MIRACLE IN IRAN: Millions Convert to Christianity in Tehran After Ali Khamenei’s Death

I want to start by telling you something about where I am right now as I speak these words.

I cannot tell you the city.

I cannot tell you which country I am in.

I cannot tell you the name of the building or the street or the people who are in the next room.

This is not me being dramatic.

This is simply what life looks like when you have spent the last 20 years as a Christian pastor inside the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Secrecy is not something you choose because you are paranoid.

Secrecy is something you choose because you have watched what happens to people who are not careful.

You have sat across from people who were not careful.

You have visited their families after.

So you learn to be careful and after a while it stops feeling like fear and starts feeling like breathing.

It is just something you do.

I am telling you this at the beginning because I want you to understand the world I am speaking from.

Not the world you see on the news right now with the explosions and the maps and the politicians giving statements.

I mean the world underneath that world.

The world that has been running quietly for decades beneath everything you thought you knew about Iran.

That is the world I live in.

That is the world this testimony comes from.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother from Iran continues his story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony.

That is the world this testimony comes from.

My name is Dario.

That is not my full name.

It is enough.

I was born in Tran in 1974.

That means I was four years old when the Islamic Revolution happened in 1979 and 5 years old when Ayatollah Kmeni returned from exile in Paris and stepped off that plane and the country I had been born into became a completely different country almost overnight.

I do not have many clear memories of before the revolution.

A few images.

My mother in the kitchen without a headscarf.

Music coming from a neighbor’s window.

My father laughing at something on the television.

Small things.

After 1979, those small things changed.

And the change was so total and so fast that even a child could feel it, even if a child could not name it.

My father was a devout Shia Muslim.

He was not a violent man.

I want to be clear about that because when people in the west hear the words devout Muslim in revolutionary Iran, they sometimes picture a certain kind of man.

And my father was not that kind.

He was a quiet man who prayed five times a day with genuine sincerity, who fasted during Ramadan without complaint, who believed with his whole heart that the revolution was the fulfillment of something God had been preparing for Iran for a long time.

He worked as a mid-level administrator in a government ministry.

He was proud of his work.

He was proud of his country.

He believed truly believed that Kmeni was a man sent by God to rescue Iran from the corruption of the sha and the influence of foreign powers, especially America.

My mother was softer in her faith.

She prayed and she fasted and she wore her hijab without being told to.

But there was something in her that was quieter than religion.

something that expressed itself more in the way she fed people and cared for people and sat with neighbors when they were grieving.

She was a woman of great warmth.

She still is as far as I know.

We have not spoken in a long time and that is one of the sorrows I carry.

I will come to that.

I grew up in a household where Islam was not a category of life.

It was the whole of life.

It was the air we breathed, the structure of every day, the framework through which every question was answered.

When I was old enough for school, I went to a school where religious instruction was central to everything.

We memorized Quranic verses.

We learned the stories of the prophet and the imams.

We were taught that Iran was the vanguard of God’s revolution on earth.

That we were a special people with a special mission.

And that the enemies of Islam, America, Israel, the West in general were the enemies of God himself.

This was not taught to us as opinion.

It was taught as fact.

The way you teach arithmetic or geography, it simply was.

I was a good student.

I absorbed everything I was given.

I was not a rebel.

I had no reason to be a rebel.

The world I lived in was the only world I knew.

And it made internal sense to me the way any world makes sense to a child who has known nothing else.

God was real.

Islam was the true religion.

Iran was God’s chosen nation.

In these last days, these things were settled.

Then the war began.

I was 6 years old when Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980.

Saddam Hussein’s forces crossed the border and the war that followed lasted 8 years and killed somewhere between half a million and 1 million people, depending on which count you believe.

I did not understand the politics of it as a child.

What I understood was the air raid sirens at night.

The way my mother would pull me and my younger sister Nasarin under the stairs when the sirens went off.

The particular darkness of Thran during a blackout.

The way the city held its breath.

I understood the funerals, the neighborhood we lived in.

was not wealthy, but it was close-knit.

And when a boy from our street was killed at the front, the whole street felt it.

I remember standing at the edge of one of those funerals as a boy of 9 or 10 and watching a mother receive the news about her son.

And even then, even as a child, something in me registered that grief and something in me filed it away in a place I did not have access to yet.

The regime surrounding that war was unlike anything that had come before it in Iranian history.

Martyrdom was not mourned.

It was celebrated.

Boys who died at the front were called Shahid, martyr, and their photographs were hung on walls and lamposts.

They were told they had gone directly to paradise.

