He had enforced the rules of the Islamic Republic.

He had, in his own words, when he eventually told me his story, reported people to the authorities on multiple occasions for religious infractions.

He was not a cruel man by disposition.

I believe he was a man who had been formed entirely within the system and had no framework for questioning it.

He believed genuinely that he was doing God’s work.

He came to me eventually through a chain of connections so long and indirect that I still find it remarkable it ever reached me at all.

He had been watching Christian broadcasts for almost a year in complete secrecy.

He had through a connection he would not specify obtained a New Testament and read it.

And then he had a dream.

I want to be clear that I am not a person who builds theology primarily on dreams.

But I also cannot deny what the people I have pastorred have told me they experienced and Mahmud told me about this dream with the kind of detail and emotional weight that you cannot manufacture.

He described seeing a man standing at some distance from him, a figure whose face he could not clearly see.

The figure said nothing but held out his hands and the marks in the hands were visible.

Mahmood told me that in the dream he understood without being told that this was Jesus and that he woke up from that dream and lay in the dark of his room and felt something that he described as the floor dropping out from under everything he had known.

not terrifying, just enormous, like a door had opened onto something so much larger than the room he had been living in that the room itself no longer made sense by comparison.

He arrived at the door of someone I knew, asking, he made his way to me.

When I first met him and understood who he was and what his background was, I will confess to you that my first internal response was caution, perhaps suspicion.

A former cleric asking to meet the underground pastor.

This was exactly the profile an intelligence operative might use.

I prayed about it.

I spoke to brother Ysef about it.

I met with Mahmud several more times before I made any decision.

And what I found over those meetings was not a man performing a conversion for strategic purposes.

I found a man in genuine profound costly crisis.

He had lost his livelihood.

He had lost his standing in his community.

His family did not know what was happening to him and he couldn’t tell them.

He was more alone than I had ever seen a person be.

I baptized Mahmud in the early months of 2013.

The man who had reported people like me to the authorities was lowered into water by my hands and came up a brother.

I have told this story to many people over the years, not to make a point about me, but to make a point about the God who arranged it.

That is the kind of God we are talking about.

That is the scale of what he is willing to do.

Let me tell you now about what these years cost me personally because I do not want this testimony to sound like a series of victories without acknowledging what lay alongside them.

My father found out about my conversion in 2010 about 2 years after my baptism.

He found out through the way information always spreads in the tight networks of Iranian family and community.

Not through a direct conversation, but through a third party who had heard something from someone who had heard something.

When he called me, his voice was not angry in the way I had feared.

It was something harder than angry.

It was like a door closing.

He said what he had to say in a few short sentences and the call ended and that was the last time I heard from him for almost 4 years.

Four years of silence from the man who had taught me to pray, who had sat with me during the Iran Iraq war blackouts, who had been the first authority I had ever known.

that silence was a particular kind of pain.

I do not think there is a word for it in any language that fully covers what it means to lose a parent who is still alive.

My mother called separately some weeks later.

She was weeping.

She was not angry the way my father was.

She was terrified.

She begged me to be careful.

She asked me if I understood what could happen to me.

She said the thing that stays with me still after all these years.

She asked me whether this was worth it, whether whatever I had found was worth the life I was putting at risk.

Worth the family I was fracturing.

Worth the future I was closing off for myself and my children.

I told her yes.

I said it quietly without drama because it was simply the true answer.

And the silence that followed was the longest silence I have ever sat in.

She was still on the line.

I could hear her breathing and there was nothing more to say because the answer was yes and neither of us could argue with it and both of us knew what it meant.

My children grew up knowing that their father’s work was secret.

This was not something I could protect them from.

A child in that household would have had to be completely sealed off from reality not to understand that something unusual was happening.

And children are not sealed off from reality.

They absorb what is around them.

My daughter, who was sharp and perceptive in ways that sometimes startled me, understood by the time she was 8 or nine that she was not to speak about her father’s activities outside the house.

She understood that if certain questions were asked by certain people, the answer was always the same neutral answer.

She understood that some of the people who came and went through our home were not to be mentioned.

I had a conversation with her when she was 9 years old, in which I tried to explain in the most honest terms a 9-year-old could handle, what the risks were, and what she should do if officers came to the house while I was not there.

I watched her listen to me with complete seriousness, the way children do when they understand that they are being trusted with something real.

She did not cry.

She asked two practical questions.

Then she nodded and said she understood.

I held it together during the conversation.

