“Let me give you another example,” the same Iranian Christian told me. “There was an abused Muslim woman who tried to commit suicide by swallowing a bunch of sleeping pills. But as she was fading into unconsciousness, she had a vision of something called the ‘Living Water.’ She had never heard of ‘Living Water.’ But something made her want to know more. She woke herself up, vomited out the pills, found a Bible, and read the entire Gospel according to John.
“When she got to chapter 4, she read the story where Jesus asked a sad and troubled woman for a drink of water from a well in Samaria. The woman is surprised that this Jewish man is talking to her. Then Jesus says to her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, “Give Me a drink,” you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.’ And the woman said to Jesus, ‘Sir, You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep; where then do You get that living water?’ And Jesus replied, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.’
“The Muslim woman was astonished by Jesus’ love and compassion for this troubled Samaritan woman. She wanted that Living Water. By the time she finished reading the book of John, she had prayed to accept Christ as her Savior. Then she came to our church asking for help to grow in her faith. We did not lead her to Christ. She came already convinced. We simply encouraged her, taught her God’s Word, and taught her how to share her faith with others. And she listened. She has led her four sisters and her parents to Christ. And a house church of twenty secret Iranian believers now meets in her home.”
“Before the [Islamic] Revolution, there was a very small response to the gospel,” one Iranian pastor told me. “In the summer of 1975, our ministry shared Christ with nearly five thousand people. Only two people showed any interest. But in 2005, ninety-eight out of every one hundred people we shared with showed interest, and we saw many decisions for Christ.”568
“In the last 20 years, more Iranians have come to Christ [than in] the last 14 centuries,” said Lazarus Yeghnazar, an Iranian-born evangelist now based in Great Britain. “We’ve never seen such phenomenal thirst. . . . I believe this phenomenon [will] snowball into a major avalanche. This is still a rain. This is not the avalanche coming. . . . But it will be happening very, very soon.”569
At the time of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there were only about five hundred known Muslim converts to Jesus inside the country. By 2000, a survey of Christian demographic trends reported that there were 220,000 Christians inside Iran, of which between 4,000 and 20,000 were Muslim converts.570 And according to Iranian Christian leaders I interviewed for this book, the number of Christ-followers inside their country shot dramatically higher between 2000 and 2008.
The head of one leading Iranian ministry, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, told me: “Based on all the things we are seeing inside Iran today, I personally believe that if every Iranian who secretly believes in Jesus could come forward right now and declare his or her faith publicly, the number would top a million.”571
A leading Iranian political dissident in the West who also happens to be a Muslim convert to Christianity told me he believes there are as many as 4.5 million Iranian converts.572
An Iranian who directs one of the largest ministries of evangelism and discipleship to Shia Muslims in his country—and is one of the most trusted Iranian ministry leaders in the world—tells me he believes the real number is closer to 7 million believers, or roughly one out of every ten people in Iran.573
Government Crackdown
Keep in mind, such numbers are impossible to verify given the current political conditions, but again, the trend lines are clear, and the increasingly panicked reaction of Iranian authorities in recent years seems to support the notion of unprecedented growth of the Iranian church.
In April 2004, for example, an Iranian Shiite cleric by the name of Hasan Mohammadi delivered a stunning speech at a high school in Tehran. He urged the students to “safeguard your beloved Shi’ite faith” against the influence of the evangelicals and other so-called apostate religions, and warned: “Unfortunately, on average every day, fifty Iranian girls and boys convert secretly to Christian denominations in our country.”574
Mohammadi had been hired by the Ministry of Education to teach fundamental Shiite Islam to the country’s youth, who are increasingly dissatisfied with the Islamic Revolution and are looking elsewhere for fulfillment. But as one father whose son was in the audience told a reporter, Mohammadi “unknowing admitted the defeat of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a theocratic regime in promoting its Islam.”
By September of that year, the Iranian regime had arrested eighty-six evangelical pastors and subjected them to extended interrogations and even torture. In October 2004, Compass Direct, an international Christian news agency, reported that “a top [Iranian] official within the Ministry of Security Intelligence spoke on state television’s Channel 1, warning the populace against the many ‘foreign religions’ active in the country and pledging to protect the nation’s ‘beloved Shiite Islam’ from all outside forces.” The news service went on to report that this security official had helped interrogate ten of the arrested evangelical pastors, had complained that Christian activities in Iran had gone “out of control,” and was “insisting that their church do something to stop the flood of Christian literature, television, and radio programs targeting Iran.”575
The rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led to a dramatic acceleration of government-directed persecution of Iranian Christians—particularly pastors, many of whom have been arrested, interrogated, beaten, and even worse. “An Iranian convert to Christianity was kidnapped last week from his home in northeastern Iran and stabbed to death, his bleeding body thrown in front of his home a few hours later,” Compass Direct reported in November 2005. “Ghorban Tori, 50, was pastoring an independent house church of covert Christians in Gonbad-e-Kavus, a town just east of the Caspian Sea along the Turkmenistan border. Within hours of the November 22 murder, local secret police arrived at the martyred pastor’s home, searching for Bibles and other banned Christian books in the Farsi language. By the end of the following day, the secret police had also raided the houses of all other known Christian believers in the city. According to one informed Iranian source, during the past eight days representatives of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) have arrested and severely tortured ten other Christians in several cities, including Tehran.”576
Just a few days before the pastor’s murder, Ahmadinejad met with thirty provincial governors and vowed to shut down the country’s growing house-church movement, reportedly saying: “I will stop Christianity in this country.”577
Nevertheless, evangelical leaders inside Iran say they are seeing the words of Matthew 16:18 come true before their very eyes: “I will build my church,” Jesus said, “and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (KJV).
