intercession that is specific and sustained, not a burst of prayer attention during a news cycle and then a return to other concerns.

Continued advocacy for those still imprisoned.

There are people inside Evan and other Iranian prisons right now whose names are known to organizations like Article 18 and Open Doors, and who need the sustained pressure of international attention on their cases, and a willingness to support the work of training and resourcing Iranian leaders, both those who have come out of Iran and those who are operating inside, with the kind of serious, substantive investment that a historic moment like this one deserves.

Let me say something about what I believe God did in me through those eight years because I think it is relevant not only to my own story but to the broader question of what suffering produces in a follower of Christ.

And I went into Evan prison as a pastor who loved God and served his community with genuine dedication.

I came out of Evan prison as a man who knew God in a qualitatively different way.

The things I learned in those years about his faithfulness in darkness, about his presence in isolation, about the way he meets people at the absolute bottom of themselves.

These are not theological propositions I can argue from a book.

They are lived experience.

They are in my bones.

And that difference between knowing about God and knowing God is something that changes the way you speak about him.

People can tell when you stand before them and talk about God’s faithfulness whether you are speaking from experience or from belief at a distance.

The currency of testimony has a quality that other currencies of speech do not fully match.

And I believe that the church that is going to do the most significant work in Iran in the years ahead is going to be made up significantly of people who have that quality.

Not because suffering is spiritually superior to ordinary life.

God does not delight in suffering, but because what is needed to reach a people who have been suffering under a particular kind of oppression is a word that has been tested in that kind of fire.

The Iranian people will not be reached primarily by polished presentation or sophisticated programming.

They will be reached by the testimony of people who have been through the worst and who are able to say from the inside of that experience, he was there.

He is real.

He is faithful.

He held me.

He will hold you.

I want to address the dream one final time.

not to make it into something larger than it was, but because it is part of this testimony, and it would be dishonest to omit it.

What I saw in those recurring dreams in Evan prison was a rupture, something coming from above to strike the fortress of authority, and then an opening on the other side of that rupture.

I have been careful throughout the years.

I have carried those dreams not to append to them a specific timeline or a specific event.

I have held them as a directional conviction rather than a precise prediction, a sense of where things were heading without a map of the specific route.

And now Kam is dead.

and and the manner of his death, a strike from above in the context of military action involving forces that were not Iranian corresponds to the imagery of the dream in ways that I sit with very carefully and very humbly because I do not want to be the kind of person who retrofits a prophecy to an event in a way that claims more than is honest.

What I will say is this.

The dream was real.

The impression it left was real.

And the conviction I carried from it that what controlled Iran was not permanent.

That God was going to break something open.

That there would be an opportunity on the other side.

That conviction has been present in me since those years inside.

And I believe it is relevant to this moment.

But I also want to be absolutely clear about something because I think it is the most important thing I will say about the death of Kam.

This is not a moment for triumphalism.

If the manner of his death, military strikes that destroyed things and killed people is not something to celebrate.

Whatever came represented, the destruction that surrounded his death involved human lives and human suffering.

I will not wave a flag over that.

I will not dress it up in the language of divine justice in a way that celebrates violence.

The God I serve is not indifferent to the cost of human lives and including the lives of people who were in proximity to power and who died in its collapse.

What I will do, what I am doing is say in the midst of what has happened, there is an opening.

And an opening is a call to prayer, to readiness, to courage, not a call to political victory lapse.

The Iranian people, all of them, need prayer right now.

They are in a moment of enormous uncertainty and fragility.

The structures that control their daily life are shaking.

What comes next is not determined.

It is being shaped in real time by forces human and spiritual that are converging in this specific window.

And what the church does in this window matters.

I want to say something about forgiveness because I believe it is foundational to everything else I have said and to everything that is going to need to happen in Iran’s future.

And I want to say it plainly and without softening it into something easy.

I have forgiven the men who arrested me.

I I have forgiven the interrogators who spent months trying to dismantle me.

I have forgiven the judge who sentenced me to life in prison.

I have forgiven the system that stole eight years from me and cost my children a father’s presence through crucial years of their development.

I have forgiven Kam.

I want to be very honest about what this forgiveness has cost and what it has not cost.

It did not happen quickly.

In the early years inside Evan, there was genuine anger in me.

a real human anger at the injustice of what was happening to me and to my family.

I do not believe that anger was wrong.

Anger at injustice is appropriate.

It corresponds to the reality of what injustice is.

The anger was not something I suppressed or denied.

I brought it to God in prayer with full honesty and over time, not quickly, not through a single act of will, it was transformed not into indifference, not into a pretense that what happened was acceptable, but into something that could release the people who had done it from the grip of my interior ledger.

Because that is what forgiveness is.

It is not a declaration that what was done was fine.

It is a decision to release the person from your own internal debt system.

To stop requiring them to pay what they cannot pay and to place the whole account into the hands of God who is the only one capable of rendering adequate justice.

That process of forgiveness has been one of the most costly and most liberating things of my life.

And I believe it is also one of the most strategically important things for the church in Iran as it faces the moment ahead because a church that carries unforgiveness into a season of potential renewal will contaminate what it builds.

The Iranian church cannot afford to bring bitterness into the next chapter.

The Iranian people who have been oppressed cannot afford to found their freedom on hatred of the people who oppressed them.

Not because the oppressors were not wrong, they were, but because freedom built on hatred is not freedom.

It is just a different form of bondage.

What is required, what the gospel makes possible in a way that nothing else does is the kind of forgiveness that opens a future.

that says what you did to me does not define what I will do next.

On that says the God who forgave me is able to transform even you.

That says I am not building my life on your failure.

I am building it on something that holds regardless of what you did.

Let me close with what I believe is the most important thing I can say to the Iranian people in Iran and in the diaspora in every country where they have scattered.

You are not forgotten.

The God who made you, who made your culture, you who wo into the Persian civilization a hunger for transcendence that runs from its ancient poetry to its modern underground church.

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