Afterward, alone, I did not hold it together.

The weight of what I was asking my child to carry, the knowledge, the secrecy, the readiness for crisis.

That weight was one of the hardest things about the life I was living.

But she never told me she wished I was different.

Not once in all those years.

If anything, there was a respect in the way she looked at me that I was not sure I deserved.

And that respect was both one of the greatest things I have received from another human being and one of the most humbling.

I want to pause here and say something that I feel strongly must be said.

The Iranian underground church wouldn’t exist without the women.

I am saying this as plainly as I know how to say it because it is the truth and it does not get said enough and I believe it needs to be said loudly and permanently.

I have known men of great courage in the Iranian church.

I have known men who went to prison and came out still standing who lost everything and kept going.

But if I am being completely honest and a pastor has a responsibility to be completely honest, the most consistently, relentlessly, creatively brave people I have encountered in 20 years of underground ministry have been women.

I knew a woman I will call Sister Zahara who was arrested by intelligence agents three separate times over the course of 10 years.

Three times taken in for interrogation.

Three times subjected to the pressure and the questions and the document placed in front of her to sign.

Three times released and three times every single time she came out and went back to the work.

Not recklessly, not as though the danger had not affected her.

The danger had affected her.

She was not someone who was immune to fear, but she had something in her that was larger than the fear.

Something she had decided about who she was and what she was going to do, and three rounds of interrogation had not been enough to dislodge it.

I baptized several of her converts.

I have always considered her one of the genuine heroes of the Iranian church.

And if her name is known in heaven the way I believe it is, then whatever her name is in heaven, it is a very honored name.

Women ran house churches while their husbands were in prison.

Women smuggled Bibles and Christian materials in ways that I will not detail specifically for safety reasons, but that required a particular combination of creativity and nerve.

Women sat with new converts in the middle of the night when the fear came.

Women led worship in apartments with their voices barely above a whisper.

And still the spirit was present.

The Iranian underground church was built on the faith of its women as much as on anything else.

And any account of it that does not say so clearly is an incomplete account.

Let me tell you about what worship felt like in those years because I think this matters and I think it gets lost in the more dramatic parts of the story.

When you sit in a circle of 12 or 15 people in a living room in Tehran and the curtains are drawn and the phones are in a bag outside the door and you know that every person in that room has paid something to be there, has risked something, has given up something, has carried the weight of secrecy all week to arrive at this particular Thursday evening.

There is a quality to the gathering that I have not experienced anywhere else.

The prayers that come out of that room are not polished.

They are not performed.

They come from the actual undecorated interior of people’s lives and they go up with the particular weight of prayers that know they cannot afford to be casual.

I have been since those years in large churches in other countries, beautiful buildings, excellent music, everything organized and presented with great care.

And I am grateful for those churches and I do not say anything against them.

But I want to tell you honestly that I have never been in any of those buildings and felt what I felt in those living rooms.

I think the presence of God is not absent from the comfortable church.

But I think the presence of God has a particular intensity in places where the people present have literally nothing left but him.

When everything that makes faith convenient has been stripped away and what remains is just a small group of human beings and a god they have chosen at genuine cost.

Something happens in that space that I do not have adequate language for.

I know it when I am in it.

I have been in it hundreds of times.

It is the realest thing I know.

The years moved.

The pressure did not let up.

Farhad, the young man who had been sentenced after our 2009 raid, was released after serving his sentence and left Iran.

I received a message from him years later from a country I will not name.

He was well.

He was still following Jesus.

That message meant more to me than I can explain.

The Masa Amini protests in 2022 marked something.

When a 22year-old woman died in the custody of the morality police and they ran streets filled with her name.

When young women stood on cars and cut their hair in public.

When the generation born after the revolution held it up and looked at it and said openly that they did not want it.

I watched all of this with grief for the blood being spilled and with something else underneath the grief.

Something I had not let myself feel in full for a long time.

It felt like a nation coming to the end of something.

Not the end of itself, the end of a lie it had been told about itself.

the end of a version of God it had been given that was never the real God but only a weapon wearing God’s name.

I did not know watching the Amini protests and their violent suppression what was coming next.

I could not have guessed the specific shape of it.

But I had been praying for decades for God to move in Iran.

And something in me was beginning to feel that the ground was changing under everything.

That the soil that had been hard and closed for so long was beginning slowly, painfully, at great cost to break open.

Seeds do not grow in sealed ground.

