Inside the Revolution

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  Recruited by a Pakistani

  Hamid is one of the most wanted Iranian Revivalists in the world.611

  Precisely because he is so effective in recruiting and training Iranian evangelists, disciple makers, pastors, and church planters, the Iranian secret police have hunted him for years. They nearly assassinated him in 1994, but by God’s grace he and his family narrowly escaped with their lives.

  While I have known of Hamid for nearly two decades, I finally met him for the first time several years ago in a secure, undisclosed location. I have no idea where he actually lives, but I have enjoyed the privilege of staying in touch with him, and I was deeply grateful when he allowed me to interview him for this project. His story deserves an entire book, not just a portion of a chapter. Nevertheless, allow me to share with you a few highlights and some of his observations of how the ground war is being waged inside Iran.

  “I was born in 1943 in Isfahan, Iran, and at the age of seventeen I became a follower of Jesus Christ,” Hamid recounted. “I am not from a Muslim background. I am from a nominal Christian background. But before I was born, my mother had a dream in which she was told, ‘You will have a boy, and this will be his name. He will serve the Lord.’

  “From the age of three, I loved God. My grandmother was a Catholic, and she taught me to pray before bed. As a teenager, I began to serve in the Orthodox Church. But at seventeen, I just had an inexplicable love for Jesus. I believe He chose me even before I was formed in the womb. He just decided I would be His follower, His servant. He is God. He doesn’t always explain. I just had a passion to serve the Lord. I went to the priest and said, ‘I want to preach!’ It was like what the apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:4: ‘He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him.’”

  “Did your friends love Jesus the way you did?” I asked. “Did they also want to preach the gospel in Iran?”

  Hamid laughed. “No, I had no other friends like this.”

  The Catholic and Orthodox churches in Iran did not even believe in preaching the gospel back in the 1960s and 1970s, he said. They were not trying to lead Muslims to Christ. To do so was illegal, anyway. So Hamid got little encouragement and no training.

  “The turning point,” he told me, “happened in 1974. I had already graduated from college. I was a mechanical engineer, and I was working for an oil company. But one day I met a Christian leader from Pakistan who was traveling through Iran looking for someone to start a nationwide ministry in that country.” Hamid said he had little interest in helping the Pakistani. After all, “the economy in Iran was thriving at the time,” OPEC was battling the West, the price of oil was soaring, and Hamid had a comfortable life.

  “Three months later, the Pakistani returned to Iran and invited me to attend a conference outside the country about evangelism and discipleship,” Hamid said. “I was curious, so I agreed to go. While I was there, a voice in my heart asked me, ‘What do you want to do with the rest of your life?’ I wasn’t sure. I liked working for the oil company. But the voice said to me, ‘Every day, thousands are going to hell.’

  “For three days and nights I struggled with God. Finally I knew what I had to do. I went back to Tehran and resigned from the oil company. The Pakistani arranged for me to receive nine months of ministry training. Then in 1975, I started a ministry to reach all of Iran with the gospel.”

  Launching a Ministry to Reach All of Iran

  “Did you think it was possible to reach every Iranian with the gospel?” I asked.

  Not really, Hamid conceded. He wanted to see God do something great in his country, but the task seemed overwhelming.

  Then I asked, “Did you see the Islamic Revolution coming?”

  “No,” he said. “Even three months before the Revolution, no ordinary citizen in Iran that I knew would have thought that this would happen, that the Ayatollah Khomeini could topple the shah and change Iran forever.”

  “How then did you and your wife launch a national ministry by yourselves?”

  “We concentrated on five things from the beginning,” he said. “First, we identified men and women from many churches who displayed a passion for the Lord, and we asked them if they would like us to disciple them.” If they said yes, Hamid and his wife would teach them the Bible. They would teach them what it meant to walk in the power of the Holy Spirit and not try to live the Christian life in their own limited strength and knowledge. They taught people to share their faith and to serve the Lord completely, in every area of their lives.

  “Second, we took our disciples to parks to practice witnessing [telling people about their faith in Christ]. Third, we recruited and trained four disciples to become full-time staff members with our ministry, because we knew we couldn’t do it on our own, and we didn’t want to do it alone. Fourth, we started a Bible school by correspondence.” This provided an opportunity for Iranian Christians all over the country to study the Bible on their own, using the lessons Hamid sent them, and to do so in the privacy and safety of their own homes. The students would then mail in their completed homework, and Hamid and his team would correspond with them, correct their homework, answer their questions, and help them grow in their faith as best they could.

  “Fifth, we held conferences and special meetings,” Hamid added. This provided Iranian believers the opportunity to gather together for more intensive Bible study, prayer, worship, and fellowship. Hamid believed it was very important for the Christ-followers in the country to have time together, to get to know one another, to know that they were not alone, to pray with and for one another, and to be encouraged to go back to their towns and villages to share their faith in Christ and help fellow believers grow in their faith.

  The Ground War in Iran

  Not many Muslims came to Christ in the early years of the ministry, Hamid admitted. The believers were growing bolder in their faith, and that was good. But there was very little interest among Iranian Shias.

