PANIC IN IRAN: Pastor Jailed by Ali Khamenei Says Jesus Showed the Supreme Leader’s Death to Him What could a prisoner inside one of Iran’s most feared detention systems possibly witness that would shake the highest levels of power in Iran? According to a dramatic testimony circulating online, a Christian pastor imprisoned under the authority of Ali Khamenei claims he experienced a powerful vision of Jesus Christ while in his cell—one that allegedly revealed a startling message about the future of Iran’s leadership.

Stories of imprisoned Iranian Christians are not unheard of; for example, pastor Youcef Nadarkhani became internationally known after facing severe punishment for his faith.

But what exactly did this jailed pastor claim he saw in that vision—and why are people across social media now debating whether it was a prophetic warning, a symbolic dream, or simply a powerful personal testimony? Could a moment experienced in a prison cell become a message that spreads far beyond the walls of Iran? Discover the mysterious details behind this viral story and the testimony that has sparked intense curiosity worldwide.

Read the full account through the article link in the comments.

I want to start by saying something that might surprise people.

I was not always a Christian.

I was not born into a Christian family.

I did not grow up going to church.

I did not even know what a church looked like from the inside until I was already a grown man.

I was born Muslim, raised Muslim, and for the first 26 years of my life, I lived as a Muslim.

Not a radical one.

Not the kind the world sees on the news with a weapon in his hand and fire in his eyes.

A just a regular Iranian man who fasted during Ramadan, who said his prayers sometimes more out of habit than conviction, who believed in a general kind of way that God existed and that Islam was the path to him.

That was the world I came from.

And I think it is important to say that clearly because the story I am about to tell you is not the story of a man who had nothing and found religion as a crutch.

It is the story of a man who had a life, who had a family, who had plans, and who was interrupted by something he could not explain and could not ignore.

My name is Elias Hoseni.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother, Reverend Elias Hoseni 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.

I was born in Thran in 1976.

I am the second of four children.

My father was an engineer who worked for a government ministry.

My mother was a school teacher.

We were not wealthy, but we were not struggling either.

We lived in a middle-ass neighborhood in the north of Thran.

It was an ordinary life in many of the ways that ordinary lives look similar everywhere.

Children playing in the street, adults working and worrying, the rhythms of meals and school and family visits, and the kind of small daily drama that fills up a life without you ever quite noticing how full it is.

My parents were educated people.

My father especially was a man who read widely and thought carefully.

He was not someone who accepted things simply because tradition handed them to him.

So he asked questions.

He weighed things.

He was a practicing Muslim in the sense that he observed the outward forms of the faith.

But he was never a man who used religion as a club.

He had a kind of intellectual integrity that I always admired even when it frustrated me as a young person.

I think I inherited that tendency from him.

The inability to simply go along with something that did not sit right inside me.

The need to examine.

The refusal to let things be settled by authority alone.

I I went to school, studied hard, and eventually entered university in Thran where I studied civil engineering.

Those were interesting years and I say that with full awareness of the complexity of what university life in Iran actually involves.

From the outside, people often imagine Iranian universities as tightly controlled spaces where only approved thinking is permitted.

And it is true that there are restrictions, significant restrictions.

But inside those spaces among the students where there is more intellectual life than the official picture suggests, there are young people wrestling with ideas they are not supposed to wrestle with.

Books passing from hand to hand that were not on any approved list.

Conversations happening in corners and in whispers about philosophy, about politics, about the meaning of existence.

I was one of those students who read whatever I could find.

are Persian poetry.

Our poets are among the greatest in human history and they have always carried spiritual weight and foreign literature and philosophy and whatever else was circulating in those informal networks.

I was not politically active in an organized way.

But I was searching.

Something in me was perpetually unsatisfied and I kept turning over rocks looking for whatever was underneath without being able to name clearly what I was looking for.

After university, I joined an engineering firm in Thran.

I was 24 years old, beginning a professional life, beginning to build something.

I married Mariam when I was 28.

She was from a similar background, educated, from a middle-class Tehran family, thoughtful, not rigid in her practice of Islam, but respectful of it as the framework of our culture and community.

We were well matched in the ways that matter for a marriage.

We could talk here.

We had genuine friendship underneath the romance.

We shared a way of looking at the world that was curious rather than closed.

Within a few years, we had our son Dara.

And then several years after that, our daughter Sharan.

I remember holding Dra for the first time in the hospital.

this small complete person who had not existed and then existed and feeling something that I did not have a theological framework for yet, but that I now understand was the presence of the holy in the ordinary and the feeling that life was more than the sum of its material parts.

That whatever this was, this mystery of a new human being arriving in the world, it pointed to something beyond itself.

Our life moved forward the way lives are supposed to.

work, family, the apartment we slowly made into a home, the routines of parenthood and marriage and career.

I was by any external measure a man who had everything he was supposed to want and I was not unhappy.

I want to be precise about this because I have told the story in different contexts and I have noticed the tendency for people to fill in a backstory of misery or crisis when none existed.

My life was genuinely good.

I loved my wife.

I was engaged with my work.

My children were healthy.

I had friendships.

But that restlessness was always there.

It had been there since I was a teenager and it never left.

It is not the kind of thing that ordinary contentment can touch because it is not about circumstances.

It is something at the level of the soul.

A deep persistent awareness that something fundamental is unanswered.

that for all the prayers I said, for all the fasting I did, for all the religious observances I performed, I did not actually know God.

Not personally, not in a way that was real and present and alive.

I knew propositions about God.

I had been taught what to believe, and I broadly believed it.

But knowing about someone and knowing them are two entirely different things.

And somewhere inside me there was a hunger for the second kind of knowing that nothing in my religious life had come close to satisfying.

I think many people many people across many religious traditions know exactly what I am describing.

The gap between the religion you practice and the encounter with the living God that the religion is supposed to point toward.

The feeling of going through motions.

The prayer that feels like speaking to a ceiling.

the rituals that feel empty without meaning them.

I was living inside that gap and I had been living inside it so long that I had almost stopped noticing it.

The way you stop noticing a low-grade physical pain that has been present for years.

The first time I ever held a Bible was in 2005.

I was 29 years old.

My a colleague at work, a man I will not name because he is still in Iran and his safety still matters, left a Persian New Testament in the drawer of a desk we shared.

I do not know to this day whether he left it deliberately or by accident.

He never mentioned it.

I found it one afternoon when I was looking for something else, and I took it out and looked at it for a long time before I opened it.

I knew what it was.

I also knew in a practical sense exactly what it meant to be found holding it.

Possessing Christian scripture in Iran is not something the authorities treat casually and distributing it or sharing it carries serious risk.

I was aware of all of that and still I could not put it down.

I opened it and it fell to the Gospel of John.

I do not have a dramatic explanation for why I started there.

It was simply where the book opened in my hands.

And I began to read.