They grow in broken ground.

And Iran’s ground in those years was breaking.

I was awake when it began.

This is not something I say to make myself sound more present in the moment than I was.

I was awake because I am often awake in the early hours of the morning.

It is one of the habits of 20 years of underground ministry.

The early hours have a quality of quiet that the rest of the day does not have.

and I have come to use them for prayer, for reading, for the kind of thinking that requires silence.

So I was in a small room on the morning of February 28th, 2026 in the early hours before dawn and I was praying.

The first thing I noticed was a sound.

It was distant enough that my mind did not immediately process it correctly.

It registered as something industrial, perhaps the kind of low percussion you sometimes hear from construction or heavy vehicles on a far road.

I noted it and continued praying.

Then it came again, and this time there was something in the quality of it that made my body react before my mind did.

something that old instinct buried from the air raid sirens of my childhood recognized before I consciously understood what I was hearing.

Then my phone began lighting up.

Messages were arriving faster than I could read them from people in Iran.

From contacts in the diaspora who were watching news channels, from pastors in our network who were awake and receiving the same messages I was.

The fragments came in pieces as they always do in those first hours of something large.

A word here, a location there.

Nothing coherent yet, but all of it pointing towards something that the body understands before the mind assembles it into fact.

Tehran, Isvahan, explosions, military targets, Israel, the United States.

I put my phone down and sat very still for a moment.

I cannot tell you that I was calm because I was not.

But neither was I in the kind of panic the situation might logically have called for.

I was in a state that I have been in before at moments of extreme crisis.

A suspended state where the body is alert and the mind is working very fast.

But something underneath all of that is simply waiting, simply watching with a steadiness that does not belong to me personally, but has been given to me and which I have learned over years to lean on rather than fight against.

I prayed, not with words at first, just with presence, just a turning toward God in the dark of that room, in the sounds of what was beginning.

And then I picked up my phone and began to answer the messages.

The hours that followed were the most overwhelming hours I have experienced since the night of the 2009 raid.

And they were overwhelming in a completely different way.

In 2009, the overwhelm was fear and helplessness.

What I felt on the morning of February 28th was harder to categorize.

It was fear.

Yes.

For the people I loved who were inside Iran.

For the new believers who were scattered across the country with no preparation for what was now happening around them.

For the innocent people in the path of strikes that were not designed to care about innocence.

But it was also something else.

something running alongside the fear that I did not know at first what to call.

I was in contact with members of my network throughout that morning.

People were frightened.

Some were in cities where strikes were close enough to feel.

Some had family members in areas that were being hit.

One woman in our network, a young woman barely 20 years old who had come to faith just 8 months before called me from inside Iran and she was not making words, just sounds.

And I stayed on the phone with her for a long time without saying much, just being there, just being a voice that was not afraid in the way she was afraid.

and I prayed over her quietly until the sound she was making gradually became steadier.

There was another member of our network, an older man I had known for over a decade whose apartment was near a government facility that was struck in the early hours.

He was uninjured, but the windows of his apartment were broken by the pressure wave.

And he described sitting on his floor in the glass and the cold air coming through the broken windows.

And it was his description of sitting there that broke through my composure for a moment because I knew that man.

I knew what he had endured over his years of faith.

I knew the particular quality of his patience and his quiet courage and the image of him sitting in glass on his floor in the cold in the broken open morning of what Iran was becoming.

That image found a crack in me.

And then the news came through about kmin.

I do not remember exactly which message carried it.

I do not think it was a single message.

It came in pieces the way all large news comes.

A report here, a confirmation there, a statement from a source, another confirmation, and then it was simply a fact that the world contained.

Ali Kame, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the man who had held that position since 1989, who had been the single most powerful figure in the country I was born in for my entire adult life, was dead.

I did not cheer.

I need you to understand this because I think some people expect that an Iranian Christian pastor would respond to this news with something like triumph.

And I want to be honest about what actually happened in me.

I sat down.

I put my phone face down on the surface beside me.

I was very still for a long time.

What came was not celebration.

What came was 37 years.

That is the only way I can describe it.

37 years of everything this man’s regime had done arrived in me simultaneously.

not as thought but as weight.

I thought about Pastor Hussein Sudant hanging from a rope in 1990.

I thought about Mhmedi Debage in solitary confinement for years writing his defense of his faith on whatever paper he could find in a cell he was not supposed to leave.

I thought about Bishop Hake stabbed in a forest.