  That all changed in 1979.

  “I thank God for the Ayatollah Khomeini,” Hamid said with a big smile, “because he did something that all the believers and all the missionaries in Iran put together for a hundred years could not do. He presented the true color of Islam. Iranians could suddenly see what Islam really is. And they began to turn against it because it’s not what they thought it would be.”

  Violence. Torture. Imprisonments. Executions. Rapes. Corruption. An eight-year war with fellow Muslims in Iraq.

  “You see, Joel, for Muslims, it’s not hard to love Jesus,” Hamid continued. “The hard part is leaving Muhammad. There is an Islam in people’s minds that does not exist in reality. The Islam of their minds is Utopia. Islam is complete, they think. So why should they leave and go to another faith? Plus, they think if you leave Islam bad things will happen to you. Muslims are very superstitious. They believe if you read the Bible you will go to hell. Some believe that if you leave Islam, your face will turn into a monkey face—all kinds of things like this. Before the Revolution, we would start sharing the gospel with Muslims by talking about God. ‘Do you believe He exists? What do you think about Him?’ That kind of thing. But after the Revolution, we could not start by talking about God because people were so angry. They would say, ‘If this is God, then I don’t want this God.’ So I realized that we have to start with Jesus. ‘Have you heard of Jesus? Have you read His teachings? What do you think of Him?’”

  People started responding. They wanted to read about Jesus in the New Testament. They wanted to see films about Jesus. They wanted to read Christian literature explaining how to follow Jesus.

  By 1980, there were a few thousands MBBs in Iran, Hamid said. Now he believes there are a few million. The challenge today is that there are not nearly enough pastors and other ministry leaders to help all these believers grow and mature in their faith. This is why Hamid and his team have focused so much time, attention, and resources on identifying believers who could become wise, loving, and cari
ng leaders. That’s why they are helping to train and develop such leaders. They see God bringing great “flocks of lost sheep” into His Kingdom, and the Lord has shown them that the desperate need in Iran is to train up more “shepherds” to care for these sheep and guide them in biblical truth.

  The Hit List

  It is not easy to be a shepherd in Iran, however. The price for serving Christ in full-time ministry is very high. Many ministry leaders have been arrested, tortured, and even executed or assassinated.

  In late 1979, for example, an Anglican priest was beheaded in the Iranian city of Shiraz. Around the same time, five bullets were fired at Iranian pastor Hassan Dehghany. Though he miraculously survived, his twenty-four-year-old son, Bahram, was soon found dead, martyred for his faith in Christ. In 1990, the Iranian government hanged a man named Hoseyn Soodmand for turning from Islam to Christianity. In 1994, three key Iranian Christian leaders were assassinated one after another—Bishop Haik Hovsepian, Mehdi Dibaj, and Tateos Michaelian. Then in 1996, another Christian, Mohammed Yousefi, met the same fate.

  During the killing spree in the 1990s, an Iranian secret police official fled the country and gave a media interview saying that more murders of Christian leaders were coming. A crumpled-up hit list was actually found with the body of Tateos Michaelian after his death. The list contained the names of those Christian leaders who had already been murdered and a list of names of pastors who had not yet been killed. Hamid’s name was on that list. As it turned out, he and his family were able to get out of the country, leaving all their worldly possessions behind, just hours before assassins came to his home to kill him.

  I asked Hamid why he thought the systematic killing of pastors had begun in the early 1990s.

  “Three reasons, I think,” he said. “First, the war with Iraq was over, and the concentration of the government was shifting to domestic problems and threats. Second, more people were coming to Christ than ever before. Many had become believers in the 1980s, certainly. But in the early 1990s, a real spiritual awakening began in Iran, a real acceleration in the numbers of Muslim converts, and the government was noticing this. And third, the leader levels were rising too high. The quality of the leaders we were recruiting and training was too high. They were older and more educated and very effective. It was no longer poor and uneducated people coming to Christ. Now the educated were coming to the Lord—doctors, engineers, philosophers, rich people. And they weren’t just converting from Islam, they were giving their money to the cause of Christ. They were giving their gold jewelry to the Church to help fund more ministry work. The government and the mullahs are scared of Christian leaders because they are very high quality and the Lord can use them to lead many people very effectively.”

  “Do you miss your life in Iran?” I asked Hamid.

  He sat back and sighed. “Yes,” he said. He misses his country, and he misses his friends. But he has no regrets. He said he believes God is using him far more now that he is living on the outside where he can study and teach and preach and travel freely without fear of arrest, or worse.

  “Just look what God is doing in Iran today,” he said. “How can I not be grateful to the Lord? I wouldn’t have believed in 1974 that we could see millions of believers in Iran, because people were so secular and so rich back then, compared to today. Women used to fly to Paris to get their hair done and fly back to attend a wedding. During the time of the shah, my team and I shared the gospel with more than five thousand people one summer, but only two people showed interest. Now, there are too many calls coming into our offices from people who have accepted Christ or want to know more about Jesus. We don’t have time to answer them all.”