The mosques rang with this message.

The schools rang with it.

We were told that to die for Islam and for the Islamic Republic was the highest possible life a person could live.

I remember being 12 years old and hearing this in school and feeling something that I would only understand much later.

A faint, distant unease that I could not name and did not dare express.

Something in me, something very quiet was asking a question it had no language for yet.

But the world around me was very loud.

And that quiet question got buried under everything else.

What I remember most from those war years more than the sirens or the funerals was the child soldiers.

Iran’s military used children at the front.

Boys as young as 12 and 13 were recruited, some voluntarily, some with pressure applied to their families.

They were given and I am not exaggerating this because it is one of the things about that era that history has documented thoroughly.

They were given small plastic keys to wear around their necks.

The keys to paradise.

The idea was that if you died in battle, the key would open the gates of heaven for you.

I remember seeing those keys.

I remember thinking about them at night.

Even at 12 years old, something about a plastic key made in a factory and handed to a child and told to him that it would open heaven.

Something about that sat wrong in me.

I did not say so to anyone.

I barely said so to myself, but it sat there.

The war ended in 1988 with a ceasefire that neither side could call a victory.

Kmeni died in 1989 and was replaced by Ali Kame who had been the president.

Kame was a different kind of leader.

Kmeni had genuine religious authority.

Even people who hated him acknowledged his standing as a cleric.

Kmin did not have that same standing and everyone in religious circles knew it.

What he had instead was political cunning and a willingness to use the instruments of state power in ways that Kmeni had not needed to because Kmeni’s personal authority was enough.

Under Kame, the enforcement became more organized, more bureaucratic, more pervasive.

the morality police, the intelligence services watching not just political dissident but ordinary citizens.

The sense that the walls had ears which in Iran under Kame they quite literally did.

I grew up into this.

By the time I was in university in the late 1990s studying engineering at a university in Thran, I was a young man who had never known any other world and was only beginning very slowly to develop the capacity to ask questions about it.

The reform period under President Katami gave a lot of young Iranians that capacity.

There was a brief opening in the late 1990s.

Newspapers published things they could not have published before.

Young people discussed politics more openly.

There was a sense in the air that change might be possible.

I remember that period well.

It felt like a window cracking open in a room that had been sealed for 20 years.

I had a close friend at university named Shaham.

He was funny and sharp and more politically engaged than I was.

He went to the student protests in July 1999.

The protests that erupted after the regime shut down a reformist newspaper and students at Tehran University rose up in response.

What happened next was what always happened in Iran.

When people rose up, the regime sent in the plain clothes militia.

They went into the university dormitories at night.

Students were beaten in their beds.

Some were thrown from windows.

Shaham was arrested.

He was held for 6 weeks.

When he came out, he was a different person.

not broken exactly, but quieted in a way that was not natural to him.

The brightness had gone down in him, like someone had turned a dial.

I visited him after his release, and we sat together, and there was not much to say.

I remember looking at him and thinking for the first time with real clarity rather than the vague childhood unease I had always carried.

Something is very wrong with this system.

Something that calls itself the government of God should not do what was done to my friend.

But thinking something is wrong with the system and knowing what to do with that thought are two different things.

I did not become a dissident.

I did not join any movement.

I finished my engineering degree and got a job and lived my life the way most Iranians lived, carefully, quietly, finding whatever small happiness was available within the walls of what was permitted.

I prayed the required
prayers.

I fasted in Ramadan.

I went through the motions of a religious life because the motions were the structure of everything around me and stepping outside them would have been like deciding to stop breathing the air.

It was around this time that I got married.

My wife’s name I will not give, not even a change name because she is still in Iran and her safety is not something I will gamble with for the sake of a story.

She was a good woman.

She is a good woman.

What happened to our marriage is complicated and painful and connected to everything else.

I will tell you and I will come to it honestly when the time is right in this telling.

We had two children, a daughter and a son.

My daughter was born in 2003 and my son in 2006.

Becoming a father did something to me that I did not expect.

It made the questions I had been filing away since childhood much louder.

When you hold a child, your child for the first time and you look at that face, something happens to a person that I think is very hard to explain to someone who has not experienced it.

You feel the weight of what it means to be responsible for another life.

And I remember holding my daughter for the first time and thinking with a clarity that surprised me.

I want to give her something real, something true.

And the next thought which followed the first one like a shadow.

I am not sure I have anything real to give her.

I am not sure I have found anything true yet.

I filed that thought away too.

I was good at filing things away.

My sister Nasrin, who was 3 years younger than me, began to get sick around 2004.