I thought about Farad, 24 years old, led out of our prayer meeting in handcuffs on a Thursday evening.

I thought about every person in my network who had been taken, questioned, beaten, sentenced, exiled, silenced.

I thought about my father’s voice closing like a door.

I thought about my mother asking me whether Jesus was worth dying for.

I thought about my daughter at 9 years old listening to me tell her what to do if certain people came to the door and then I put my face in my hands and I wept.

I wept for a long time.

Not for Kame.

I want to be completely honest.

I did not weep for him.

But I also did not weep in victory.

I wept in a way I cannot fully explain even now.

a releasing of something that had been held under pressure for so long that I had stopped feeling the pressure.

The way you stop feeling the weight of something you have been carrying for years until the moment it is lifted and you suddenly feel the absence of it in your body.

Something enormous had been lifted.

something that had been pressing down on the country I loved and the people I served for almost four decades.

And the release of it, even in the middle of war, even in the middle of strikes and burning buildings and broken windows and a young woman crying on a phone in a city I could not reach.

The release of it was real and it moved through me like something physical.

I need to say something carefully here and I need anyone listening to hear it carefully.

I do not celebrate bombs.

I do not celebrate war.

I do not celebrate the deaths of human beings including the death of a man who caused enormous suffering because that man was also a person made in the image of God.

and his death is not a thing to celebrate but a thing to mark with the seriousness it deserves.

And more than that, the strikes on February 28th killed people who were not kame.

They killed people who were not IRGC commanders or regime architects.

They killed people who had been living inside the Islamic Republic as victims.

People who had never had a choice about the government above them.

People who were simply in the wrong location when metal fell from the sky.

I know a Christian family in my network who had been underground believers for over 12 years.

People who had endured everything the regime had to give and had held on.

and their neighbor, a man with three children, a man who had no involvement in the regime and no role in its crimes, was killed in the strikes.

Three children without a father.

Three children who had nothing to do with any of this.

That is not collateral.

That is a man.

That is three children.

And if anyone in the church wants to describe what happened on February 28th with only triumph and no grief, I ask them to sit with those three children first.

I say this not to undermine what I believe God is doing in Iran.

I say it because the gospel requires honesty.

The gospel does not ask us to flatten our grief in order to make our hope look cleaner.

It asks us to hold both.

It always asks us to hold both.

That is one of the things about this faith that I have found consistently true across 20 years.

It does not offer easy comfort.

It offers honest comfort which is harder to receive and infinitely more real.

In the days that followed the strikes, reports began reaching me through my network about what was happening inside some of Iran’s prisons.

I want to be careful here because I cannot verify all of these reports with the kind of precision I would prefer, and I will not make claims I cannot stand behind.

What I can tell you is what I received from sources I trust.

In the confusion and the rapid political shifts of those first days, the authority structures inside some detention facilities went through significant disruption.

Some guards abandoned posts.

Some facilities entered a state where the normal functioning of the system broke down.

In this environment, some prisoners were released formally or informally who had been inside for faith related offenses.

I received a phone call 3 days after the strikes from a number I did not recognize.

I almost did not answer it.

When I did, the voice on the other end said my name.

My real name, not Dares.

And I knew immediately who it was.

It was a pastor I had known for over 15 years.

A man who had been inside Evan prison for three years on charges of acting against national security.

A man I had prayed for by name out loud every single day for three years every day.

not as a ritual, as an act of faith that was sometimes difficult to sustain because three years is a long time and silence is a hard thing to keep praying into.

He said my name and I could not speak.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out for almost a full minute and he waited on the other end of the line and then he said my name again gently to let me know he was still there.

I will not reproduce the conversation that followed.

It was private and it was sacred.

But I will tell you that when I finally found words, the first thing I said was, “I prayed for you every day.

And his response was something I will carry for the rest of my life.

He said he knew.

He had not known in any rational sense.

He had been in a cell without access to communication, but he said he knew he had felt it.

I sat with that phone call for a long time after it ended.

I thought about what prayer actually is.

I thought about all the years I had prayed into things I could not see.

All the prayers that had seemed to go up and dissolve into silence.

All the mornings I had prayed in the dark of a room and had to choose in the absence of evidence to believe that the prayers were landing somewhere real.

And I thought about that voice on the phone saying, “I knew.

I felt it.

I want to talk about something else that happened in those days because it may be the thing that surprised me most of everything that February 28th unleashed.

