Iranian Believers Set FreeChainsFreedom In

in the midst of prison and persecution by discovering that Jesus is worth it all.

FEBRUARY 2015WWW.PERSECUTION.ORG

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Overview

T he IslamIc RepublIc of IRan is one of the most difficult places to be a Christian. The regime has imprisoned 50 to 100 Christian leaders who are facing prison terms of six to eight

years, torture, and even the threat of the death penalty for their faith in Jesus.

The government views conversion to Christianity as treasonous and a threat to its national security. Several of its leaders have made public statements concerning the large numbers of house churches and Muslims con-verting to Christianity.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard regularly harasses and tracks down Christians, doing all they can to strike fear into the hearts of those who would so much as think of following Jesus. They will often confiscate the homes of Christians. As a result of these constant threats and imminent arrest, hundreds of Christians are forced to leave the country every year due to persecution.

The Rest of the StoryThe story behind the story is that God is

doing something incredible in Iran.

“Something is happening here, like nowhere else in the Middle East,” a church leader recently told ICC. People are coming to faith in Jesus by the thousands. It’s this fact that is actually causing the persecution.

The Iranian regime is trying to keep Islam’s grip on society, but the masses have found life in Iran empty and meaningless. Heroin use and prostitution are at epidemic levels and the people are desperately searching for something real that would give pur-pose to life.

“The situation for Christian converts is real-ly troubling,” said Faraz Sanei, an Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch. “But any group that is grow-ing and popular among young people is under the microscope. They’ve used very repressive activities to crackdown on [Christians].”

The Church is experiencing massive growth in Iran, especially among the youth. The gov-ernment is doing everything in its power to strangle it, but nothing they have tried has worked. In fact, their efforts have probably only led to a swifter rise in the numbers of Muslims converting to Christianity.

Driven UndergroundDespite a constitution that provides free-

dom of belief, association, and public assem-bly, the persecution from the government has driven the church underground. In Iran, it is essentially illegal to be a Christian.

The only churches allowed to meet openly are those of ethnic Christian groups such as the Armenians and Assyrians, yet even they are prevented from performing almost any service in Persian, the language spoken by most Iranians. All of the Persian speaking churches have been shut down by the govern-ment, and the intelligence ministry closely monitors the churches to ensure no Persian speakers attend services.

The government is spying on the house churches to prevent them from meeting, and sending agents in to infiltrate the Christian networks. As you will read in the stories in this magazine, the intelligence agencies go to great lengths to discover those who are shar-ing Christ with others.

In the coordinated raid that arrested Arezoo (page 24), 20 agents stormed her house, and just as many raided six other houses across the city. More than 100 agents were believed to be involved in arresting just seven Christians who had dared to meet with others who shared their faith. But despite the risks, people continue to turn to Christ because they have found a peace they never had before. They hear about a name that is able to bring freedom and healing, and

that is something that they could never find in Islam. They know they are playing with fire, that there are risks, but they keep sharing the message because they believe the cost is worth it.

The regime is trying to strangle the voice of those who have found life, but the newly reborn shout from the rooftops about how they found God. The best the government can hope for is to lock up some of the leaders and drive others to leave the country.

A Church in ExileVahid and his family left Iran to go serve

in a church in the country of Georgia, but that was not far enough. Iranian agents hunted them down there and threatened the family.

“Tell your father to be silent and to say no more about Christianity. If they keep preach-ing, when they return to Iran, we will kill them,” they told Vahid’s 15-year-old son.

For Fahim and his wife Derya, the gov-ernment closed their business, blacklisted Fahim from ever owning another, and went door-to-door telling their neighbors they were apostates and enemies of God.

Fahim and Derya made the heart-breaking decision to leave Iran — never to return. Now they, like so many others, are in a place of waiting. They’ve escaped to surrounding countries and applied for refugee status and must now wait for the UN to approve their application and resettle them.