I will not describe her illness in detail because it would identify our family and that is not a risk I am able to take.

What I will tell you is that it was serious and it was slow and it was the kind of illness that does not kill you quickly but sits with you and diminishes you gradually.

And watching someone you love go through that is one of the most helpless experiences a human being can have.

I prayed for her.

I prayed with genuine desperation.

I was not a man who had lost his faith at this point.

I still believed in God.

Or at least I still performed the rituals of believing in God.

And in Iran, the two things can become so intertwined, you stop noticing the difference.

I prayed the prayers I had been taught.

I asked Allah for her healing.

I asked with everything I had.

What I got back was silence.

I want to be honest about that silence because I think it is important.

It was not a silence I felt once and then moved on from.

It was a silence that accumulated over months and then over years.

Each prayer that went up and came back with nothing attached to it.

Each night I drove to the hospital and sat in a corridor while the doctors did what doctors do and I looked at the ceiling of that corridor and I spoke in my heart to a god I was no longer sure was listening and I asked the same question.

I think every human being eventually asks when they are in enough pain is anyone there? I was 30 years old.

I had a wife, two young children, a good job, a life that looked from the outside like a life that was working.

And inside I was completely hollow.

I do not mean sad.

I mean empty in a way that is deeper than sadness.

Like a room that has had all its furniture removed and the walls stripped bare and the windows sealed.

Just space and silence and nothing to fill it with.

I am telling you all of this because I want you to understand that when God found me, he did not find a man who was ready.

He did not find a man who had been searching.

He found a man who had stopped looking.

A man who had convinced himself there was nothing to find.

He found me in the hollow place.

That is where he tends to find people.

I had a colleague at my engineering firm named Vartan.

He was Armenian.

His family had lived in Iran for generations.

There is a significant Armenian Christian community in Iran, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world and they exist within the Islamic Republic in a particular kind of fragile tolerance.

They could practice their faith but quietly and within limits and always with the awareness that the tolerance could be withdrawn at any time.

Vatan was a quiet man.

He was not someone who talked about his faith.

I had worked alongside him for 3 years and we had never once discussed religion.

One afternoon, Vatan left something on my desk before he went home.

Not a book, not a Bible, a small piece of paper folded twice with several verses typed out in Farsy.

That was all.

He left it and he left for the day.

And I sat at my desk for a long time, looking at that folded paper before I picked it up.

I will not pretend that what happened next was dramatic.

It was not.

I read the words on that paper and they were words from the Gospel of John.

I had never read the Gospel of John.

I had been taught that the Christian scriptures were corrupted.

That the original gospel that Jesus received had been altered by his followers into something unrecognizable.

That what Christians had was not the true word of God.

I believed this the way I believed everything else I had been taught without examining it because there had never been any need to examine it.

But here were these words and they were in my hands and I was alone in an office in Thran at the end of a day and I read them.

I am not going to try to manufacture emotion in the retelling of this moment.

I am going to tell you what actually happened.

I read the words.

I read them again.

And the third time I read them, I felt something that I do not have an adequate word for in any language.

Not lightning, not a vision, nothing that would make a compelling scene in a film.

Just a stillness, a sudden, deep, inexplicable stillness.

The way sometimes in the middle of a loud city, everything will briefly go quiet between one moment and the next.

That stillness settled over me, sitting at my desk with that piece of paper in my hands.

And in that stillness, something in me that had been asking a question for 30 years felt for the first time like the question had been heard.

That is the only way I know how to describe it.

The verses were from the Gospel of John.

One of them said that the truth will set you free.

Another said that Jesus came so that people could have life.

Not a reduced version of life.

Not a managed, controlled, permitted version of life, but life in fullness.

I sat with those two sentences for a long time.

I thought about what I had been given by the system I was born into.

The fear, the silence, the performance of faith that had nothing living in it anymore.

The hollow room I was living inside.

And I thought about those two sentences, truth, life, freedom.

I folded the paper back up and put it in the inner pocket of my jacket and I went home.

I did not tell my wife.

I did not tell anyone.

I put the paper inside an engineering textbook on my shelf at home and I went about my life.

But every night after everyone was asleep, I would take that paper out and read those verses again.

And every night the stillness came back.

It was like discovering a door in a wall you had walked past a thousand times without noticing.

I had not opened the door yet.

I was not even sure I was going to.

But I knew the door was there now and I could not unknow it.

Over the weeks that followed, I started finding my way to more.

There was a satellite channel, I will not name it, though many Iranians know the channels.