Dreams and Visions
Ultimately, I’m told that most Iranian MBBs are not coming to Christ primarily through The Passion of the Christ or the JESUS film, or through radio and satellite TV ministries, or even through the work of the mushrooming house-church movement. These resources are vitally important. They are giving many unbelievers initial exposure to the gospel, and they are certainly strengthening the faith of new believers as well as those who have been following Christ for some time. But they are not enough to bring many Iranians to a point of decision. What is bringing these Iranians to Christ are dreams and visions of Jesus.
One Iranian Muslim woman had a dream in which God told her, “Whatever the two women you are going to meet with tomorrow tell you, listen to them.” Startled, she went through the next day curious who she would meet. She had no plans to meet anyone, but sure enough, at one point two Iranian Christian women came up to her and explained the message of salvation to her. She obeyed the Lord’s direc
tive from the dream, listened carefully, and then bowed her head and prayed to receive Christ as her Savior.
Several years ago, an Iranian pastor I know met a twenty-two-year-old Iranian Shia woman who had become a Christian after seeing a vision of Jesus Christ. She just showed up in his church one day, hungry to study the Bible for herself. The more she studied God’s Word, the more deeply she loved Jesus. Soon, she discovered that God had given her the spiritual gift of evangelism. That is, not only did she have a passion to share her faith with others; the Holy Spirit had also blessed her with a supernatural ability to lead Muslims to Jesus. Today, she leads an average of fifteen people to Christ every day—that’s right, fifteen a day. She told my pastor friend that Iranian Muslims are so desperate for the gospel that typically it takes about five minutes to share the story of her conversion and how God has changed her life before the listener is ready to also receive Christ. “Difficult” conversations, she says, with several questions or concerns, take fifteen to twenty minutes. Her prayer: to lead seven thousand Iranian Muslims to Christ over the next five years.578
In my third novel, The Ezekiel Option, I tell the story of two Christians driving through the mountains of Iran with a car full of Bibles. Suddenly, their steering wheel jammed and they had to slam on the brakes to keep from driving off the side of the road. When they looked up, they saw an old man knocking on their windows and asking if they had the books.
“What books?” they asked.
“The books about Jesus,” the old man replied. He went on to explain that an angel recently came to him in a vision and told him about Jesus. Later he found out that everyone in his mountain village had had the same vision. They were all brand-new followers of Jesus, but they did not know what do to next. Then the old man had a dream in which Jesus told him to go down the mountain and wait by the road for someone to bring books that would explain how to be a Christian. He obeyed, and suddenly two men with a car full of Bibles had come to a stop right in front of him.
This was one of my favorite passages in The Ezekiel Option, but it’s not fiction. I didn’t make it up. It’s true. I got it directly from a dear friend of mine who is the head of a ministry in the Middle East. He personally knows the men involved. I simply asked if I could change their names for use in the novel, and my friend agreed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Big, Untold Story—Part Two
More evidence of a dramatic revival in the Middle East
What God is doing in Iran is extraordinary.
But it is just the beginning. As you travel through the rest of the Islamic world, you find miracles happening everywhere and accelerating as never before.
Revival in North Africa
Senior pastors and ministry leaders in Egypt estimate there are more than 2.5 million followers of Jesus Christ in their country. A growing number of these are Muslim converts, and there is also an enormous revival going on among nominal Christians inside the historic Coptic church, whose members number about 10 million.579
Lynn’s mom, our boys, Lynn, and I lived in Egypt for nearly three months in late 2005 and early 2006 when I was researching and writing Epicenter. During that time, we had the opportunity to see this enormous surge of Christianity firsthand. We met with Egyptian MBBs and NCBBs engaged in satellite television ministry, in radio ministry, in Internet ministry, in gospel literature distribution, and in all manner of evangelism outreaches and discipleship programs. We visited a variety of churches, including the famous “garbage church” in the caves above Cairo, located right next to the biggest “city” of trash and waste products I have ever seen in my life.
To get to the “garbage church,” you must first drive through this “city” of badly built brick and cement apartment buildings teeming with an estimated fifteen to thirty thousand “garbage people”—no one knows for sure, and the numbers are always changing—living amid literally thousands of tons of trash. Everywhere you look you see people picking through it, sorting it, rebagging it, looking for objects of value and hoping to sell plastic bottles and the like to recyclers. The stench is unbelievable.
