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

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

Torture has been documented extensively by human rights organizations.

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

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

People came out of Evan changed.

Some came out of Evan not at all.

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

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

Pastor Hussein Sudman was executed in 1990.

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

He had pastored a church in Mashad in northeastern Iran.

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

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

Hussein Sudman refused to recant.

He was 55 years old when they killed him.

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

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

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

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

International pressure eventually secured his release in 1994.

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

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

The killings were never officially solved.

Everyone in the Iranian Christian community understood who was responsible.

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

We were not naive about what we had stepped into.

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

We chose to be in that circle anyway.

That is what I want people to understand.

The choice was made with open eyes.

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

I was not yet a pastor.

That would come later.

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

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

I do not say this with pride.

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

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

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

The green movement.

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

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

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

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

Something that would not fully heal.

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

12 of us were present.

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

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

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

The meeting had been going for about an hour.

We were in the middle of prayer.

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

Someone was praying out loud.

I no longer remember who.

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

Then the door came in.

It did not knock.

It did not ring.

The door came in.

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

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

They were followed by two more men.

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

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

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

We were transported separately.

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

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

I was placed in a small room.

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

The man who conducted most of my interrogations was calm.

I remembered the calmness more than anything else about him.

He was not cruel in an obvious way.

He did not shout.

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

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

He wanted names.

He wanted locations.

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

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

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

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

A printed document.

I was told to read it and then sign it.

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

I read it carefully.

I pushed it back across the table.

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

He told me that my family would be approached.

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

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

And then he left me alone in the room.

I want to be honest.

I was frightened.

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

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

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

I was frightened.

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

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

I did not sign the document.

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

What I wrote was simply this.

Jesus Christ is Lord.

I did not say it defiantly.

I did not announce it.

I wrote it quietly.

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

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

What followed was not pleasant.

I will not recount the specifics.

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

After 11 days, I was released.

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

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

Three members of my church were not released.

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

He was 24 years old.

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

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

I went back to my apartment after my release.

My wife was there with the children.

My daughter was 6 years old.

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

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

Relief and grief simultaneously.

Gratitude for the room.

Guilt for Fad.

Gratitude for my daughter’s arms.

fear about what I had exposed my family to.

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

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

I asked him the obvious questions.

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

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

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

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

I thought they had damaged something in me.

I was wrong.

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

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

that I do not think the regime ever fully understood.

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

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

They were not watching the living rooms.

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

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

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

Let me tell you what I mean.

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

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

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

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

The numbers they were coming up with were extraordinary.

A 100,000 perhaps more.

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

The direction was relentlessly stubbornly inexplicably upward.

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

Every single one of these pressures produced the same result.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the gospel has a way of finding hungry spaces.

I became a pastor in 2011.

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

There was no ordination ceremony in a church building.

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

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

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

That was it.

That was everything.

In the underground church, this is how it works.

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

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

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

What it carried practically speaking was this.

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

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

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

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

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

I am not complaining about any of this.

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

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

The underground pastor in Iran goes to the congregation.

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

His phone is never fully trusted.

His movements are never fully private.

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

I discipled people during these years.

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

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

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

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

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

I spent a year with him.

I watched the locked room open.

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

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

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

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

It is the man I will call Mahmood.

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

He had enforced the rules of the Islamic Republic.

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

He was not a cruel man by disposition.

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

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

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

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

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

And then he had a dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A former cleric asking to meet the underground pastor.

This was exactly the profile an intelligence operative might use.

I prayed about it.

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