My phone and the phones of other house church leaders across my network began receiving calls and messages from Muslims.

Not hostile calls, not threatening calls, questions.

I need you to understand what this means in context.

For decades, the dynamic between the underground church and the surrounding Muslim community had been one of extreme caution on both sides.

We did not approach Muslims.

We did not evangelize openly.

We did not make ourselves known.

The risk of doing so was too great.

And beyond the personal risk, the risk to the person being approached was real.

A Muslim who showed interest in Christianity could face serious consequences.

The separation was enforced not by preference but by survival.

And now, without anything being initiated from our side, messages were arriving.

A man who said he had known for years that a neighbor was a Christian and had never said anything, but now wanted to talk.

a young woman who had been watching Christian satellite broadcasts in secret for months but had not known how to reach anyone and had now through a chain of connections found a number to contact a man who identified himself as a former member of the bas’s paramilitary volunteer force who said he had spent 15 years enforcing a system he had believed believed was God’s will.

And now he did not know what he believed about anything.

And he had been given a number and he was calling it.

That last call lasted 4 hours.

I am not going to describe everything that was said in it.

I will tell you that by the end of it, the man on the other end of the phone was not the same man who had called at the beginning.

I do not mean he converted in that phone call.

I mean something had opened in him, something that had been sealed for a long time.

When we finished talking, he said he wanted to talk again and I said yes and we have talked since.

I do not know where his journey will end.

I know where it is going.

This is what I want the world to understand about what is happening in Iran right now.

Underneath the news cycle, underneath the military strategy, underneath the political analysis, the Islamic Republic used religion as a weapon for 47 years.

They took the name of God and they put it in front of every act of oppression, every execution, every arrested pastor, every plastic key around a child’s neck.

And when the system built on that weaponized version of God began to collapse, something predictable and also somehow astonishing happened.

The people living inside that system began to ask whether the god they had been given was the real god or whether there was something else.

There was always something else.

The underground church knew this because the underground church had been meeting that something else in living rooms every Thursday for 30 years.

But the invitation to find it had never been this open before.

The doors that were being blown off their hinges by the events of February 28th were not only political doors.

They were spiritual doors.

And on the other side of them, hungry, disoriented, searching, were millions of Iranians who had been told for their entire lives what God was like and were now in the rubble of that telling, willing to ask the question again from the beginning.

There is a verse in the book of Isaiah that I have returned to throughout my life at critical moments.

It says, “I am doing a new thing.

Do you not perceive it?” I have leaned on that verse in dark times when the new thing was not visible, and I was asking God to remind me it was coming.

I went back to that verse on the days after February 28th.

I sat with it for a long time, and for the first time in all the years I had read it, I was reading it, not as a promise still waiting to be fulfilled, but as a description of something I could see with my own eyes in real time, happening in the country I had been born in and loved and served and suffered for.

I am
51 years old.

I have been a pastor in the underground church for 15 years.

I have sat in interrogation rooms and bathtubs and hospital corridors and prison waiting rooms and living rooms with closed curtains.

I have prayed into silence for decades.

I have held people who were breaking and tried to be steady for them.

I have been afraid more times than I can count and have chosen to continue more times than I can count.

And I am standing.

I cannot say standing literally.

I am in a room somewhere in the world that I cannot name.

But I am standing at the edge of something I do not have words for yet.

Something I have prayed toward for 20 years without knowing if I would live to see it.

The ground of Iran is broken open and something is growing in it.

The war is still happening.

People are still dying.

The future is not settled.

I do not pretend otherwise.

But the God I have served in the dark for two decades did not bring the Iranian church through 47 years of K&A Iran to abandon it.

Now what was planted in living rooms with the curtains closed is coming up through the broken ground.

And nothing, not another regime, not another crackdown, not anything in earth or heaven is going to put it back underground.

I am aware that some people listening to this may be uncomfortable with a pastor speaking about spiritual harvest in the middle of a war.

I understand that discomfort and I want to address it directly before I say anything else.

It is not comfortable.

It is not clean.

There is nothing about the current situation in Iran that allows for simple, uncomplicated hope.

People are dying.

Cities are damaged.

Families are separated.

Children are growing up in the middle of something that will mark them for the rest of their lives.

To speak about spiritual opportunity in the middle of that requires a kind of carefulness that I want to be held to.

If at any point in what I’m about to say, I begin to sound as though I am treating human suffering as a backdrop for a Christian success story.

I ask you to call me on it because that is not what I am trying to do.