I mean, that broadcast Christian programming into Iran at night.

Christian satellite television had become by the mid 2000s one of the most significant tools for the gospel reaching Iranians precisely because it was invisible.

No missionary had to enter the country.

No pamphlet had to be smuggled across a border.

The signal simply came from the sky into homes across the Islamic Republic.

And people watched it alone in the dark with the volume low.

I watched it alone in the dark with the volume low.

I watched a man explain who Jesus was.

Not a Western man in a suit trying to sell me something.

An Iranian man speaking in Farsy talking about Jesus the way someone talks about a person they have actually met.

Not a historical figure behind glass in a museum.

A living person.

Someone this man on the screen had encountered and had not recovered from in the best possible way.

I watched this man speak and something in me could not look away.

I did not understand everything he said, but I understood that whatever he had, whatever was making him speak with that kind of aliveness, I did not have it and I wanted it.

For the first time in my life, I genuinely deeply wanted it.

I am going to pause here and say something to anyone listening to this who is not a Christian, who perhaps grew up the way I grew up, who has the same hollow room inside them that I had.

I am not asking you to believe what I believe.

I am not asking you to do anything.

I am only telling you what I experienced as honestly as I can.

A man who was empty found something that filled him.

That is the only claim I am making right now.

Whether you receive that as truth or not is between you and whatever you understand God to be.

But it is what happened.

I found my way to Vartan a few weeks after he left that paper on my desk.

I found a moment when we were alone and I asked him very quietly about the verses.

He looked at me for a long time before he answered.

He was measuring me, I think, measuring whether I was safe.

That measuring look I would learn later after I had been in the underground church for years that every Iranian Christian knows that look.

You give it and you receive it.

It is the look that says, “Can I trust you with my life?” Because that is not a dramatic way of putting it.

That is literally what trust means in that context.

He must have decided I was safe because he began to talk.

What happened over the next several months as Vartan slowly carefully introduced me to more of the Christian faith and then eventually to the small underground community he was connected to.

That is a story I will tell in the next part of this testimony.

But I want to end this first part where the beginning truly was with a man at a desk in Thran in the middle of his hollow life holding a piece of paper.

Not a dramatic beginning, not a vision or a miracle in the conventional sense.

Just words on a page and a stillness that had no explanation.

I did not know sitting at that desk what those words were going to cost me.

I did not know what they were going to require of me.

I did not know that they were going to take me away from everything I had been given.

My community, my family’s approval, my safety, the life I had built inside the permitted walls.

I did not know any of that.

But I also did not know what they were going to give me.

Nasarin was still sick.

The prayers I prayed to the ceiling of hospital corridors were still going unanswered as far as I could tell.

My hollow room was still mostly empty.

The regime was still the regime.

Common was still common.

Tehran was still.

But there was a door in the wall now.

and the light coming from underneath it was the only light in the room.

I did not know it yet sitting at that desk.

But God had already found me.

I was just the last one in the room to find out.

I want to tell you how I came to be baptized because it did not happen quickly and it did not happen easily.

And I think the slowness of it is important to understand.

After those first conversations with Vartan, I spent almost 3 years in what I can only describe as a long, careful, stumbling walk toward faith.

Three years of watching those satellite broadcasts alone at night.

Three years of reading carefully and secretly everything I could get my hands on about Jesus and the Christian faith.

3 years of quiet conversations with Vartan, always in private, always with the lowgrade awareness in the background that this conversation was not a conversation we could be overheard having.

3 years of the question inside me slowly changing shape, moving from is anyone there to who is this Jesus to what do I do with what I am beginning to believe.

I was not raised with patience.

Iranian men of my generation and background were not typically raised to sit with uncertainty.

You knew what you knew and you acted on what you knew.

And the framework of Islamic practice gave you a very clear structure for everything.

There was the permitted and the forbidden.

There was the halal and the haram.

There was a fatwa for every question.

The certainty of that framework was I understand now one of the things that kept me inside it long after the framework had stopped meaning anything to me personally.

Uncertainty is harder to live with than a wrong answer.

A wrong answer at least has the comfort of feeling solid underfoot.

What I was walking into had no solid ground in that sense.

It asked me to trust something I could not fully see or prove.

It asked me to believe not in a set of rules but in a person.

That is a very different thing.

Rules you can examine and debate and apply.

A person you have to choose.

And choosing feels exposed in a way that following rules does not.

But here is what kept pulling me forward through those three years.

It was not arguments.

It was not evidence in the academic sense.

It was the quality of life I saw in the people around this faith.

Vartan was one.