As they wait, the church continues to grow. Out of Iran, they are able to worship freely. While they struggle with having lost every-thing, they see that their relationship with God has only grown deeper.

As Naghmeh Abedini (page 18) shared, “Jesus is worth it” and there is an incredible lesson to be learned from the persecuted.

There is a cost for following Jesus, but the cost is never too high.

He’s worth it!

An alarming rise in the number of house churches and Muslim conversions to Christianity has enraged the Iranian regime and launched a new wave of persecution against the Church in Iran.

‘If they keep preaching, when they return to Iran, we will kill them.’ – Iranian agents threaten the15-year-old son of a Christian pastor who had left Iran to serve a church in another country

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A Journey Toward Freedom

Twenty intelligence officers burst into Arezoo’s* home in the

early morning of May 8, 2013.

“You are guilty of Christian evangelism — a crime threatening the national security of the Islamic Republic of Iran!” They pointed at a candle with a Scripture verse on it and at a picture of Jesus, “This is a crime! And this is a crime!”

The officers took Arezoo to the police station and ensured her they would charge her with the highest possible penalty for her crimes. Little did Arezoo know, that morn-ing there were raids at seven homes across Mahabad, a largely Kurdish city in western Iran. Two men and four other women had also been arrested the same day. They were part of the house church Arezoo and her fam-ily had been attending. She was caught up in a massive operation to stamp out the church in their city.

A Month of Interrogation Arezoo was held in prison for a month and

interrogated for as many as 12 hours in a day.

“How did you become a Christian? Why did you leave Islam?” the guards would ask her. “What are the names of other Christians? Who is supporting you? Where are you get-ting your materials?”

The interrogations were full of mental games. The guards would claim her friend had already told them everything, and they were only holding her because they wanted to torture her.

They also called her 22-year-old son, Armen, into the prison for interrogation 15 times during the month Arezoo was held, each time placing him in a room next to his mother so she could hear what was happening.

“It was so difficult,” Arezoo said. “I started to tell them about Jesus Christ, [but] they kept beating me and saying, ‘We will prove your faith is wrong!’”

A month later, Arezoo was released to await trial for her crime, her faith unshaken.

Conversion from Islam We asked Arezoo many of the same ques-

tions the guards did, “How did you become a Christian? Why did you leave Islam?”

Arezoo said her journey started 13 years earlier when she began to watch a Christian satellite channel because she felt an emptiness in her life that her religion did not satisfy. She found meaning and truth in the program’s teachings and began watching regularly. One day, she decided to pray as the preacher invit-ed people to give their lives to Jesus.

She started to share her new-found faith with her husband, the son of an Islamic leader, but he would not come to faith until four years later.

Armen, then only 15 years old, was a more devout Muslim than anyone else in his family, and followed the extreme teachings he learned at school. When Arezoo started to show her son some of the Christian programs on televi-

sion, he told her, “I can kill you because you are an apostate.”

Despite his radical stance, Armen secretly started to watch the programs himself after a few months, all the while keeping up the façade of being a hardline, extremist Muslim.

“I was too proud to admit it was affect-ing me,” Armen said, noting that his attitude changed one day when the pastor of a house church invited him over for a visit. “He told me I needed to repent. I prayed with him and confessed my sins. I admitted God is who He says He is, and my life was really changed.”

Armen became active in a house church that grew to more than 20 members before splitting into smaller cell groups and eventu-ally being shut down by authorities.

Testimonies of FreedomIranians share testimonies of finding Christ, facing persecution and turning the world upside down. *names have been changed for security

“Arezoo”

‘I prayed with him and confessed my sins. I admitted God is who He says He is, and my life was really changed.’ – Armen, Arezoo’s son, describes the day hegave his life to Christ.

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A Courageous JourneyArezoo waited eight months after her release

from prison before the prosecution convicted her of crimes against national security. She was released on a bond of 500,000,000 rials (about $18,000 USD) for nearly four months before the courts finally sentenced her to four years in prison.