That is not what I believe and it is not what the gospel asks of me.

What the gospel asks of me is honesty.

And the honest thing, the thing I cannot look away from because it is happening in front of me and around me and coming to me through every channel I have in Iran right now.

Is this people are turning to Jesus in numbers and at a speed that I have never seen in 20 years of ministry.

That is the truth.

And I have a responsibility to say it truthfully with appropriate grief for the circumstances that have created the opening and with appropriate gratitude for the God who is walking into that opening with mercy instead of judgment.

Let me tell you what I am hearing from the ground.

House churches that had 12 or 15 members are reporting 30, 35, sometimes 40 people trying to attend.

The infrastructure that was built quietly over decades for a community of hundreds of thousands is suddenly being asked to serve what appears to be a community that is growing toward millions.

Leaders who were discipling 10 or 15 people are now fielding inquiries from 50.

Satellite ministry organizations that were receiving thousands of messages a month from Iranians asking about faith are now receiving tens of thousands.

People who had been watching Christian broadcasts for months or years in complete secrecy, not knowing how to reach anyone, are now reaching out through whatever channel they can find because the secrecy no longer feels as necessary as it did.

And the hunger has become too large to manage alone.

I received a message last week from a house church leader in a city in central Iran.

I will not say which city who told me that in a single week 14 people had been baptized in his network.

14 in a week.

In 20 years of underground ministry in Iran, the normal pace of baptisms in any given network is one here, two there, a slow and careful and precious accumulation.

14 in a week is not a pace I have ever heard of.

Not in Iran.

not under these conditions.

I want to be careful not to present numbers without acknowledging their limitation.

We are in the middle of a rapidly evolving situation in a country where careful recordkeeping has never been possible and is even less possible now.

I am not giving you statistics I can footnote.

I am giving you the testimony of people I trust from a network I have spent 20 years building who are describing the same thing from different cities and different contexts.

Something unprecedented is happening.

But I do not want to only talk about numbers.

Numbers are the smallest part of what I want to say.

I want to talk about why this is happening.

not the simple answer.

The regime fell and people are free now to explore because the simple answer is not fully accurate and it leaves out the most important parts.

The regime has not fully fallen.

The war is still going.

The situation is uncertain.

Freedom of religion in Iran is not yet a legal reality.

People who are turning to Jesus right now are not doing so in a safe environment.

They are doing so in a broken, dangerous, uncertain environment.

The turning is happening not because the path has become easy, but because something in people has become unable to wait any longer.

I have thought carefully about why this moment is producing what it is producing and I want to share what I believe for whatever it is worth.

The first reason is what I have already described the collapse of the regime’s version of God.

When a government uses religion as its primary instrument of control for nearly five decades and then that government collapses or begins to collapse, the religion it weaponized takes damage to.

Not true religion, not the real God, but the specific version of God that the regime manufactured and deployed.

The god of the Islamic Republic was a God who approved of executions and morality police and plastic keys around children’s necks.

That God is now exposed as what he always was.

Not God, but a tool.

And the people who were given that tool instead of the real thing are now in the rubble of everything asking for the first time in their lives, is there a real thing? Is there an actual God separate from all of that? And if so, where is he? The second reason is something I touched on in an earlier part of this testimony, but I want to say it more fully now.

Iranians are not, as a people, spiritually shallow.

This is an ancient civilization.

The land that is now Iran produced Cyrus the Great, who is the only non-Jewish figure in the Hebrew scriptures given the title of God’s anointed, the Persian king who freed the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity.

Persia produced Roomie whose poetry about the longing of the human soul for God is read by people of every religion around the world.

The Iranian people have a deep cultural memory of spiritual seeking, of the soul’s hunger for something real and transcendent.

The Islamic Republic tried to channel all of that hunger into a narrow, controlled, politically useful form, but you cannot permanently contain a people’s spiritual capacity within a political project.

The hunger is too old and too deep.

When the political container cracked, the hunger came out in every direction.

The third reason is the most personal to me, and it is the one I want the global church to hear most clearly.

The underground church stayed.

When the arrests came, the church stayed.

When the raids came, the church stayed.

when friends went to prison and colleagues were killed and families were fractured and the cost kept rising.

Year after year, the church stayed in Iran.

We did not all leave.

Some left, many left.

And I do not judge anyone who left because I know what the cost of staying was.

And I know it was not a cost every person could reasonably be asked to pay indefinitely.