There was a particular steadiness in him.

A kind of peace that was not the peace of someone who had been broken into submission but the peace of someone who had been settled from within.

I had known a lot of religious people in my life.

Iran was full of religious people but this was something different.

This was not the performance of piety.

This was something that came from somewhere deeper than behavior.

When Vartan finally brought me to a house church meeting for the first time, it was a Thursday evening in the spring of 2007.

He drove me there himself, taking a route that involved two unnecessary turns because that is what you do.

You do not drive directly to the place.

You approach it the way you would approach something you are not supposed to approach indirectly checking behind you pausing to make sure.

The apartment was in a quiet part of North Tran.

Seven people were there when we arrived, including the pastor, an older man I will call brother Ysef, though that was not his name.

The apartment looked like an apartment.

There was nothing on the walls that would signal to a visitor what took place there.

No cross, no religious symbols of any kind.

This was deliberate.

If officers came in, the room had to be explainable as an ordinary gathering.

We sat in a circle.

They prayed.

They read from the New Testament.

They talked about what they had read.

And the talking was not like any religious discussion I had ever sat in before.

It was not recitation.

It was not performance.

It was people speaking about Jesus the way you speak about someone who is present in the room.

There was a woman there who talked about something she had been struggling with that week.

and the way she connected it to a passage she had been reading and the honesty of it, the plain undefended honesty of saying here is my weakness and here is where I am finding something to hold on to.

That honesty undid something in me.

I sat in that circle and I did not say very much.

I was not ready to say much.

But by the time I left that evening, I knew with a certainty I had not felt about anything in years that I wanted to come back.

I came back and I kept coming back.

Months passed.

The circle became familiar.

The faces became known to me.

The faith became through all those Thursday evenings and all those secret readings and all those quiet prayers.

I was learning to pray in my own words rather than in the formulas I had been given.

Something that I could no longer honestly call someone else’s faith.

It was becoming mine.

Not because I had reasoned my way into it.

because something had been happening in me slowly and genuinely that I did not have any other explanation for.

The hollow room was not hollow anymore.

That is the simplest way I know to say it.

When I was baptized in the spring of 2008, it was in the bathtub of an apartment belonging to a woman in our group whose husband was away on work.

Brother Yseph performed the baptism.

There were four of us present.

The window was closed.

The bathroom door was closed.

There was no music.

Brother Ysef put his hand on my head and said the words and lowered me into that water and I came back up.

And I am not going to pretend I have the words to fully describe what happened in me in that moment.

I sat on the edge of that bathtub and I wept for a long time.

Not for one reason, but for many reasons at once.

For all the years I had lived in the hollow room and not known there was a door.

For Nasarin, still sick, still in and out of hospitals.

for my children who I was determined now to raise with something true inside them, even if I could not yet see how that would be possible.

For the 30 years of plastic keys and empty ceilings and prayers that bounced off the sky, and also, and this was the strange part, the part I did not expect, for joy, a joy that made no logical sense given the circumstances I was sitting in.

I was wet in a stranger’s bathroom in Thran, having just committed what my country’s laws considered apostasy, a crime that could theoretically be punished by death.

And I was experiencing something that I can only call joy.

Real solid interior joy.

The kind that has nothing to do with what is happening around you and everything.

to do with something that has shifted permanently inside you.

I have thought about that bathtub many times in the years since.

I think about it especially on the days when everything is hard and the cost of this life presses down on you and you wonder whether you have made a catastrophic mistake.

On those days, I go back to that bathtub and the weight of that water and the feeling of coming up from under it and I remember that is the anchor.

That moment is the anchor.

What I stepped into after that baptism was the full reality of what it means to follow Jesus in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I had understood it in my mind before.

But there is a difference between understanding something in your mind and living it in your body every day.

The underground church is not a romantic thing.

It is a practical daily often exhausting exercise in loving people and serving God under conditions specifically designed to make both of those things as difficult as possible.

The rotation of meeting places was constant.

We never met in the same location more than a few weeks in a row.

Phones were left in a bag outside the door of wherever we were meeting because the regime had the capability to activate phone microphones remotely and we knew it.

Bibles were wrapped in newspaper or plain cloth covers or disguised as other books.

The Bibles themselves were scarce and precious.

A single Bible would pass through many hands, be written in and underlined and worn to pieces by the time it finished its journey through a church community.

New converts were introduced to the group slowly over multiple weeks of individual vetting because the IRGC’s intelligence wing V AJA was known to place informants inside house churches, not a paranoid fear, a documented reality.