I read the first few verses.

The part that says in the beginning was the word and the word was with God.

And in the word was God.

And I stopped.

I read it again.

There was something in those opening sentences that was unlike anything I had read in any religious text before.

Not because I fully understood what they meant.

I did not.

Not then, but because they had a weight to them, a density that I felt more than I processed intellectually, like standing near something very large and feeling the gravitational pull of it before you understand what the thing is.

I read on.

I read through the entire first chapter, and by the time I put the Bible back in the drawer, my mind was going in directions that I could not entirely control.

The language of this text was doing something to me.

I was an engineer.

I was trained to be logical and precise and to distrust what could not be measured.

And I sat there in my office afterward staring at my work and thought.

Something just happened to me.

I over the following weeks I kept going back to that desk when my colleague was absent and reading more.

Chapter by chapter slowly, carefully.

I was reading it the way a man reads something that he senses is important but does not yet fully understand with a mixture of fascination and caution.

And as I read something was accumulating in me.

A conviction still wordless at that point that the person these pages were written about was real.

Not historically real in the limited sense that any ancient figure was real.

real in the sense of present alive actually there.

I need to tell you about the dream because the dream is where things moved from searching to encounter.

It was an ordinary night.

I had not been reading the Bible that day.

I was not in any heightened spiritual state.

I went to sleep the way I always did beside Mariam in our bedroom with the sounds of the city outside.

And in the night a dream came that was unlike any dream I had had before.

There was a man.

I cannot give you a precise physical description that would satisfy a painter, and I will not try to manufacture one.

What I can tell you is that there was a man standing in a quality of light that was not theatrical or blinding, but simply clear, a clarity that made everything in the dream visible and present.

And I knew in the way you sometimes know things in dreams without being told who this man was.

And he did not preach to me.

He did not give me a list of things to do.

He simply looked at me.

And in that look, in whatever that moment of being looked at fully was, I experienced something that I had been reaching toward my entire life.

It was the experience of being completely known.

Not in a frightening way, not in the way of an interrogation or a judgment, but in the way of being seen to your very foundation by someone who finds nothing there that changes their love for you.

And I felt known and I felt accepted in the same breath.

And those two things together produced in me a piece that I can only tell you was the most real thing I had ever felt.

more real than the walls of the room I would wake up in, more real than the work problems I had been thinking about the night before.

I woke up and sat in the dark for a long time.

Miam was asleep beside me.

I did not wake her.

I just sat there with whatever that had been, turning it over, and knowing that something had fundamentally shifted, even if I could not have told you exactly what or how.

I was not a Christian yet in any formal or confessional sense, but the door had opened and I knew I was going to walk through it.

In the months that followed, I read everything I could access.

I finished the New Testament, moved into the Old Testament through passages I could reach.

I read whatever theological or explanatory material I could find through careful means.

Some of it online through systems that people in Iran used to access restricted content.

some of it through physical materials that passed through the informal network of people who were curious about or connected to faith.

I prayed differently, not in Arabic, not in the formal postures I had been taught, but in Persian in my own words are in the way you speak to a person who is actually there and who you are beginning to know.

And I was being answered, not always in dramatic ways.

Sometimes in the quality of a particular morning, sometimes in a sudden clarity about something I had been confused about.

Sometimes in a physical warmth in prayer that I could not explain, but that I had also learned to stop trying to explain away.

God was present.

That was the simple fact of it.

Uh the God I had been reaching toward through years of former religion and intellectual searching was present.

And he was not cold or distant or conditional.

He was close and warm and deeply personal.

And discovering that after years of the other thing, the empty ritual, the ceiling prayers, was like a man dying of thirst, finding water.

I need to find other believers.

That was the thought that settled in me after some months of this private solitary journey of faith.

And I could not do this alone indefinitely.

And I knew it.

The scripture I was reading was not the scripture of isolated individualism.

It was relentlessly communal.

It spoke of a body, a fellowship, people who needed each other.

But finding other Christians in Iran is not a straightforward thing.

It requires time, caution, and the slow building of trust that only comes through careful relationship.

It was through a friend who had a friend through a chain of indirect connections in that I eventually made contact.

The introduction was indirect and deniable at every link in the chain.

And after several conversations and a gradual establishment of trust, I was eventually brought to a gathering.

There were nine of us the first time I attended.

We met in a small apartment, sitting on the floor and on the edges of the furniture, close together because the room was not large.

Everyone had brought something.

Food, a small contribution of some kind.

I There were people from across the range of Thrron’s middle class, a doctor, two university students, a woman who worked in government administration, a retired teacher, a man who ran a small printing business.

All converts, all from Muslim backgrounds, all people who had through different paths and different encounters found their way to the same place I was finding my way to.

They read scripture together.

They prayed together in Persian in voices that stayed low, not from lack of conviction, but from the awareness of what surrounded them.

They sang softly, carefully, but they sang.

And there was something in that room among those nine people in that small apartment with the curtains drawn that was more alive than anything I had experienced in any mosque I had attended in 29 years of practicing Islam.

The presence of God was palpable.

I know that sounds like the kind of thing people say at Christian events without always meaning it specifically.

I mean it specifically.

There was something in that room that was not explicable by the human ingredients present, and everyone there knew it, and none of them had to say so for everyone to know it.

I wept.

I did not plan to.

I am not a man who cries easily, and I have never been.

But sitting in that room for the first time, I was surrounded by these people who had paid real prices for the thing I was only beginning to step into.

I wept with relief.

mostly the relief of a man who has been alone with something enormous and has finally found people who understand it.

Over the following months, I became a regular part of this community.

I formally gave my life to Christ in that group, not with any ceremony or elaborate ritual.

I simply with a prayer said aloud in the presence of those people that I have never tried to repeat verbatim because I do not think the specific words were the point.

The point was the intention, the surrender, the full and final stepping through the door that had been standing open since the dream.

Now I need to tell you about telling Miam, because this was not a small thing, and I will not pretend it was.

I told her gradually, not in one conversation, but over several weeks.

on peeling back layers as I gauged her responses, watching her face for the fear I knew was likely and for the openness I hoped was also there.

I told her first about the Bible I had been reading, then about the dream, then about the group, and she listened to all of it in the quiet, attentive way that is very characteristic of who Mariam is.

She does not react quickly.

She processes, she thinks, and then she speaks from that place of having thought carefully.

Her first honest response was fear.

I I want to be clear that this was a completely reasonable response.

What I was telling her was that her husband had been secretly reading a banned religious text, attending illegal religious gatherings, and was in the process of converting from Islam to Christianity.

a conversion that in Iran carries the legal designation of apostasy and can carry a death sentence.

The fear was not weakness.

The fear was wisdom.

She understood the stakes completely and she was frightened for our family.

Uh but Miriam is also a woman who does not dismiss things she cannot explain and she could not dismiss what she was seeing in me.