But many stayed.

Pastors stayed, women stayed, young people who came to faith and immediately understood the risk stayed.

And we built something over those years in the hidden spaces of Iran.

Not a building, not an institution, not anything visible from the outside, but a presence, a community, a network of people who knew each other and trusted each other and had paid the same price to be part of the same thing.

When the doors began to open, Iranians knew where to find us because we had not left.

When your Muslim neighbor wants to ask about Jesus, he knows to come to you because you are still there.

You were there through the hard years.

You are still there in the hard years that are now different hard years.

And that presence, that faithful unmoving presence is worth more in evangelism than any program or strategy or well-funded campaign.

It is simply the presence of the church in the place it was called to be.

That is what we have.

That is what by God’s grace we did not give away.

I want to speak now to the global church to Christians in America, in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, wherever you are hearing or reading this.

I want to ask you for something and I want to be specific about what I am asking.

I am not asking for your triumphalism.

I am not asking you to turn what is happening in Iran into a talking point in debates about the war or in political arguments about American foreign policy.

The people converting to Jesus in Iran right now are not arguments.

They are human beings in the middle of one of the most disorienting experiences of their lives.

Discovering a new faith in the ruins of an old one in the middle of a country at war with no guarantee of safety and no certainty about what tomorrow holds.

They need care.

They need disciplehip.

They need pastors and teachers and communities that can hold them and walk with them through what it means to follow Jesus when you have never done it before.

And the cost of doing it is still very real.

The infrastructure of the underground church in Iran is overwhelmed right now.

The people who have been doing this work for decades are exhausted in a way that is hard to describe.

We are running on what God gives us directly because what we have in terms of human resources and structures was built for a community of a certain size.

And that community is growing at a rate that our structures cannot currently keep up with.

the need for support, financial support, prayer support, the support of trained teachers who can create disciplehip materials in Farsy, the support of diaspora Iranians who have the language and the cultural knowledge to help.

That need is urgent and real.

Pray.

I ask this first because I believe it.

First, pray specifically for the safety of new believers who have no idea yet what they have stepped into.

For the leaders who are trying to disciple them.

For wisdom for house church networks navigating a security environment that is still genuinely dangerous even as it is rapidly changing.

and for Iran’s political future to move toward a constitution that protects the freedom of every Iranian to believe and worship as their conscience leads them.

I want to say something about that last prayer for Iran’s political future because I think it matters very much how Christians outside Iran understand what they are praying for.

I am not praying for a Christian Iran in the sense of a theocracy that replaces one form of religious compulsion with another.

I have lived inside a religious compulsion for most of my life.

I know what it does to a person, to a nation, to faith itself.

Faith that is compelled is not faith.

It is performance at gunpoint.

What I am praying for, what I have been praying for for 20 years is an Iran where a Muslim and a Christian and a Jew and a Zoroastrian and a secular person and an atheist can all sit at the same table and none of them is afraid.

where the law protects every person’s right to believe what their conscience leads them to believe and to change that belief if their conscience leads them somewhere new.

Where no one hangs from a rope for apostasy where no one’s door comes in on a Thursday evening.

I believe Christianity will grow in Iran.

I believe it is already growing in Iran at a rate that history will record as remarkable.

But I am a pastor, not a conqueror.

I do not want Iran for Christianity the way the regime wanted Iran for its version of Islam.

I want Iranians to meet Jesus the way I met Jesus.

In a moment of genuine personal encounter, through words that found the hollow room inside them and did not leave, through a community that loved them at real cost.

Not through pressure, not through the absence of alternatives, through love, through presence, through the patient, relentless, costly, ordinary work of the church being the church.

If Christianity becomes the faith that shapes Iran’s future, and I believe it will, I believe it more certainly today than I have ever believed anything.

It must be because Iranians chose it freely because they encountered something in Jesus that they could not find anywhere else.

Because the church that survived 47 years of persecution earned their trust, not through power, but through love.

Bombs break things.

Love builds them.

And the church’s business has always been building.

Let me speak now to anyone listening to this who does not follow Jesus.

Anyone who is outside the faith, curious or skeptical or simply trying to understand what is happening in Iran and why a pastor is speaking about it this way.

I am not going to shout at you.

I am not going to threaten you with consequences.

I am going to tell you one simple thing.

I was where you are.

I was a man in Tehran who thought Christianity was a foreign religion for people who had been colonized into believing it.

