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

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

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

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

Some guards abandoned posts.

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

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

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

I almost did not answer it.

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

My real name, not Dares.

And I knew immediately who it was.

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

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

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

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

He said my name and I could not speak.

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

I will not reproduce the conversation that followed.

It was private and it was sacred.

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

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

He said he knew.

He had not known in any rational sense.

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

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

I thought about what prayer actually is.

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

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

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

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

I felt it.

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

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

Not hostile calls, not threatening calls, questions.

I need you to understand what this means in context.

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

We did not approach Muslims.

We did not evangelize openly.

We did not make ourselves known.

The risk of doing so was too great.

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

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

The separation was enforced not by preference but by survival.

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

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

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

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

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

That last call lasted 4 hours.

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

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

I do not mean he converted in that phone call.

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

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

I do not know where his journey will end.

I know where it is going.

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

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

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

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

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

There was always something else.

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

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

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

They were spiritual doors.

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

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

It says, “I am doing a new thing.

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

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

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

I am 51 years old.

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

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

I have prayed into silence for decades.

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

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

And I am standing.

I cannot say standing literally.

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

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

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

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

The war is still happening.

People are still dying.

The future is not settled.

I do not pretend otherwise.

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

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

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

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

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

It is not comfortable.

It is not clean.

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

People are dying.

Cities are damaged.

Families are separated.

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

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

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

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

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

What the gospel asks of me is honesty.

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

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

That is the truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the hunger has become too large to manage alone.

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

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

14 in a week.

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

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

Not in Iran.

not under these conditions.

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

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

I am not giving you statistics I can footnote.

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

Something unprecedented is happening.

But I do not want to only talk about numbers.

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

I want to talk about why this is happening.

not the simple answer.

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

The regime has not fully fallen.

The war is still going.

The situation is uncertain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That God is now exposed as what he always was.

Not God, but a tool.

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

Iranians are not, as a people, spiritually shallow.

This is an ancient civilization.

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

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

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

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

The hunger is too old and too deep.

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

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

The underground church stayed.

When the arrests came, the church stayed.

When the raids came, the church stayed.

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

Year after year, the church stayed in Iran.

We did not all leave.

Some left, many left.

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

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

But many stayed.

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

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

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

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

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

You were there through the hard years.

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

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

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

That is what we have.

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

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

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

I am not asking for your triumphalism.

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

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

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

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

They need care.

They need disciplehip.

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

And the cost of doing it is still very real.

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

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

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

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

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

That need is urgent and real.

Pray.

I ask this first because I believe it.

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

For the leaders who are trying to disciple them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith that is compelled is not faith.

It is performance at gunpoint.

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

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

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

I believe Christianity will grow in Iran.

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

But I am a pastor, not a conqueror.

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

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

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

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

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