The family made a plan to leave everything and flee to safety. Armen, who took the lead in the journey, recalled selling their car, tak-ing all the money out of the bank, destroying their cell phones and finally leaving to meet a person who would smuggle them out of Iran.

At nightfall, the family was driven into the mountains, stopping occasionally to switch vehicles. The smugglers were careful to avoid the checkpoints of Sepah, the intelligence police, helped by the fact that some of the drivers were Sepah agents who profit from smuggling people out of the country.

At each exchange, the group seemed to grow. After the last car ride, Arezoo’s family joined a group of nearly 80 others, includ-ing many Afghans and Baha’i, all making an escape from Iran. The group travelled the next eight hours on foot before finally cross-ing the border. A Kurdish man met them on the Turkey side of the border and led them down to a farm outside the village. After a few

hours, three minibuses arrived to transport them to a larger city where they could offi-cially register with the United Nations (UN).

The UN sent the family to a small town in western Turkey where they found a church community of other refugees that has taken them in while they wait to learn the next step.

Is This a Crime? Fahim and Derya are a

smiling and friendly couplewith a rambunctious little

boy. After ten years of run-ning a real estate company in

Tehran, Fahim has been blacklisted by the government and banned from ever owning another business. Their neighbors turned on them, and even the church said it was best for them to go.

But how did they come to such a place?

A Life Without Peace“I was strongly religious, but I had no per-

sonal relationship with God,” Fahim said. “I was running a business, but still was missing something. I would ask questions of God, but never received an answer.”

Derya was also very religious.

“I was content with Islam; I thought I was complete,” she told us. “But I had some Armenian Christian friends that seemed to have a peace that I didn’t have.”

When one of the employees who worked for Fahim became a Christian, he started to share the Gospel with Fahim, telling him that he talks to God and God talks to him. Fahim would come home at night and tell Derya about what his employee had said, but they tried to dismiss it. Eventually, however, Derya decided that since she believed Jesus was a prophet, it couldn’t hurt to investigate him further. She found a Bible from one of her Armenian friends and started to read.

“I was shocked! It was really different. I realized Islam lied to me about who Jesus is. He is more than a man,” Derya said. “Jesus said, ‘I am God. I am the only way, the true way. After me many lying prophets will come.’”

After just 20 days of reading the Bible, Derya realized it was true and that she needed to believe its message and share it with Fahim, who had become addicted to drugs, because she realized it was the power he need-ed to turn from addiction. Fahim believed, was baptized and saw God transform his life.

Playing With Fire Within two months of their becoming

Christians and beginning to share their faith, Derya’s sister, nephew and nieces all became Christians. So many came to faith, in fact, that the couple started a house church and reached out to Christian leaders in Tehran for training.

“We took everything we learned and imme-diately taught it to our family and friends who had become believers,” Fahim said.

Not everyone was happy with their new faith, however. When they shared it openly at a family gathering, Fahim’s sister became very angry. Derya’s brother warned her that she was “playing with fire.”

The real estate office became a very active evangelistic place. Three of Fahim’s employ-ees were believers who would share with clients whenever they could. Then one day, without any prior warning, the authorities came and shut down the office and arrested the three employees. Fahim was summoned to the police station to meet with the authorities.

“I was so nervous and worried,” he told us. “In the interview, I told them, ‘We love God; is this a crime in Iran? We are just Christians, and we love God.’ They answered, ‘You tell others about Jesus, this is a crime in Iran.’”

The government closed Fahim’s business and revoked his real estate license. The execu-

“Fahim”

‘I was content with Islam; I thought I was complete. But I had some Armenian Christian friends that seemed to have a peace that I didn’t have.’ – Fahim’s wife, Derya, explains her journey to finding peace in Christ

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Feature Article

tive director of the intelligence police issued a letter stating that Fahim was guilty of “publi-cizing Christianity, distribution of the Bible, and Christian literature.” He was barred from ever running a business in Iran again.