The change in me was real and it was visible.

I was calmer.

I was kinder.

There was something in me that had settled, that restlessness that she had known about since before we were married, that she had lived alongside for years without being able to touch.

It was quieter and she noticed.

She began her own inquiry.

She started reading carefully, privately.

I’m with the same caution I had used.

She prayed in her own way and she told me later that she had said to God in that prayer, “If this is real, show me.

If Jesus is who Elias says he is, show me.

” It was an honest, unadorned prayer from a woman who was not going to be swept along by her husband’s experience without her own.

It took almost a year.

And then one evening in the kitchen of our apartment, she told me that something had changed in her.

that in prayer as she had encountered something she could not explain and could not dismiss that she believed.

She did not use a lot of words to describe it.

That is also characteristic of Miam, the compression of deep things into few words.

But her face told me everything the words did not say.

And from that night we were walking this together.

I want to say something about what it means to hold a faith in secret in Iran.

Uh because I think people outside that reality sometimes romanticize it without understanding what it actually costs in daily life.

The double life is exhausting in a way that is not dramatic or acute but chronic and grinding.

Every day you make small calculations.

What to say to the neighbors? How to explain why you are not at Friday prayers? what to tell your family when they ask questions.

And the children had to be taught from a young age before they could fully understand why that there were things you did not say outside the house.

That some of what we did and believed was private.

That is a burden to place on a child.

And I have never been entirely at peace with the necessity of it.

And yet within all of that, within the secrecy and the caution and the daily weight of the double life, there was something extraordinary happening in us and among the people we were connected to.

People were being transformed not in the abstract programmatic sense of a religious program producing behavioral change, in the real particular individual sense of actual human lives being turned around.

A man who had been crippled by shame for years, finding freedom in the experience of grace.

A marriage being restored when both partners began to pray together.

A young person who had been on the edge of something very dark, finding a reason to stay.

These were not statistics.

These were people I knew.

And watching these transformations happened was fuel for everything.

By 2010, I was leading a small network of house groups across Thrron.

I want to be honest that the growth of this responsibility was not something I sought.

It happened because people needed leadership and I had through the years of study and the depth of my own encounter with God developed the capacity to provide it.

I was teaching, counseling, baptizing.

I was a pastor not by any formal denominational process.

There was no institution here to confer the title but by the actual functioning definition of the word.

The network numbered perhaps 60 to 70 people at its peak.

Not large by any comparison with a conventional church.

But each person in that number represented a story of real transformation, real cost, real courage.

I knew all of them.

I knew their families, their circumstances, their specific spiritual struggles.

She that knowledge that pastoral intimacy was one of the greatest privileges of my life and also when what came next came one of the greatest sources of grief.

I knew by 2011 that I was being watched.

It was not a single thing but an accumulation of small signals that a person living in a surveillance society learns to read.

I became more cautious.

I talked to Miam about it and we prayed together about it seriously.

that there were practical conversations about what she would do if I was arrested, who she would contact, where she would go with the children.

These were not panicked conversations.

They were the deliberate, responsible conversations of people who understood their situation.

And there was something else happening in those months before the arrest.

Something that I can only describe as a preparation.

Not a preparation I chose or manufactured.

A preparation that was being worked in me.

A deepening of my prayer life that was qualitatively different from what had come before.

A settling in me about the possibility of suffering that did not come from bravado or spiritual performance but from something that felt like grace being deposited like God filling a tank before a long journey.

I did not understand it fully at the time.

In retrospect, I understand it completely.

The night I knew I was going to be arrested before it happened.

I was sitting alone in my study after the children had gone to bed, Miriam was reading in the other room, and I had a very clear, very quiet sense, not a voice, not a vision, just a settled conviction that whatever was coming, I was going to be okay.

Not okay in the sense of comfortable or safe.

Okay sense of held, sustained, not abandoned.

I sat with that sense for a long time.

I held it carefully the way you hold something fragile and then I went to bed.

Two nights later, she know on a cold night in January 2012, the knock came.

It was a Thursday night.

I know it was Thursday because of the significance of that detail in Iranian life.

Thursday evening is the beginning of the weekend in Iran, a time when families are home, when things are relaxed, when the pace of the week eases.

There was nothing unusual about that evening.

The children were asleep.

Miam was in the kitchen.

I was in my study looking over some notes I had been preparing.

On the apartment was quiet in the particular way it gets quiet when everyone you love is safe inside it and the world outside is holding its noise.

The knock came at around 10 at night.

It was not a polite knock.

It was the kind of knock that does not distinguish itself from a demand.

Loud, flat, immediate.

And I knew in that fraction of a second between hearing the sound and standing up from my chair, I knew, not with fear exactly, with a kind of solemn recognition of the thing I had been preparing for had arrived.

There were four men at the door, plain clothes, no uniforms.

This is deliberate.

The intelligence agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence almost never appear in the recognizable dress of police or military because the ambiguity is functional.

You do not know exactly who these men are, what authority they carry, what is about to happen.

They identified themselves, showed a document that I was not given time to read carefully.

I had told me I needed to come with them.

They were professional and controlled.

There was no unnecessary drama in how they moved.

They had done this many times before.

They came into the apartment.

They did not wait to be invited.

Miriam came out of the kitchen when she heard the voices, and I watched her see what was happening.

I want to tell you what I saw in her face in that moment.

or because I have carried that image with me through everything that followed and it is central to who she is and what she is.

There was fear.

I will not lie and say there was not because she is a human being and fear was the only rational response.

But there was also something else underneath the fear and not destroyed by it.

A steadiness, a refusal to collapse.

Just she looked at me and I looked at her and in that exchange which lasted only a few seconds because the men were moving through the apartment.

Everything that needed to be said between us was said without a single word.

I love you.

I am afraid for you.

I am going to be okay.

Take care of them.

I know.

I will.

She held herself together in a way that even now when I think about it fills me with a grief and an admiration that are difficult to separate from each other.

She did not scream you.

She did not beg them.

She stood in her own kitchen with the dignity of a woman who understood exactly what was happening and who had decided in that instant that she was not going to give these men the satisfaction of seeing her fall apart.

They took my phone and went through the apartment looking for materials, books, notes, anything that could be used.

They found things, portions of scripture I had written out, notes from teachings I had prepared.

They took what they found into bags.

I I was allowed to pack a small bag of personal items.

I was not allowed to wake the children to say goodbye.

Dra was 8 years old.

Sharon was five.

They were asleep in their room, and I was not allowed to walk in there and hold them one last time before everything changed.

I have thought about that specific denial many times over the years.

The cruelty of small things.

I walked out of my home and into a waiting car.

We drove to Evan prison in silence.

Evan sits in the north of Tehran, uh, tucked against the foothills in a way that makes it feel geographically separate from the city.

Even though it is not far, if you did not know what it was, you might not look twice at the walls and the gates, but every Iranian knows what it is.