It had happened to people we knew.

You learned to read a room.

You learn to listen for something slightly off in a new person.

A question that felt designed to prompt a specific answer, an eagerness that was slightly too targeted, an interest in names and locations that went a little beyond natural curiosity.

Most of the time, your instincts were wrong, and the new person was simply a genuinely hungry soul who needed what you had.

But you could not afford to assume the cost of being wrong was not hurt feelings.

The cost of being wrong was Evan prison.

Let me tell you about Evan prison because I think people outside Iran do not fully understand what those two words mean to an Iranian Christian or to any Iranian dissident or minority believer.

Evan prison sits in the mountains at the northern edge of Tehran and it is not a place where people are sent to serve sentences in the straightforward sense that a prison sentence is understood elsewhere.

Evan is a place where people go and what happens to them while they are there is largely invisible to anyone on the outside.

Torture has been documented extensively by human rights organizations.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN special reporter on Iran, not as an accusation, but as a established fact documented by the testimonies of hundreds of survivors over decades.

Sleep deprivation, isolation, beatings, psychological pressure applied with professional precision.

People came out of Evan changed.

Some came out of Evan not at all.

Iranian Christians had been going to Evan for decades before I was baptized.

Let me tell you about some of them because their stories need to be said out loud and need to be remembered.

Pastor Hussein Sudman was executed in 1990.

He was a convert from Islam which under the Islamic Republic’s interpretation of Sharia made him an apostate, a crime punishable by death.

He had pastored a church in Mashad in northeastern Iran.

He was arrested, tried, convicted of apostasy, and hanged.

His son Ramin was told his father would be released if Hussein recanted his faith.

Hussein Sudman refused to recant.

He was 55 years old when they killed him.

His name is recorded in the history of the persecuted church.

His name should be known everywhere that people talk about religious freedom and the price of faith.

Pastor Medie Debbage was arrested in 1983 and imprisoned for 9 years, a significant portion of it in solitary confinement on the charge of apostasy.

While he was in prison, he wrote a defense of his faith that was eventually read into the public record at his trial, a document of extraordinary clarity and courage in which he said plainly that he had chosen Jesus and would not unchoose him regardless of what the court decided.

International pressure eventually secured his release in 1994.

Two weeks after he was released, his colleague, Bishop Hike Hovepian Mayor, the man who had campaigned most loudly for Debb’s freedom, was found stabbed to death.

6 months later, Mehi Debbage himself was found murdered in a forest.

The killings were never officially solved.

Everyone in the Iranian Christian community understood who was responsible.

These names were known to us in the underground church, not as distant historical figures, but as recent predecessors, as people whose choices and whose deaths define the soil we were standing on.

We were not naive about what we had stepped into.

We were not innocent of the knowledge of what the regime had done and was capable of doing.

We chose to be in that circle anyway.

That is what I want people to understand.

The choice was made with open eyes.

By 2009, I had been part of the house church for 2 years and brother Yseph had begun to speak to me about growing in leadership.

I was not yet a pastor.

That would come later.

But I was someone the group was beginning to look to.

Someone who people came to with questions, someone who seemed to have a gift for sitting with people in the hard places and not flinching.

I do not say this with pride.

I say it because it is relevant to what happened next.

The year 2009 was already electric in Iran before our church was raided.

The presidential election in June of that year in which Mahmud Ahmad Nad was declared the winner over the reformist Mir Hussein Mosavi in a result that millions of Iranians believed was fraudulent had triggered the largest street protests the country had seen since 1979.

The green movement.

Millions of people in the streets dressed in green, chanting for their votes to be counted.

The regime’s response was what the regime’s response always was.

Violence, arrests, disappearances, a brutal grinding down of the resistance until the streets went quiet again.

But something had cracked in the relationship between the Iranian people and their government that year.

Something that would not fully heal.

It was in this atmosphere in the late summer of 2009 that our house church gathered on a Thursday evening in an apartment in the Narmmak district of Tehran.

12 of us were present.

We had been meeting in that particular location for about five weeks, which was longer than we usually stayed anywhere.

There had been difficulty finding alternative spaces, and we had allowed ourselves to stay in one place, perhaps one or two weeks longer than was wise.

I have replayed that evening many times in my mind over the years.

The meeting had been going for about an hour.

We were in the middle of prayer.

The lights in the apartment were at their normal evening level.

Someone was praying out loud.

I no longer remember who.

And the room had that quality of gathered quiet that I described earlier, that particular fullness that comes when people are genuinely present with God together.

Then the door came in.

It did not knock.