You Should Leave IranFahim and Derya were torn. They were

seeing God work in amazing ways, but were uncertain of what to do next. Fahim remem-bered that the morning the office was raided, he was actually praying, “God, the economy is really bad right now. Help me get out of running this business.”

The raid by the police was not the answer for which he had hoped.

Not long after their business was closed, the police helped Fahim and Derya make the decision to leave Iran by turning their neigh-bors against them, telling them that Fahim and Derya were “apostates, enemies of God.”

“It seemed almost overnight people changed,” Derya said. “They stopped speak-ing to us, ignored us …”

Even the church pulled away, afraid it was too dangerous for them to associate any longer. Friends stopped calling or visiting, and despite Derya’s plea that she wanted to continue to go to the church and “worship Jesus,” their pastor told them they would “put the church in danger” by attending.

The most difficult one for the couple to be forced to leave was Derya’s mother, who was on her death bed. Fahim was able to visit Derya’s mother one last time in the week before they left, and he took the opportunity to share the Gospel with her again.

This time, she nodded, and made a sign of the cross — the only thing she still had the strength to do.

Derya was in tears as she told the story, “I’d prayed for her every morning. My mother was so close to Fahim that she wanted him to be the one who would wash her body after she died. We had to leave before she passed away, so we were so sad when we received the phone call that she had died.”

“I wondered why Fahim wasn’t there,” Derya said, “We realized, though, that it was Fahim who got to see her washed in the blood of Jesus.”

Saved and SentAs we sat in the living

room with Vahid,* his wife, and their three sons, the story

that would unfold was incred-ible. For this Iranian family, the

story of their life had taken them from the brink of suicide to being sent as church plant-ers to another country where the Iranian intel-ligence continued to hunt them, and finally led them to a Turkish border town with just $160 USD, some of their belongings, and almost no contacts. Ten months later, they had found odd jobs earning about $450 per month, working 12 hour days, and were anxiously awaiting a decision from the United Nations to learn where the next chapter in their story may lead.

“That’s the Name!” Vahid and Mojgan were a typical Muslim

family living in a suburb outside Tehran, but something strange started happening about two months after the birth of their second son, Atash. Mojgan began to have visions, dreams that were often of Satan or demons threatening to kill her or her son.

At first they were just dreams, but eventu-ally Atash became ill and Mojgan would wake up many nights drenched in sweat from the terror of the dreams. Though she sought the help of doctors and mullahs (Islamic teach-

ers), none could offer any help, and the dreams began to occur as visions during the day.

“I woke up one morning. I fell to my knees and saw a bright light come through the win-dow,” Mojgan said. “I could not see anything. I could not speak. I heard a voice that said to me, ‘Do you know who I am? I am who I am.’ After that I woke up crying.”

Mojgan knew nothing of the Bible, had never read the Scriptures, and had no idea what this meant. She told no one save her father-in-law, who replied, “God loves you very much, but keep this in your heart. Tell no one.”

For more than five years, Mojgan hid the dream in her heart, until one day she had another dream of an old man who came to visit. At first, Mojgan turned him away because of his appearance. Then he said to her, “Your problems can be fixed just with my name. There is no need to go to the mullahs.”

“I heard a voice that said to me, ‘Do you know who I am? I am who I am.’” – Mojgan describes a vision that led her on ajourney to find Christ

“Vahid”

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Mojgan began to wonder what name the man meant and searched everywhere for answers, even occasionally turning on the Christian satellite broadcasts her family had started to receive while everyone else was away from home. One day, she heard the pas-tor on one of the programs say, “My daughter, you are worried. The name of Jesus can heal you!”

Mojgan rushed to the television to hear the name again. It was the name of Jesus, and she instantly knew that He was the one who was able to bring freedom and healing. She placed her faith in him.

