Iran

Sharing God’s Word in the Depths of “Hell” As Pastor Houmayoun led a prayer meeting at his home in Shiraz, Iran, in 2012, secret police stormed in and arrested the pastor, his wife, their 17-year-old son and four other church leaders. The seven Christians were blindfolded, shoved into vehicles and taken to an intelligence prison for questioning. After days of interrogation, they were moved to a public prison and ordered to keep quiet about why they had been arrested; the guards rightly feared the spread of Christianity among the prison’s 6,000 prisoners. But Houmayoun and the other believers felt compelled to obey a higher authority. “It would have been comfortable just to be quiet and not talk about Jesus,” Houmayoun said. “Things would have gone better for us in prison.” As they shared their testimonies and the gospel with their Muslim inmates, one thing became very clear: They were going to need Bibles. Collecting Verses Instead of despairing over their imprisonment, the Christians saw an opportunity to spread the gospel among their fellow inmates. As they shared their testimony quietly with one inmate after another, they received a variety of responses. A few threatened to kill them, while many others

Mourning the loss of her martyred father in Iran, Rashin promised the Lord she would follow in his footsteps. On Dec. 3, 1990, 13-year-old Rashin Soodmand’s life changed forever. That day, she learned that the Iranian government had executed her beloved father for leaving Islam, a decision he had made at age 17. Rashin had grown accustomed to her father’s repeated confrontations with Iran’s Islamic authorities. While still a toddler, she moved with her parents to the city of Mashad, Iran, where her father had been raised as a Muslim. In 1980, during the early days of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, her parents started a church in their basement, and after learning of the gatherings, the religious police repeatedly arrested her father, Hossein Soodmand, and other believers. Despite suffering physical and psychological torture during his brief stints in jail, nothing prevented Hossein from sharing Jesus Christ. While Hossein’s bold faith inevitably led to persecution, it also helped protect and eventually inspire Rashin’s faith. She and her siblings were the only Christians at their school, so her father taught and quizzed them on fundamentals of the faith in order to counter their mandatory Islamic studies. “That was a challenge for me,” Rashin