It did not ring.

The door came in.

Four men in plain clothes, which was how the intelligence agents always operated.

They did not wear uniforms because the absence of uniforms created a particular kind of terror, a confusion about who exactly these people were and by what exact authority they were entering your space.

They were followed by two more men.

The room erupted into movement and noise for about 30 seconds and then went very still as everyone understood simultaneously that there was nothing productive that movement could accomplish.

I am not going to describe the physical details of what happened in that apartment at length because some of the people who were in that room are still in Iran and the specific details of that night could still be dangerous to them.

What I will tell you is that everyone present was taken.

We were transported separately.

I did not know for the first several days where any of the others were or what was happening to them.

I was taken to a facility I believe was connected to Evan Prison’s intelligence ward, though I was blindfolded during transport and cannot be certain of the location.

I was placed in a small room.

The interrogations began the following morning and continued over a period of 11 days.

The man who conducted most of my interrogations was calm.

I remembered the calmness more than anything else about him.

He was not cruel in an obvious way.

He did not shout.

He spoke to me in a measured, reasonable tone, as though we were colleagues working through a professional problem together.

And that reasonleness was more disturbing than rage would have been.

He wanted names.

He wanted locations.

He wanted me to describe the network of house churches I was connected to and the people who led them.

I told him I did not know what he was talking about.

He smiled at this very slightly and said he understood and we would continue to talk until I remembered.

There was a piece of paper placed in front of me at one of the sessions.

A printed document.

I was told to read it and then sign it.

It stated that I had been deceived by foreign missionaries working on behalf of Zionist and Western powers to destabilize Iran, that I renounced any association with Christian organizations, and that I affirmed my return to Islam.

I read it carefully.

I pushed it back across the table.

The man on the other side looked at me for a long moment and then folded the document and put it away.

He told me that my family would be approached.

He told me my children’s school enrollment could be affected by my choices in this room.

He said these things quietly the way you state a fact of geography.

And then he left me alone in the room.

I want to be honest.

I was frightened.

I am not going to perform bravery for you in this telling.

I was a man in a room I could not leave.

In a country where people disappeared with two small children whose faces I could not stop seeing every time I closed my eyes.

I was frightened.

But underneath the fear, and I can only explain this as something that was not originating from inside me, was a steadiness, a settled quality that I had no natural right to under those circumstances.

It was there the way the floor is there, not dramatic, not miraculous in any visible sense, just solid underfoot.

I did not sign the document.

On the day they placed it in front of me a second time, I picked up the pen they had left beside it and I wrote one sentence in the space above the signature line and I put the pen down.

What I wrote was simply this.

Jesus Christ is Lord.

I did not say it defiantly.

I did not announce it.

I wrote it quietly.

The way you write down a fact you are not willing to pretend is not a fact.

Then I put the pen down and looked at the man across the table and waited.

What followed was not pleasant.

I will not recount the specifics.

I will tell you that I was not permanently injured and that I remained who I was when I went into that room, which is the only victory that was available to me and the one that in the end mattered most.

After 11 days, I was released.

No charge was formally filed against me, which was common.

The regime used detention and the experience of detention as a message, a warning, and then released people to walk back into their lives carrying that warning inside them.

Three members of my church were not released.

One of them, a young man I will call Farad, received a sentence of 5 years in Evan prison.

He was 24 years old.

His crime officially listed was acting against national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.

His actual crime was sitting in a circle on a Thursday night and praying to Jesus.

I went back to my apartment after my release.

My wife was there with the children.

My daughter was 6 years old.

She ran to me when I came in the door and put her arms around my waist and I held her and I looked over her head at the room around me, the ordinary normal domestic room, the furniture, the light.

And I felt something that I do not think I can name.

Relief and grief simultaneously.

Gratitude for the room.

Guilt for Fad.

Gratitude for my daughter’s arms.

fear about what I had exposed my family to.

And underneath all of it, quieter than everything else, but more solid than any of it, the same settled certainty that had been there in the interrogation room.

I sat in my apartment that night alone after everyone was asleep and I talked to God about what had happened.

I asked him the obvious questions.

Why this? What for? what are you doing? I did not receive a vision or a word or any kind of dramatic answer.

What I received was what I always received in those silent conversations.

The stillness, the presence that does not speak in sentences, but is nonetheless unmistakably there.

And in that stillness, something in me that the 11 days might have broken found itself instead harder than it had been before.

I thought they had damaged something in me.

I was wrong.

They had only revealed what was already there, and what was there was not going to move.