While for Mojgan her personal faith was settled, life did not seem to improve for the family. Vahid was facing his own battles and losing. He’d started to use drugs and had reached the point of suicide.

“I thought I was the problem for my family. I thought I would rescue them by committing suicide,” Vahid said. “I decided that night at 5:00 p.m., I was going to do it.”

He still remembers the date. It was November 14, 2003. Realizing that suicide was a sin, Vahid cried out to God to help him. To his surprise, the Father answered and directed him to turn on the television.

“I said, ‘Who are you?’ and he said, ‘I am who I am,’” Vahid recalled. “I went and picked up the remote and started flipping through the channels. When I came to the Christian channel, the remote stopped working. After a minute, I heard the man say, ‘Vahid, I want to speak to you. Only the name of Jesus can save you from suicide.’ I was amazed.”

Mojgan, who was in the next room, came running when she heard the name, shouting, “That’s the name!”

That night, Mojgan and Vahid bowed their knees and gave their lives to Christ. Over the next two years, over 20 friends and family had come to Christ and joined a house church in their home. About seven months later, after being joined by a pastor who knew many other believers in the city, the church grew to more than 100 people, and made the decision to split into three smaller churches.

The church shared their faith boldly, but they always had to be careful of watchful government eyes.

Vahid and Mojgan lived for almost eight years as Christians under the eyes of the gov-ernment. They started a bakery that they used as cover for the church to have a place to meet. They were heavily involved in the church, but God had another plan for Vahid and Mojgan.

“This is the time!” “In 2008, we felt God telling us, ‘Prepare

for migration, this is the time!’ We didn’t know exactly what it meant at the time, but in 2011 we saw God leading us to go to Georgia to plant a church there,” Vahid said. “When we arrived in Tbilisi, we walked around and saw Orthodox and Catholic churches and dreamed of starting a Persian church. Georgia has a large influx of Iranians who have relocated to the country, at the pace of 100,000 a year.”

“We started with 10 people. After one month, the house couldn’t hold the congrega-tion,” Vahid said. “The church needed a new place to meet. We found a building to remodel and spent weeks repairing it, placing a cross on it, and a sign of the Iranian Church in Georgia.”

After two or three months, even their new building was packed. Many Iranians in Georgia were exposed to the Gospel for the first time. The church, which was featured in international news broadcasts, had set up a booth in downtown Tbilisi and was passing out New Testaments and Gospel literature to hundreds of people every day.

The livid Iranian government asked the Georgian officials to pressure Vahid into clos-ing the booth. When that failed, Iranian intel-ligence police came to their home and told the couple’s 15-year-old son to tell his father to “be silent and say no more about Christianity” and threatened to kill them when they returned to Iran if they continued to preach. From that point on, the family received phone calls mak-ing death threats against Vahid and his family.

While the ministry was going well, they struggled to make it financially. After some time of struggling to keep food on the table, a $400 gift came in, and one of the church lead-ers told Vahid, “It’s time. Your ministry here is done. It’s time to go to Turkey.”

Spending more than half of their money on bus tickets, the couple moved and swiftly found a new church family of other Iranians who have all faced their own stories of perse-cution and salvation.

Not all believers escape prison in Iran. Please pray for these prisoners below.

Farshid Fathi, arrested in 2010 and sen-tenced to six years in prison, was beaten so severely by guards in April of 2014 that he was transferred to a hospital. In August, he was moved to the “dangerous prisoners” section of Rajai Shahr prison.

Benham Irani, arrested in 2010 and sen-tenced to six years in prison for leading a house church, recently required surgery for internal bleeding and stomach ulcers.

Maryam Naqqash Zargaran (known as Nasim), arrested in 2012 and sentenced to four years in prison, has a history of heart problems and has been hospitalized due to physical and mental abuse by guards.

Saeed Abedini, arrested in 2012 and sentenced to eight years in prison, has suffered internal injuries from abuse and been denied medical treatment.

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