But then you come through it to the other side, to a paved parking lot and a lovely little Christian chapel, nestled against huge cliffs. Carved into the cliffs are the most amazing scenes of Jesus walking on water, Jesus on the cross, Jesus ascending to heaven, and so forth, each with a Bible verse inscribed below it in Arabic and English, all done by a Polish artist. Inside the six caves are six chapels, the largest of which holds twenty thousand people.
Our guide that day was an MBB named Addel. He shared with us (by translation) how he was lost in drugs and alcohol and the depression of living in the garbage village. He also shared with us how he came to hear an audiocassette of one of the priests at the church and how God used that sermon to convict him of his sin and point him to what Jesus did on the cross to pay the penalty for his sins and offer him forgiveness. Now Addel greets visitors who come to see this extraordinary ministry and tells them the story of what God is doing there.
The church was planted, he said, in 1978 by a Coptic priest with a burden for reaching people many consider, as Paul called himself, “the scum of the world, the dregs of all things”580 with the Good News that they could be adopted by the King of kings. So many people became Christians in the years that followed that in 1992 they had to convert the largest cave into a worship amphitheater. On an average weekend, some ten thousand new and growing believers from the garbage community come to sing and hear the message of the gospel and learn how to be true disciples of Jesus Christ. Services are held on Thursday nights (the most popular service), Friday mornings, and Sunday evenings.
In May of 2005, more than twenty thousand Arab believers gathered for a day of prayer for their unsaved Muslim friends to become followers of Christ. The event was broadcast throughout the Middle East on a Christian satellite television network, allowing millions more to see God powerfully at work.
The number of believers in Libya is not currently known. In Tunisia, I am told, there are less than a thousand MBBs. But in neighboring Algeria—the birthplace of St. Augustine, one of the early Church fathers, but for many centuries almost devoid of a Christian presence—more than eighty thousand Muslims have become followers of Christ in recent years. The vast majority of these believers are young people under the age of thirty.581
The surge of Christianity has become so alarming to Islamic clerics that in March of 2006, Algerian officials passed a law banning Muslims from becoming Christians or even learning about Christianity. Christians trying to share their faith with Muslims face two to five years in jail and fines of five thousand to ten thousand euros for “trying to call on a Muslim to embrace another religion.” In a move to stamp out the rapidly growing house-church movement, the law also forbids Christians from meeting together in any building without a license from the government.582
Christianity is also growing in Morocco. On a 2005 trip to Casablanca and Rabat, I found the Moroccan media up in arms about the “phenomenon of Moroccans converting to Christianity,” suggesting that between 20,000 and 40,000 Muslims have become Christ-followers. The Morocco Times, for example, ran an article on March 12, 2005, entitled, “Why Are Moroccans Converting to Christianity?” Then on January 24, 2006, the Times published a story entitled “Evangelical Missionaries Back in the Limelight.”583
Local pastors and ministry leaders have told me that the kinds of numbers cited in these stories may be overstated, but they readily acknowledge that God is on the move in their country. During my visits there, I have personally had the privilege of meeting many MBB leaders who shared with me the dramatic stories of their own conversions. Some of these leaders were actually “hajjis”—meaning they were once such devout Muslims that they made the pilgrimage to Mecca known as the Haj to worship Allah—before leaving Islam and turning to Christ. Now they are evangelists, disciple makers, and church planters overflowing with exciting stories of how other Moroccans are coming to Christ
. Let me share just one with you.
A young Muslim woman from Morocco—let’s call her Abidah (which means “worshiper”)—saw the JESUS film while living and working in Europe and became a follower of Jesus. After two years of being discipled in the faith by an older and wiser believer, Abidah went home on vacation to visit her family in Morocco. For five days she prayed about how to tell her family that she had become a Christian, but she was too scared. On the sixth day, her sister also returned home from Europe. “Hey, look what I got for free!” the sister said to her family, showing them a copy of the Injil (New Testament) and the JESUS film a Christian had given her as a gift on the ferry ride across the Mediterranean.
“Hey, look, the film is about Isa!”584 exclaimed the father, a traditional Muslim. “He’s our prophet. Let’s all watch it.”
Abidah was in shock.
The family sat down together in front of the television. About halfway through the film, the whole family was asking one question after another, trying to understand who Jesus was, why He taught the way He did, and how He could do miracles and show such love and compassion to everyone, including His enemies.
Abidah saw her opening. She started answering the questions. Now it was her family who was in shock. “Why do you know all these things?” asked her father.
“Because I saw this movie two years ago and I became a Christian. But I’ve been afraid to tell you.”
A cloud covered her father’s face. He looked angry. But when he spoke, he did not yell at Abidah. Instead, he said, “What! You made us wait five days to hear about Jesus?”
Revival in Sudan
In Sudan, meanwhile, one of the biggest stories in modern Christendom is unfolding—a spiritual awakening of almost unimaginable proportions amid civil war, radical Islam, rampant persecution, and outright genocide. Some three hundred thousand Sudanese have been killed in recent years in Darfur alone. More than 2.5 million Sudanese have been displaced by all the fighting. Yet the God of the Bible is moving powerfully there to draw these dear people into His family.
Inside the Revolution Page 43