It has been the site of some of the darkest chapters of Iranian history under the sha and then under the Islamic Republic.

Different political authorities using the same location for the same essential purpose in which is the confinement and the breaking of people they find inconvenient.

The name Evan carries a specific weight in Iranian consciousness that no other location in the country quite matches.

When you first arrive at Evan, particularly in the intelligence ward, which is often called ward 209, the first thing they do is take from you the things that keep you oriented.

Your clothes are replaced.

Your possessions are cataloged and removed.

You are put in a temporary cell.

And then the most important thing happens.

You lose time.

There is no window.

The lights do not change with the outside world.

You do not know if it is day or night, what hour it is, how long you have been in that room.

This disorientation is deliberate and it is effective.

The human mind depends on temporal reference points in ways we take completely for granted until those reference points are removed.

Without them, anxiety rises and judgment begins to blur.

I was held in initial processing conditions for what I later estimated was about 3 days, though I could not have told you that at the time.

The first interrogation came when I was already confused about time and had not slept properly and had eaten very little.

This, too, is deliberate timing.

The interrogations were conducted in a small room with a table between me and the interrogators.

Sometimes one man, sometimes two.

Ye, there was a primary interrogator.

I will call him the interrogator who led most of my sessions, particularly in the early months.

He was not the kind of man you might imagine if you are drawing on film or television depictions of this kind of figure.

He was not loud or physically threatening.

He was measured, educated, articulate.

He spoke in a careful almost academic way about complex subjects in a different context in a university perhaps.

He he might have been someone whose lectures you found interesting but he was very good at what he did and what he did was not primarily information extraction.

The questions about my network, about names and locations and funding sources, those came and I refused to answer them consistently and there were consequences for those refusals.

But the deeper project of the interrogations was not information.

It was dismantlement.

Mo he was trying to take apart the framework of my faith and my sense of self in a way that would leave me with nothing to stand on.

He would spend an entire session examining the logic of my conversion, not in a philosophical debate format, but in a way designed to introduce doubt.

Had I been manipulated by foreign interests? Had the people who brought me into the Christian community used me? Was I certain that what I felt in prayer was not simply a psychological phenomenon produced by isolation and group suggestion? Was I willing to destroy my family, my children’s future, my wife’s life for something that might ultimately be nothing more than selfdeception? These questions were not random.

They were targeted at the places where my inner life was most vulnerable.

A man can resist a question that has nothing to do with him.

It is much harder to resist a question that reaches into the real complexity of your actual experience.

Because the truth is that I had asked some of those questions myself, not as evidence of doubt, but as part of honest faith, and he was using my honesty against me.

The physical conditions during this period were an instrument as much as the interrogations were.

The cell was small.

The light was constant.

There was never darkness, never the normal signal to the body that rest was available, and the temperature was kept low.

The food was minimal in both quantity and quality.

I was not beaten in those early weeks, though I knew that others elsewhere in the prison were subjected to physical violence.

I heard things through the walls that I will not describe in detail because the people those sounds belong to deserve more than to have their suffering described in a testimony that is primarily about my own experience.

But the cumulative effect of constant light and cold and minimal food and irregular unpredictable sleep disturbance and the relentless pressure of the interrogations, the effect of all of that together is something that I want people to understand is a form of torture.

It does not leave visible marks.

It leaves something else.

There came a point approximately 6 weeks into my detention, I believe, where I reached a place of interior collapse that I have not fully spoken about publicly before.

I I was in my cell alone late in what I assumed was night based on some internal sense that was no longer reliable.

And I experienced something that I can only describe as a complete internal darkness, not just fear, not just exhaustion, something that felt like the total absence of God.

Like every experience I had ever had in prayer, every encounter, every moment of that warmth and presence that had sustained my faith for years, all of it had been some kind of extended selfdeception.

And now, just stripped of everything external.

The truth was becoming visible.

There was nothing there.

There was a cell and a wall and a light that never went out and a man who was completely alone.

I lay on the floor of that cell.

I do not know for how long.

And I prayed, though calling it prayer almost sounds too dignified for what it was.

It was more like a desperate reaching in a direction where I was no longer sure anything existed to be reached.

I said, and I do not remember the exact words and would not pretend to.

Something that amounted to, if you are there, I need you to be real right now, not later.

now because I have nothing left.

What happened next I will try to describe as accurately as I can and without embellishment because embellishment would dishonor it.

The darkness did not lift dramatically.

There was no sudden vision, no audible voice, no light show.

But into the room where I was lying on that floor, there came something that I can only call a presence.

Quiet, unmistakable, and entirely external to me.

Meaning, I know the difference between something I generated from my own psychological resources and something that arrived from outside them.

And this was the second thing.

This presence settled into that room the way warmth settles into a cold space when a heat source is brought into it.

And with it came a verse that I had memorized, but that arrived in that moment not as a recollection, but as a communication from Isaiah 43.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you.

When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.

I am not going to try to make that moment sound more dramatic than it was.

I am going to tell you that after that night on something in me was settled that was never fully unsettled again during those 8 years the particular fear the fear of abandonment the fear that my faith had been nothing and that I was alone in the universe lost its power over me.

Not all fear disappeared.

The fear for Miam and the children never left.

The physical and psychological difficulty of what I was enduring did not change.

But the deepest terror, the existential terror was addressed in that cold cell on that floor.

I by something that was not me.

My trial took place after several months of pre-trial detention.

I want to describe the charges clearly because I think it is important for people outside Iran to understand exactly what the Iranian state criminalizes.

I was charged with apostasy, leaving Islam.

I was charged with leading an illegal church, which in Iran means any gathering of Christians that is not part of the small number of officially recognized pre-revolution historic churches, and that includes converts from Islam.

I was charged with evangelizing Muslims, which means sharing my faith with people who were not Christians.

Bandai was charged with acting against national security through what was described as connection with foreign anti-revolutionary organizations.

A charge that was applied to almost every house church leader because the state categorizes the entire network of international Christian organizations that support Iranian believers as hostile foreign actors.

These charges together in Iran’s legal framework can carry a death sentence.

My lawyer, who had been assigned rather than chosen, and who was navigating a system with very little room for genuine defense, told me plainly that the apostasy charge alone could result in execution.

He urged me in the careful language of a man who could not be too direct to consider the benefit of demonstrating cooperation with the court.

I understood what he was saying and I told him as clearly and respectfully as I could that I was not going to recant my faith, that I was not going to provide information about other believers, that I would speak honestly in court about who I was and what I believed.

He absorbed this information with the expression of a man who was not surprised but who had been obligated to try.

The court session itself was not long.

In Iran’s system for cases of this nature, the proceeding does not resemble what most people in democratic countries understand as a trial.

The judge in my case was also a cleric.

The outcome based on what had been gathered during my detention was not genuinely open.

