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.

I spoke to brother Ysef about it.

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

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

I found a man in genuine profound costly crisis.

He had lost his livelihood.

He had lost his standing in his community.

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

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

I baptized Mahmud in the early months of 2013.

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

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

That is the kind of God we are talking about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was something harder than angry.

It was like a door closing.

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

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

that silence was a particular kind of pain.

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

My mother called separately some weeks later.

She was weeping.

She was not angry the way my father was.

She was terrified.

She begged me to be careful.

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

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

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

Worth the family I was fracturing.

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

I told her yes.

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

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

She was still on the line.

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

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

This was not something I could protect them from.

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

And children are not sealed off from reality.

They absorb what is around them.

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

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

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

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

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

She did not cry.

She asked two practical questions.

Then she nodded and said she understood.

I held it together during the conversation.

Afterward, alone, I did not hold it together.

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

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

But she never told me she wished I was different.

Not once in all those years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three times taken in for interrogation.

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

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

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

The danger had affected her.

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

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

I baptized several of her converts.

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

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

Women ran house churches while their husbands were in prison.

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

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

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

And still the spirit was present.

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

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

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

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

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