Something happened in Iran in the years following the 2009 crackdowns.

that I do not think the regime ever fully understood.

And I believe the reason they never fully understood it is because they were looking at the wrong thing.

They were watching the streets, watching for political protest, watching for visible resistance.

They were not watching the living rooms.

They were not watching what was happening in apartments with the curtains closed, in small kitchens where people sat with cups of tea and copies of the New Testament, in bathrooms where people were quietly lowered into water and came up different people.

While the regime was watching the visible world, God was doing something in the invisible one.

And invisible things done consistently over years and decades have a way of eventually becoming very visible indeed.

Let me tell you what I mean.

By the time I was released from detention in late 2009, there were an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 Christians in Iran who had converted from a Muslim background.

This was not a number that was possible to verify precisely for obvious reasons.

people who practice an illegal faith do not fill out registration forms.

But these were the estimates coming from organizations that had spent years carefully tracking the underground church, Open Doors, Middle East Concern, Elam Ministries, researchers who had built networks of contacts and cross reference testimonies over years.

The numbers they were coming up with were extraordinary.

A 100,000 perhaps more.

10 years earlier the number had been a fraction of that and the direction was not decreasing.

The direction was relentlessly stubbornly inexplicably upward.

every wave of arrests, every raid, every execution, every public statement from the regime that Christianity was a foreign weapon being used against the Islamic Republic.

Every single one of these pressures produced the same result.

The church got bigger, not immediately, not loudly, but consistently over time in the way that water consistently over time shapes stone.

I have thought about this for years and I believe I understand something of why it happened.

The Islamic Republic made a catastrophic error that authoritarian religious systems have made throughout history.

They fused God with the state so completely that when people lost faith in the state and by 2009 after the election theft and the blood in the streets, millions of Iranians were losing faith in the state.

They also lost faith in the version of God the state had sold them.

The god of the Islamic Republic was a god of fear, of punishment, of revolutionary violence, of plastic keys around children’s necks.

When that version of God began to collapse in people’s hearts, a space opened up, a very large, very hungry space.

And the gospel has a way of finding hungry spaces.

I became a pastor in 2011.

I want to be careful about how I describe this because I do not want it to sound like something it was not.

There was no ordination ceremony in a church building.

There was no seminary training, no formal qualification, no certificate.

What happened was that brother Yseph, who had been watching me and walking with me for several years, called me to sit with him one afternoon, and he talked to me for a long time about what he believed God had put in me.

And then he and two other elders placed their hands on my head and prayed over me.

That was it.

That was everything.

In the underground church, this is how it works.

Authority comes not from an institution but from the recognition of the community.

The community looked at me and said, “You are one of our shepherds.

” And I accepted that weight knowing fully what it carried.

What it carried practically speaking was this.

I was now responsible not just for my own faith but for the faith of others.

When someone in our network was arrested, I was the one sitting with their family.

When a new convert was terrified and did not understand what they had stepped into, I was the one walking them through it.

When marriages broke under the pressure of one spouse converting and the other not, I was the one sitting in the middle of that grief.

When someone came to me in the night because the fear had become too large to manage alone, I was the one they called.

I am not complaining about any of this.

I am telling you what pastoral ministry in the underground church actually looks like because I think people outside Iran who use the word pastor have a very different picture in their minds.

They picture Sunday mornings and prepared sermons and a congregation that comes to you.

The underground pastor in Iran goes to the congregation.

He goes at odd hours and through indirect routes and he arrives without drawing attention and he leaves the same way.

His phone is never fully trusted.

His movements are never fully private.

He lives always with the knowledge that someone somewhere may be watching.

I discipled people during these years.

Men and women who had come to faith through satellite television or through the testimony of a friend or family member who had no community, no structure, no one to teach them.

I remember a man I will call Reza, a former soldier, not someone who would have been described by anyone who knew him as a likely candidate for Christian faith.

He had come to me through a chain of connections after watching a broadcast alone in his apartment for 6 months.

When I first met him, he was like a man who had found a locked room and had been standing outside it for months, pressing his ear against the door.

Everything in him was reaching towards something he did not yet have the full language for.

I spent a year with him.

I watched the locked room open.

I watched a hardcloed man become someone with a quality of gentleness in him that he had not had before.

I baptized him in the bathroom of a friend’s apartment.

And the expression on his face when he came up from the water is one of the things I carry with me as evidence that what we are doing is real.

But the conversion that stays most permanently in my memory from those years is not Raza.

It is the man I will call Mahmood.

Mahmood had been a lower ranking cleric in a mosque in a provincial city I will not name.

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