I was allowed to make a statement.

I used that opportunity to say clearly that I believed in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

That I had come to this faith through my own genuine conviction and not through foreign manipulation.

That I had led a community of believers whose only activity was worship and the study of scripture and that I did not consider this a crime against my country or my people.

I said that I loved Iran.

I said that the God I served was not the enemy of Iran.

I said that I was prepared to accept whatever judgment the court gave, but that I could not deny what I had encountered and what I believed.

The sentence was life imprisonment.

The words landed in my chest like something physical.

Not because I had not known they were coming.

I had, but knowing and hearing are different.

Life imprisonment.

I was 35 years old.

I had a wife and two children.

and a man in a court in Thran had just told me that I would die inside Evan prison.

I looked at my lawyer.

He looked down at the table.

I looked at the judge who was already moving on.

I looked at the wall and I felt under the weight of those words something that I want to be honest about because I think dishonesty here would damage the authenticity of everything else I have told you.

I felt for a period of days after that sentencing a grief so profound that it was almost physical, not for myself.

I had made my peace with whatever came for me.

The grief was for Miam, for Dar and Sharan, for the life they were going to have to live without me in it.

for Dar’s growing up, for Sharon’s childhood, for all the ordinary things.

Birthday meals, homework, the first day of a new school year, the conversations you have with your children late at night when they cannot sleep and they come to find you.

All of that now taken from them.

And I had chosen this.

Oh, in the sense that I had the option to prevent it and had refused to take that option.

That weight was real.

But I had also chosen it in the deeper sense that I could not have done otherwise and remained who I am.

And in that deeper sense, it was not a choice at all.

It was simply the consequence of being without apology or reservation exactly who God had made me.

I was taken from the courtroom back into the body of the prison and the next chapter of my life began.

There is something that happens to time in a long imprisonment.

In the first year, you are still anchored to the outside world by memory and by hope.

You count weeks.

You remember what you would normally be doing on a specific day.

You celebrate your children’s birthdays inside your own head, alone in a cell, picturing what their face might look like, blowing out candles you are not there to see.

The first year is in many ways the hardest uh because you are carrying the full weight of the life you are missing and you have not yet found a way to set that weight down.

By the second year something shifts not a lessening of the love or the longing.

Those do not decrease but a kind of adaptation begins.

your mind and spirit because they must find a way to inhabit the present rather than perpetually mourning the past or anxiously projecting into the future.

And you begin to live inside the life you actually have rather than constantly measuring it against the life you have lost.

I am not describing this as some achievement of mine.

I am describing it as something that happened in me over time through the combination of sustained prayer and the absolute necessity of survival and I believe the grace of God working in my psychology in ways that were merciful.

And the daily reality of Evan prison, specifically the years of my imprisonment there involved a routine that was simultaneously rigid and unpredictable, which is its own particular form of psychological strain.

The structure was fixed.

The same meal times, the same lights, the same rotations.

But within that fixed structure, things could change without warning.

A cell transfer, an unexpected period of isolation, privileges granted and then withdrawn, a sudden change in the guard assignment that affected the temperature of daily life in ways that were small but significant.

You could never fully relax into the routine because the routine could be disrupted at any point and the disruption was never explained and rarely predictable.

I was moved from the initial holding situation into a shared cell in the general population of the prison.

After the trial, this was in purely human terms a relief.

The shared cell meant other people, a conversation, the small social commerce of daily life that we take entirely for granted until it is removed from us.

Even in a prison, even under the worst conditions, human beings find ways to create small dignities.

A shared meal is still a meal.

A conversation before sleep is still connection.

A joke told quietly in a cell is still laughter.

Those things matter enormously and I will not minimize them.

And the men I shared cells with over the years of my imprisonment were a cross-section of the many kinds of people Evan holds.

Political prisoners, journalists, activists, people who had posted something on social media that the authorities found objectionable.

Lawyers who had defended the wrong clients.

Economic prisoners.

people caught in the complex web of Iran’s various prohibited activities and religious prisoners like myself, Christians, Bahi, Sufi Muslims whose practice the state did not sanction, Sunni Muslims from minority ethnic communities who had run a foul of the religious establishment.

There was a man I will call a rash who was in the cell with me for about 14 months.

He was a journalist who had been arrested for something he had written about economic corruption among officials.

He was secular, sharp, deeply skeptical of all religion, which put him and me in an interesting dynamic.

We had long conversations, many of them over many months.

He challenged me in the way that intelligent, honest skeptics do, which is the most useful kind of challenge.

He did not ask me easy questions.

He asked me, “If your God is good and powerful, what exactly are you doing here?” He asked me whether I had considered the possibility that my conversion experience was a psychological response to a deep need for meaning rather than a genuine encounter with a real being.

He asked me whether the harm done across history in the name of Christianity was something I could honestly account for.

I engaged with every one of those questions.

Not defensively, I was beyond that, but with a genuine willingness to think carefully because I believe that a faith that cannot withstand honest questioning is not a faith worth having.

We went on those conversations for months sitting in our cell, two men with nothing to do but think and talk in a rash.

Never became a Christian while I knew him and I never pressured him too.

But something was happening in him over those months.

I could see it.

A loosening of the certainty of his dismissal, a growing openness to the possibility that there was more to the universe than his previous framework allowed for.

When he was transferred, he told me privately that the conversations had stayed with him in a way he had not expected.

That was enough for me.

There were other believers I found inside Evan.

Not many, but some.

When you are in a large prison for years, these things happen gradually and carefully.

The establishment of trust, the slow recognition in another person’s eyes that they carry the same thing you carry.

There was a man I will call brother Cameron.

He had been arrested before me, was serving a long sentence for similar activities to mine, and had been inside Evan for several years when I arrived.

He became I in the most genuine sense of the word a brother to me.

We could not always meet freely or regularly.

The conditions of our respective cell blocks and the movements of the guard assignments determined what was possible.

But when we could meet, we met with the intensity of people who understand that time is precious and that connection is survival.

We prayed together.

We recited scripture together quietly from memory on sitting close enough that the words carried between us without needing to travel far.

We talked about God with a directness and an intimacy that I think is only really possible when you are in a situation where everything else has been stripped away.

There is no performance in those conversations.

There is no theological point scoring.

There is just two people reduced to their essentials talking honestly about the thing that is sustaining them in an unsustainable situation.

Brother Cameron had a quality of faith that I have not often encountered.

It was very quiet and very deep.

He did not speak much about his experiences or his feelings.

He was a contained man.

But when he prayed, there was something in his prayers that was unlike most prayer I had heard.

a directness, an intimacy with God that sounded like a man talking to someone he had known for a long time and trusted completely.

He He had been in that prison for years at that point, and his faith had not shrunk under the pressure.

It had deepened.

Watching that in him was a confirmation to me in the early years, especially that what I was trying to hold on to was holdable.