I thought Jesus was a figure from ancient history who had been used by Western powers as a cultural tool.

I thought the people who followed him were at best well-meaning and confused and at worst agents of an agenda I wanted no part of.

I believed all of this with the confidence of someone who had never actually examined any of it because I had been given a version of the world in which examining it was not necessary and not safe.

And then in a hollow room on an ordinary afternoon, I read six sentences on a piece of paper and something happened that I have spent 20 years trying to describe and have never fully managed to.

Not lightning, not a vision, a stillness, a sense of being heard by something that had always been there and that I had never been quiet enough to notice.

I am not standing here at 51 years old, having lost my family’s approval, having been arrested, having spent two decades in hiding, having raised my children inside a secrecy that no child should have to live inside, having paid every price this life has asked me to pay because of a feeling.

Feelings pass.

Feelings are not enough to sustain a person through 11 days in a detention facility or 30 years of quiet questions or a mother’s voice asking you on the phone whether this is worth dying for.

I am here because of a person.

His name is Jesus.

I have never once regretted meeting him.

And if there is anything in your life that resembles the hollow room I described at the beginning of this testimony, if there is an emptiness that the things you have been given to fill it have not filled.

If there are questions that the framework you were raised inside has not answered.

If there is a ceiling you have shouted at and gotten silence back, then I am asking you to do one thing.

Not to believe.

Not yet.

Not to pray a prayer or join a church or make any decision at all.

Just to ask honestly with whatever is left of your honesty in whatever private space you can find.

whether there is a God who knows your name, whether the stillness that I am describing is something that is available to you.

I asked that question in a hospital corridor at 2:00 in the morning.

I asked it with nothing left and something answered that something has not left me since.

Finally, I want to speak directly to my brothers and sisters inside Iran.

I know some of you are listening to this or reading this right now.

In cities whose names I cannot say in rooms with curtains that may or may not still need to be closed.

In a moment that is unlike any moment we have lived through before.

I want to say to you, do not be afraid.

I know that is easy to say from wherever I am and harder to live where you are.

I know the situation is still dangerous.

I know the uncertainty is real.

I know that some of you are leading communities that have tripled in size overnight and you are exhausted and underresourced and sometimes you look at what God is asking you to do and you wonder whether you have enough.

You do not have enough.

None of us ever have enough.

That has never been how this works.

What we have has always been what God gives us as we go.

And he has never once given it in advance.

And he has never once failed to give it when we needed it.

You know this.

You have lived it.

Every Thursday evening for years and years, you went into rooms where you did not have enough and came out having been given enough.

This is the same.

only larger.

The church that met in living rooms with the curtains closed for 40 years is not going back into hiding.

What was planted in the dark is coming up into the light.

What was whispered for decades is now being spoken out loud.

What was held by 12 people in a borrowed apartment is now being held by thousands and soon by more.

Keep going.

Keep gathering.

Keep baptizing.

Keep praying.

Keep being present in the broken places of Iran’s life the way you have always been present.

Because that presence is the only argument for Jesus that has ever actually worked and is the only one that will continue to work.

Not arguments, not strategy, presence, love, the willingness to stay.

God did not bring us through 47 years to abandon us.

Now I have to go.

There are people waiting for me.

New believers who need to be taught.

Conversations that need to be had.

Prayers that need to be prayed.

The work does not pause because I have been telling you about it.

The work is always going.

I want to leave you with one thing.

Early in this testimony, I described a hospital corridor where I asked a ceiling if anyone was there.

I described it as the bottom of something.

The place where the hollow room was at its most hollow, and the silence was at its most silent.

I have been back to that corridor in my memory many times since then.

I have gone back to it in prayer the way you return to a place that changed you.

And what I see now when I return to it is not a man shouting into emptiness.

What I see is a man being listened to.

What I see is a God who was in that corridor the whole time.

Who had been in every corridor before it.

who had been waiting with the patience that only God has for a man to finally run out of his own answers and simply ask.

He was there.

He has always been there in Tehran in Evan prison in the bathtub where I was baptized in the interrogation room in the hollow years and the full ones in the living rooms with the closed curtains in the broken ground of Iran.

right now walking among the millions of people who are asking for the first time whether he is real.

He is real.

He is in Iran.

He has always been in Iran.

He was there before Kmeni and before Kam.

And he will be there after all of this.

When the war is over and the ground has settled and Iran becomes whatever it is going to become, he will be there.

I have staked everything I have on that.

I have no regrets.

 

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