Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Ground War—Part One

How the Revivalists are making disciples despite extreme persecution

All of the true followers of Jesus Christ in the Muslim world that I have met are deeply burdened for their neighbors and their countrymen. Often when they pray, they are in tears because they know that hundreds of millions of Muslims go to bed every night without any hope, without any peace, without having their sins forgiven, without the assurance that they are going to heaven when they die. This grieves the Revivalists and motivates many of them to take enormous risks to get the good news of God’s love and plan of salvation to those who have never heard the gospel or never accepted Christ as their Savior.

What comforts the Revivalists, they say, is Jesus’ message in Matthew 16:18, when he said, “I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (KJV). This passage is a great source of relief and consolation for pastors and ministry leaders in the epicenter because it means that at the end of the day, they are not responsible for the success of the church in the epicenter. That’s Jesus’ job. He said that He is building His Church in the epicenter and around the world, and nothing and no one can stop Him.

What, then, is the job of the Revivalists?

Simple: to obey the Lord Jesus Christ in whatever He tells them to do. “If you love Me,” Jesus said in John 14:15, “you will keep My commandments.”

So what does Jesus tell them to do? Love Him enough to preach the gospel, make disciples, plant churches, and teach and equip others to do the same.

To some the notion of doing the work of God even while trusting God to ultimately accomplish that work may seem contradictory. But not to the Revivalists. They say the distinction is that the burden of obedience lies with individual followers of Jesus Christ, while the burden for success lies with Jesus Christ Himself. As one ministry operating very effectively in the Muslim world likes to teach its members: “Your job is to share Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leave the results to God.”

To men and women trying to serve the Lord in very dangerous and difficult circumstances, these are liberating principles. The Bible teaches that Jesus loves His true followers regardless of their performance. He wants them to obey Him, whatever the cost, but He is not grading them based on their results. The results are dependent on Him, not them, and this, many Revivalists have told me, helps them sleep peacefully at night despite the enormous task that lies before them.

“Boots on the Ground”

As we saw in the last chapter, the leaders of the Revivalists are deeply grateful to the Lord for providing radio, satellite television, and increasingly the Internet as powerful and effective new ways of reaching vast numbers of Muslims with the gospel and biblical precepts.

Still, most are not convinced that they can win the battle for the souls of the Muslim people through an “air war” alone. That is, they do not feel that they can merely beam in the evangelistic programming and Bible teaching—however strong the quality of those programs—from afar and make the revolutionary impact they believe is needed. What is vital, they insist, is waging a massive and historic “ground war” to complement the “air war.” As God directs them, therefore, they are steadily and systematically putting “boots on the ground” all throughout the Muslim world—men and women trained to make disciples, who will be qualified to make other disciples, who will be able to make other disciples as well.

Ultimately, the Revivalists say, their hope for transforming the Muslim world is not in technology but in human beings who have been “revived”—spiritually transformed by faith in Jesus Christ and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit of God.

Jesus, they note, used no technology when He came to a dusty corner of Roman-occupied Palestine. Rather, He preached to the masses, sometimes five to ten thousand at a time. He also recruited individuals, built a team, and invested His time in teaching this small band of brothers how to live like God-chosen global game-changers. He walked with His twelve disciples. He ate with them. He traveled with them. He spent time with their friends and family members. He gave them projects and assignments to test the content of their character and the quality of their faith. He forgave them when they made mistakes. He encouraged them. He prayed for them. He prayed with them. And He loved them to the last moment of His life on earth.

What was the result? Admittedly, one—Judas Iscariot—failed disastrously, betraying them all. But look at the other eleven disciples. They started as worldly, fearful, jealous, petty, competitive, small-minded, uneducated, and untrained men. But after a few years of walking and talking with Jesus and observing His life, His purity, and His supernatural power in action, these men became such bold, decisive, and fearless preachers, pastors, evangelists, and apostles that even their opponents had to admit that they had soon “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6, KJV). This is the model believers in Christ must follow, the Revivalists say, if they are to change the Muslim world.

The key is the personal touch. The Muslim culture is an Eastern culture, not a Western one. It is based on relationships and storytelling and on people spending long periods of time with one another. People in Eastern cultures are not so worried about schedules and quotas and sales figures and returning e-mails and phone calls quickly. They are interested in personal contact. They are interested in firm handshakes and good food and strong coffee and sweet tea and looking in a man’s eyes to see if he is a good man or a bad man and whether he can be trusted or not.

In such a culture, a spiritual revolution cannot all be waged or won by remote control. It cannot all be done from radio and TV studios in Europe or the U.S., or via e-mail and Web sites. Some of it—much of it—must be done face-to-face, person-to-person.

Can that be dangerous? Absolutely. But the Revivalists say there is no other way.

Never before in human history have there been so many followers of Christ living in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The mission of the Revivalists, they tell me, is to focus on helping mere followers turn into fully devoted disciples who are willing to do whatever Jesus tells them to do, go wherever Jesus tells them to go, and say whatever Jesus tells them to say. They want to do so in every city, every town, every village, and every neighborhood in their countries and region.

What’s more, they are trying to identify, train, and mobilize leaders. They are prayerfully seeking out men and women who are ready to help new converts study the Bible for themselves. They are looking for people who are willing to lead new and young believers in worshiping their risen Savior. And they are hoping to find people who are able to plant new churches, often in the privacy and secrecy of their own homes, since renting or buying or building a church facility would draw too much attention and buildings could be attacked by Radicals and blown to smithereens. This, the Revivalists stress, is how movements are made.

Waging a Spiritual War, Not a Physical One

In the pages ahead, I will profile some of the most effective “ground commanders” I have met in the Middle East. But first, let me be crystal clear about an extremely important point. When I use the terms “air war” and “ground war,” I do not mean to suggest in any way, shape, or form that the Revivalists are violent people or that they would ever resort to military weapons to force their beliefs on others. To the contrary, the Revivalists abhor violence as much as the Radicals embrace it. Their deeply rooted conviction not to use violence to advance the Kingdom of Jesus Christ comes directly from the teachings of the Bible.

On the night of His arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus told Peter not to attack Roman soldiers with his sword, noting that “all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52, NIV). Likewise, the apostle Paul wrote to those he was discipling, saying, “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:3-4, NIV).

Paul made an even more detailed case to this effect in Ephesians 6:10-17: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

Revivalists do not use pistols, rifles, machine guns, explosives, or bombs of any kind to advance their objectives. They understand that a physical war as well as a spiritual war is being waged against them, but the Bible teaches them to wage only a spiritual war, a war of ideas and beliefs, not a physical war.

Thus, they say they thank God every morning for a new day and for continued life. Then they pray that God would fill them with the Holy Spirit, suit them up in the full armor of God, give them the strength and the courage to do and say whatever He commands them, and accomplish His divine purposes for that day in and through their lives.

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 caring 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