Every year with the regularity of a ritual that was designed to erode rather than honor, officials came to me with the recantation document.

The wording changed slightly from year to year, but the substance never did.

It was a statement that I had been misled in my conversion, that I renounced Christianity, that I returned to the practice of Islam, and that I acknowledged the authority of the Islamic Republic’s religious framework.

Signing it would lead to review of my sentence, possible reduction, possible release.

Every year I refused, I want to describe what that refusal cost because I do not want it to sound like a triumphant or effortless thing.

The first few times it was met with extended periods in isolation.

Solitary confinement in heaven is a specific kind of suffering.

The cell is small and the time in it is absolute.

no meaningful interaction with other human beings for days or weeks at a stretch.

In isolation, the mind has no choice but to turn inward.

And for a person who is carrying real grief and real fear, that inward turning can become very dark.

I struggled in isolation more than I have often admitted.

And the thoughts that came in those periods were not good thoughts.

They were the thoughts of a man who was questioning every decision that had brought him to where he was.

who was measuring the cost against the return in a way that did not produce comfortable conclusions.

But here is what I also found in isolation.

And I say this not to dress it up in false spiritual heroism, but because it is true.

The presence of God was more tangible in those isolated periods than at almost any other time.

I think it is because in isolation there is nothing else.

Nothing to distract, nothing to lean on, nothing to fill the space except what is actually there.

And what was actually there, what I found in the absolute silence of those periods, was not emptiness.

It was presence.

The same presence I had first encountered in a dream before I understood who it belonged to.

The same presence that had come into my cell on the floor in those early terrible weeks.

It was consistent.

It was faithful.

and it was enough.

In my fourth year of imprisonment, the dreams began.

I have spoken about these dreams in select settings and I will speak about them here fully because they are a central part of this testimony.

I want to be careful and precise about how I present this because I have seen prophetic claims used irresponsibly and I have seen people build entire narratives on uncertain foundations.

So let me tell you exactly what the dreams were and exactly what I understood about them at the time without adding the interpretation that came later.

The first dream came on an ordinary night.

I was asleep in my cell.

In the dream there was a structure large imposing carrying the sense of great authority.

I understood this structure in the dream to represent the highest level of power in Iran.

Not the building itself, not a specific location, but the authority and the symbolic representation of the system of control that was embodied in the Supreme Leader’s office.

Around this structure, there were layers like concentric rings of reinforcement.

It felt impregnable.

It felt like something that had been built to last indefinitely.

And then something came from above.

Not from a human direction, not from a military direction, not from a political direction, from above.

And in the dream, this was unmistakably a direction that carried spiritual significance.

Above meant something different from the horizontal directions that human power operates in.

And what came struck the structure at its center.

There was a rupture, a breaking, and then, and this is the part that stayed with me most, a stillness settled over what had broken.

Not the stillness of death, not the silence of a place destroyed and emptied, more like the stillness of a thing that had been very tightly sealed, a jar or a container that had been opened.

And in that stillness there was the sense of something entering or something being able to enter for the first time.

I woke from this dream with the same quality of impression that I associate with the dreams I have learned to take seriously.

A clarity that does not fade with waking.

A sense of having been shown something rather than simply having experienced the random firing of a sleeping mind.

I lay in my cell for a long time thinking about it.

I did not know what to make of it with confidence.

I had ideas, but I was careful with my ideas.

Over the following months, the dream recurred, each time with the same essential structure and the same essential feeling, though with variations in the peripheral details, a rupture from above, a stillness, an opening.

I began keeping notes in the margins of the Quran that I had been given as a prisonisssued item in a notation system that I developed specifically to record these things in a form that was not immediately legible to anyone who might search my belongings.

The notes documented what I had seen and the approximate dates and any specific details that differed from previous occurrences.

The one thing I will say about what I believed at the time, and I held this belief carefully, I without broadcasting it, without making pronouncements, was that I felt God was showing me something about Iran’s future.

Not a specific event with a specific date, but a direction, a trajectory, that the power structure that had held Iran in its grip was not permanent.

that something was coming from above from God that was going to break something open and that on the other side of that breaking there would be an unprecedented opportunity for the gospel in Iran.

I held that.

I wrote it down and I continued living inside the years.

The visits from Miam were the lifeline they were both emotionally and practically.

We developed over time and out of necessity a way of communicating real information within the constraints of monitored visiting conditions.

It was not elaborate code.

It was more the intimacy of people who know each other deeply enough to understand what is being meant by what is being said.

She updated me on the children in ways that told me everything I needed to know about their emotional state as well as their physical well-being.

She told me about the community carefully without names or specifics that could endanger anyone in ways that told me whether the work was continuing.

It was through everything it was continuing.

Watching Darra grow up through a pane of glass is something that I carry with a specific kind of grief that has not fully healed even now.

She ate.

He was still young enough to sit close to the glass and press his small hand against it in a way that broke something open in my chest every time.

At 10, he was asking questions in a way that told me his mind was working on the reality of what was happening to our family.

At 12, he had gone quieter, an introversion that I recognized as the young person’s way of processing more than they know how to say.

At 14, there was something in his eyes when he looked at me that was complicated in a way I could not fully read from the other side of that glass and that I spent long hours in my cell trying to understand.

At 16, when I was finally released, he was taller than me, and he stood back slightly when I first came in, and we had to find our way back to each other slowly, carefully, like two people who had drifted, and had to learn the distance they had traveled apart.

Sharon was different.

She was younger and more instinctively physical, and less guarded in showing what she felt.

She would put her hand flat against the glass and say things that were simple and true in the way that a child’s observations can be.

She told me during one visit when she was perhaps seven or eight that she prayed for me every night that she told God that I was in prison because I love Jesus and she asked God to make the people in charge be fair.

I wept after that visit and not in front of her.

I held myself together for the duration of the visit.

But alone in my cell afterward, I wept for a long time because the faith of that child formed in secret in a small apartment in Thran by a mother who was doing everything alone was more real and more pure than most of what I had encountered in years of ministry.

The executions that happened during my years inside Evan are something I will address only in general terms.

I knew men who were executed.

So not strangers, men I had talked with, prayed with, shared food with in the common areas during the periods when we had that access.

Men who had faced their deaths with a courage that I will not dress up in any language because the plain description of it is enough.

They faced death for the things they believed and for the way they had lived.

And they did so with a dignity that the state that killed them did not deserve to witness.

I will say nothing more specific than that and accept that the grief of those losses was one of the heaviest things I carried in those years and that those men are not forgotten.

By year six, my situation had become the subject of significant international attention.

Through Miam and through my lawyer and through the fragmented information that reached me inside the prison, I became aware that my name was being spoken in places and contexts I had never expected.

Advocacy organizations, government statements, on reports by human rights bodies.

This information arrived in pieces, often months after the events it described.