  And that, Hamid says, is why he focuses on training leaders capable of responding to the spiritual revolution Jesus has unleashed in Iran. “Like Jesus said, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.’”612

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Ground War—Part Two

  More accounts of leaders on the front lines

  For the past several decades, the most effective and influential pastors and ministry leaders operating on the front lines of the Christian ground war in the Muslim world have been those who, like Hamid, were born into nominal Christian families. But as more Muslims have come to faith in Christ, grown in their faith, and begun to gain practical ministry experience, a rising number of Muslim Background Believers have emerged as effective spiritual leaders in the epicenter as well.

  Samir is one example. I met him on my first trip to Iraq in February 2008 and was immediately impressed with his love for Jesus Christ and his passion for ministry.613

  Born in 1968 in a southern Iraqi village, Samir, an Arab, was raised a devout Shia Muslim. While his forefathers were Shia imams (high-ranking Islamic clerics) and his parents were devout, Samir said, “Nobody pushed me to be very religious. I chose that. I was about eleven or twelve. I started going to the mosque and meditating on many things. There was something special between me and my God, I believed. I felt God was very near to me. I was so close to God that I used to try to do funny things to make God laugh. And I felt He did laugh, and I felt He was happy . . . and I was happy.”

  After he graduated from college, trained to be an electrician, Samir was arrested. “I was perceived by Saddam’s police as a Shia activist or a subversive,” he told me.

  “Were you a rebel?” I asked him.

  “Yes, I was,” he conceded. “I was against the government and against the Sunnis. But I was not violent.”

  Samir spent seven months in jail. When he was released, he was required to serve in the Iraqi Army, but he refused and was sent back to jail. A special court released him from army service—Saddam’s Sunni-dominated army had no interest in training Shias to use weapons—but Samir was fired from his job. With his growing reputation as a Shia activist, he found it difficult to find work.

  By the end of 1994, Samir decided that if he was going to be tagged as a Shia Radical anyway, he might as well become a Shia Radical. So he moved to the Iraqi city of Najaf and applied to study at the Hawza, the most elite Shia Muslim seminary in all of Iraq, second in prestige and influence only to the main seminary in Qom, Iran. Once accepted, Samir plunged himself into his studies and received high marks from his professors.

  In time, Samir not only completed his studies but was greatly honored by being invited to become a professor at the seminary to teach Shia doctrine to the fresh, eager students. Samir eagerly agreed.

  Visions and Trances

  “There are two areas of teaching at the Hawza,” Samir told me. “The first concerns knowledge—that is, teaching students Islamic theology and Sharia law. The second concerns one’s spiritual life—that is, helping students develop their relationship with God. I was fascinated with both, but especially with getting closer to God and helping others do the same.

  “Shia Islam is very mystical, and we taught the students that there are higher and higher levels of spiritual growth that they need to attain and lead other people to. One of these levels is discovering God’s love for you and building your love for God until you become consumed by God. The challenge is that Shia doctrine teaches that God’s love is not available for everyone, only for those who go through this very specific spiritual journey that we were teaching at the Hawza.

  “We taught our Shia seminary students to do various spiritual exercises. In these exercises you are supposed to meditate until you are in, essentially, a trance. In that trance, you will begin to see visions or revelations of ancient imams and the various prophets and other historical figures. But Shias consider actually seeing such visions a very low level of revelation, because seeing these ancient figures could hinder a person from going higher and seeing God Himself. But these visions and revelations are indications that you are going in the right direction.

  “Now, please understand, Joel, that I was teaching this all to my students. I
was one of only four professors at the seminary teaching this form of meditation. But one day something unexpected happened.”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “One day I was meditating, and it was almost as if I was flying in an airplane,” Samir explained. “I was climbing up from the ground, higher and higher, and then I started passing through the clouds, and I was climbing higher and higher and then suddenly it was as though I was slipping away from the atmosphere and entering another reality, and then I saw Jesus. He was smiling at me. He looked just like the one I had seen in the JESUS film that I had once seen on television, but with a darker face, an Eastern face. In the first vision, I had no communication with Jesus, but I felt very peaceful. Then, over the course of the next few days, He appeared a second, third, fourth, and fifth time. He began to speak to me. He gave me answers to the many questions I had.”

  The Qur’an, Samir noted, teaches Muslims that Jesus is to be highly revered. It says Jesus was born of a virgin, was a wise teacher, and did miracles. But it does not give many more details than this. Yet Samir had become intensely hungry to understand this Jesus who kept appearing to him. He could not tell the two hundred Shia students he was teaching about the visions he was having. But as a scholar, he knew he had to do more research. So one day he told one of his students to go to Baghdad and find a complete Arabic copy of the Bible for him, though he did not say why. The student complied, and Samir, in the privacy of his own room, began reading the Bible voraciously. The more he read, the more intrigued with Jesus he became. So he would pray more, hoping to see Jesus again, and he did. For a certain period in the mid-1990s, Samir said, Jesus was appearing to him every day.