But its cumulative effect was to tell me that I had not been forgotten.

And that knowledge was in the practical reality of long imprisonment more important than I can easily describe.

Being forgotten is its own kind of death.

Being remembered is its own kind of lifeline.

In year seven, conditions inside the prison began to shift slightly.

Not dramatically and not in any way that made the fundamental reality different.

But the temperature of daily life changed in small ways that were perceptible to those of us living inside it.

More access to common areas, slightly improved conditions in some of the cell blocks, a reduction in some of the more arbitrary withdrawal of privileges.

Iran’s relationship with the outside world always complicated.

you was going through a particular phase of pressure that was producing certain adjustments in how the prison administration managed international scrutiny.

I do not know all the factors.

I only know what I experienced and what changed.

And then in what I later understood to be my last year, word began to come through the channels available to me.

indirect, fragmentaryary, carefully communicated that something was moving in my case, negotiations of some kind.

Your international pressure producing some response.

My lawyer, who had stayed with my case through all those years, with a faithfulness that I can only attribute to conscience, communicated to Marryiam that there was activity happening around my situation that he was cautiously hopeful about.

I received this information across the glass during one of Miriam’s visits.

We could not speak plainly, but she communicated it in the way we had learned to communicate, in the texture of what she said and what she chose not to say, and in the steadiness of her eyes when she said it.

And that night, alone in my cell, I prayed.

I prayed the most honest prayer I think I had prayed in years, which was this, that if this door was opening by God’s hand, I received it with gratitude.

And that if it was not yet time, I would continue to trust him in that place because he had been trustworthy in that place for 7 years, and I had no reason to stop believing he would remain.

So, I meant both parts of that prayer completely.

That is not something I could have said in year 1.

It is something that can only be true after years of being held.

The door opened.

The release did not come in a single moment.

This is the reality of how the Iranian system processes these things.

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

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

There were meetings with officials.

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

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

The conditions of my release were specific and significant.

I was to report regularly to the intelligence services.

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

I was not to speak publicly about my imprisonment.

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

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

I was free inside Iran.

I was not free to leave Iran.

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

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

I will not give a more specific date than that.

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

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

And I was a man of 43 walking back into it, carrying 8 years of a particular kind of living that had changed me in ways I was only beginning to understand.

The first thing, the absolute first thing was Marryiam.

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

Close.

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

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

I will say only that 8 years of being separated from the person you love most in the world, seeing them only through glass in monitored conditions and then having them actually present physically close, that reunion was one of the most profound experiences of my life.

We held each other for a long time.

Neither of us spoke.

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

Adera was 16.

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

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

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

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

I let him come to me in his own time.

And he did.

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

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

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

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

Sharon was 12.

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

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

This is real.

I am here.

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

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

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

8 years is a long time.

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

Technology had moved.

The social landscape had shifted.

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

I had to relearn ordinary things.

How to use the current phone interfaces.

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

How the practical infrastructure of daily life had changed.

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

What was not strange was the community.

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

The network had changed.

People had moved.

Some had left Iran.

New people had joined.

The structure had shifted in response to years of pressure.

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

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

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

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

This fact alone told me something significant.

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

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

And the community had not shrunk.

It had grown.

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

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

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

I had proved that in my own life.

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

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

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

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

It is also the impossibility of registering as a Christian in official government documents if you were born Muslim which means that legally in the eyes of the state you do not exist as a Christian.

Oh, it is the inability to access certain jobs or opportunities if your faith is known.

It is the social pressure from family and community, the potential for family members to report you, the reality that in certain contexts, your faith being discovered can result in divorce, disinheritance, loss of child custody.

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

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

I say this not to produce despair but to calibrate the scale of what Iranian believers are living with.

And then to say they are living with it and not only surviving it, thriving in it in the way that genuine faith thrives under genuine pressure which is different from the way it grows in safety and comfort.

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

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

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

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

Miam and the children came out separately from me.

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

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

And that is a strong statement that I make deliberately.

Inside Evan, the suffering was mine.

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

In those days of not knowing where Miriam was, where Dara and Sharon were, whether they were safe, the helplessness was total, and I had no cell to sit in and no ability to even direct the prayer at a problem I could clearly see.

All I could do was trust.

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

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

They arrived safely.

We were reunited outside Iran and the relief of that reunion was again one of those experiences that I do not have adequate words for.

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

On the country we eventually arrived in in Western Europe.

I will not name specifically.

We are here.

We are safe.

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

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

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

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

We are together.

We are free.

And that is not a small thing.

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

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

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

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

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

It is for the wider body.

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

And I was carrying something that people needed to hear.

And then came March 1st, 2026.

I was at home in the morning.

We had woken early.

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

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

My phone was on the table.

It began to register messages.

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

People have asked me since what I felt first.

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

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

My first response was grief.

Genuine uncomplicated grief for the loss of a human life.

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

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

I had prayed for Kamina.

I had asked God to reach him.

I had meant those prayers.

And now he was dead.

And I did not know, I cannot know what his end looked like in the eyes of God.

That unknown itself was something to grieve.

I wept.

I am not ashamed to say that.

I wept for a man who had been the human face of a system that had taken 8 years of my life and had marked my children and my wife in ways that will not fully heal in this lifetime.

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

because I had learned in a prison cell that love is not conditional on the other person deserving it and that prayer for your enemies is not a performance but a genuine reaching toward God on their behalf.

And the man I had genuinely prayed for was gone.

After the initial stillness, I went to marry him.

I told her I needed to find something.

She knew what I meant.

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

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

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

I read them to her.

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

She listened without interrupting.

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

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

For a moment when the Iranian people and the Iranian church would need a voice to say, “This is not random.

This is not only geopolitics.

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

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

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

It was time to speak.

I want to speak directly now.

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

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

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

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

Not primarily in political terms.

There are better qualified people for that analysis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a movement.

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

It exists among university students and among working-class families and among professionals and among the rural poor.

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

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

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

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

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

I think about a woman I will call Fariba.

She came to faith in her late 30s after a marriage that had broken her in multiple ways and a period of depression during which she had been genuinely unable to find any reason to continue.

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

She did not make a quick emotional decision.

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

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

She lost her extended family support in the process.

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

She continued, “I’m the last I heard of her.

She was quietly, carefully sharing her faith with others in her neighborhood and had seen three people come to Christ through her.

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

One man whose marriage was being restored.

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

” Faribba introduced him to.

This is the Iranian underground church.

Person by person, life by life, he had extraordinary personal cost.

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

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

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

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

And then someone showed him something different, not a western Christianity imported whole from another context.

but the Jesus of the Gospels speaking in Persian on addressing questions that were specific to his experience as a young Iranian man and something happened in him that he had not expected and could not dismiss.

He is still inside Iran as far as I know.

He is still meeting quietly with a small group.

He is still praying for his country.

I think about brother Cameron who I have already mentioned.

He served his full sentence and was released.

He is no longer in Iran.

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

And that is enough.

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

They have been praying for Iran for a long time.

Not just for their own safety and survival, though those prayers are real and appropriate.

They have been praying for the transformation of the nation.

And for the people of Iran as a whole, including the officials, including the guards, including the judges who have sentenced them to encounter the God who transforms.

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

I believe that day is beginning.

I believe that with everything in me.

Now, I want to speak to my fellow Iranians.

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

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

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

I am speaking to you.

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

Iran is a great people.

I mean this not as nationalism but as genuine conviction.

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

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

These are not minor contributions to the human story.

They are central to it.

But the capacity for spiritual depth that is woven into the Iranian cultural DNA.

The mystical hunger that runs through Persian poetry from roomie to hes.

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

This is not incidental.

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

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

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

They know it better than the world does.

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

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

And that gap has become intolerable.

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

I know the history.

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

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

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

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

Not the Jesus of the Crusades.

Not the Jesus of colonial mission.

Not the Jesus of American evangelical politics.

The Jesus of the Gospels.

The Jesus who was born in an occupied territory under the control of an empire that his own religious establishment was compromised by.

on the Jesus who spent his time with the people at the margins, the poor, the sick, the disreputable, the ones the religious authorities had written off.

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

Love.

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

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

That Jesus is not a foreigner to the Iranian experience.

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

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

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

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

This is his blood given for us.

He is available to every Iranian person who is searching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The God who brought my family out of Iran.

He is not the God of the system.

He is not the God of the regime.

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

If you have been hurt by religion, specifically by the religion used by the Islamic Republic to justify the things it has done to the Iranian people, I want to say your anger is not irrational.

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

It is legitimate to be wounded by it.

But the wound is not the whole story.

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

He is on the other side of that equation.

He always has been.

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

My brothers and my sisters who are meeting right now in someone’s apartment in Tehran or Isvahan or a city I have never visited sitting quietly together reading the word in low voices he praying prayers that cost them the kind of security that most Christians elsewhere take entirely for granted.

I see you.

I know what your life is.

I have lived it.

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

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

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

I know all of it.

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

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

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

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

They have been heard.

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

But I believe with everything in me that the moment we are now in is a hinge point, a turn.

A chapter beginning that is different from the chapter that has just closed.

I am not telling you to be reckless.

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

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

However much that man embodied the system, there will be a struggle for what comes next.

There will be danger in that struggle.

Please be wise.

Protect each other.

Protect the vulnerable people in your communities.

Do not take unnecessary risks in the name of optimism.

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

There is a difference between wisdom and paralysis.

Walk in wisdom, but walk.

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

Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Iranian church has things to teach.

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

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

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

Continued advocacy for those still imprisoned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are lived experience.

They are in my bones.

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

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

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

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

Not because suffering is spiritually superior to ordinary life.

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

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

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

He is real.

He is faithful.

He held me.

He will hold you.

I want to address the dream one final time.

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

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

I have been careful throughout the years.

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

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

And now Kamina is dead.

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

What I will say is this.

The dream was real.

The impression it left was real.

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

That God was going to break something open.

That there would be an opportunity on the other side.

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

And I believe it is relevant to this moment.

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

This is not a moment for triumphalism.

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

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

I will not wave a flag over that.

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

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

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

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

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

They are in a moment of enormous uncertainty and fragility.

The structures that controlled their daily life are shaking.

What comes next is not determined.

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

And what the church does in this window matters.

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

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

I have forgiven the men who arrested me.

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

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

I have forgiven the system that stole 8 years from me and cost my children a father’s presence through crucial years of their development.

I have forgiven Kam.

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

It did not happen quickly.

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

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

I do not believe that anger was wrong.

Anger at injustice is appropriate.

It corresponds to the reality of what injustice is.

The anger was not something I suppressed or denied.

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

Because that is what forgiveness is.

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

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

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

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

And I believe it is also one of the most strategically important things for the church in Iran as it faces the moment ahead.

Because a church that carries unforgiveness into a season of potential renewal will contaminate what it builds.

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

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

Not because the oppressors were not wrong.

They were.

But because freedom built on hatred is not freedom.

It is just a different form of bondage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are not forgotten.

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

that God has not looked away from you through 40 years of the Islamic Republic, through the executions and the imprisonments and the economic suffering and the social oppression.

through the protest movements and the crackdowns and the generations of young people who grew up in a country that told them their deepest longings were dangerous.

Through all of it and before all of it and after all of it, he has not looked away.

He sees Iran.

He has always seen Iran.

And I believe I believe it in the same place where I believed in the margins of a prison Quran in words only I could read in years when I did not know if I would ever be free.

I believe that the story of Iran and the story of the gospel are about to intersect in a way that will be talked about for generations.

Not because I am optimistic by personality.

Not because the political situation has produced comfortable conditions for it.

But because the God who sustained the underground church through 40 years of suppression is not a God who does things halfway.

He sustains through the dark so that he can release into the light.

And the Iranian church has been sustained.

It is alive.

It is ready.

And the light is beginning to come.

Iran, it is your time.

Not the time of any political faction.

Not the time of any foreign power with interests in your geography.

Not the time of the regime that is ending or the replacement that is forming.

This is the time of the God who has been waiting at the door of this ancient, beautiful, suffering, searching people and who is now, I believe, about to make himself known in Iran in a way that the world will not be able to ignore.

Pray for Iran.

Pray specifically and persistently.

Pray for the believers who are still inside that they will have wisdom and courage and supernatural protection in this transitional period.

Pray for the Iranian people who are watching the collapse of the only governmental framework they have known that they will find not just political freedom but the deeper freedom that only God can give.

Pray for the leaders who will emerge in Iran in the months ahead.

that among them will be people of genuine conscience and genuine faith who will help their country find a different path.

And and if you are Iranian in Iran or anywhere in the world and you are searching and you want to know the Jesus that I have been talking about.

He is not hard to find.

He is not behind the locked doors of an institution or a program or a denominational system.

He is available to you right now wherever you are in whatever language you carry your innermost self in.

You can speak to him directly.

You can ask him to make himself real to you the way I asked in a prison cell with nothing left.

More the way Miam asked in a kitchen in Thran before she fully understood what she was asking.

The way tens of thousands of Iranians have asked in secret over these 40 years and have received an answer.

The door is open.

It has always been open.

And I believe that in this moment in Iran’s history, it is open wider than it has been in a very long time.

My name is Elias Hoseni.

I am an Iranian man.

I am a husband and a father.

I am a pastor.

I I was imprisoned for 8 years in Eban prison for the faith I am still standing here declaring.

I am free.

My family is free.

And the God who freed me is the same God who is moving across Iran right now in ways that are visible and in ways that are not yet visible.

Hold on, Iran.

Your time is here.

The light is coming.