Interest in the Christian faith is growing among scholars and leaders in a most unlikely place: Iran. Anyone at least my age remembers the swift change that came to that country in 1979, when Islamic radicals took over and Americans were taken hostage in the embassy in Tehran. Since then, the dominant image of Iran has been that of a place that's anti-American, anti-modernity, and certainly anti-Christian. But the Revolution, it turns out, is the very reason things are changing.
So says Sasan Tavassoli, an evangelical pastor in Iran (yes, in Iran). It's widely acknowledged within that country that the Revolution failed to deliver, and now Iran is considering its future in the community of nations. Part of this entails dialogue with Christian thinkers. More moderate Shiite clerics and academics are eager to learn from Christians, and as it turns out, one of their questions is a common theme on this blog: how do we pass the faith on to the next generation?
We Westerners are perhaps guilty of painting all of Islam with a broad brush, imagining that every young Muslim is schooled in a madrassah and taught to hate Western culture. But this is not so, and Tavassoli describes Iranians as descendants of the proud Persian tradition of tolerance for foreign religions (King Cyrus, who issued the decree allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem from exile, was Persian). So while Iran is certainly not multi-religious (being 98% Muslim), it is by no means a Saudi Arabia or a Somalia.
Another way of looking at this is that Iran could continue down a road of repression and strict observance of shari'a law, but it is in fact moving away. Tavassoli declares that this was never what the people supported in the first place, that the Islamic fundamentalists hijacked the 1979 revolution, and that Iran has been alarmed by the prediction of global conflict based on culture made at the turn of this century, desiring instead to position itself more moderately.
You may or may not buy Tavassoli's appraisal of Iran's political self-concept, but let's focus on the fact that we American Christians share at least one thing with Shiite Muslims in Iran: we're both concerned with propagating our faith in the midst of environments that value tolerance, free expression of ideas, and specifically do not value coercion or indoctrination in religious matters. They, like we, believe one's path to God must be freely chosen, not compelled. So how do you make kids choose right (if that isn't an oxymoron)?
To me, this is an issue of faith, of believing that God is bigger than seemingly hopeless circumstances; of recognizing that even during the last 30 years of an Islamic state in Iran, Muslims have been coming to Christ and that these conversions have been not the work of human evangelization, but as the result of dreams and visions. Tavassoli reports that one such dream, of the Virgin Mary asking for help, caused a government official to make an unsolicited offer of financial assistance to a Presbyterian church. It is recognizing that God works even through unintended consequences, such as when a Muslim writer is commissioned to do a Farsi translation of the New Testament and then has the chance to report to high government officials that in the course of his project, he had come to recognize many of his own misconceptions about Christianity.
It is because of the success and potency of the gospel in settings where the odds are stacked against it that we, in America, can take heart. I'll not deny that obstacles and threats to the free expression of religion exist in this country. But honesty demands that we acknowledge we are much freer than most and that most American Christians cannot claim to have experienced oppression or persecution that is really anything beyond scorn. If Jesus can break through a revolution led by Muslim extremists and preserve a remnant and a toehold in the middle of the Islamic world, should we have any reason to doubt that he will overcome any domestic threat here in the land of the free?
I further believe that there are specific reasons the hunger for Christian perspectives is surfacing, and they have to do with the veracity, reality, and uniqueness of Jesus Christ himself. Jesus - the real, actual Jesus attested to in the gospels - is a life that must be reckoned with. And so you have young Muslims wanting answers about the Jesus of the Bible, not just the Jesus of Muslim tradition. You have Muslims yearning to know the assurance of forgiveness. And you have people disillusioned by a revolution that promised them the world, but delivered only more uncertainty.
If we just show people - of all ages, in all cultures - God for who he really is, exemplified by the witness of creation, incarnate in Jesus Christ, I believe that's enough. The baggage that gets in the way is usually cultural - someone knew someone who was a Christian and they didn't like the effect of that. Yet, an intent gaze into the face of the true God is often convicting enough for people to set aside stacks of objections and to focus on what they know to be true.
Let's labor, then, to give kids this truth. Bring it to them in song, in spirit, in our teaching, our counsel, our own values. Let's so value God and the things of God that the inestimable worth of Jesus Christ is the unmistakable flavor of our zeal. A zealous desire for something less tends to yield that something less. But there is an incredible sufficiency in knowing Christ that transcends political or economic or cultural objectives. Iran is waking up to this, knowing that they were sold short on a revolution. To be sure, the country is anything but "open" as the word is normally used in Christian circles. But when the leaders of a nation that only one generation ago staked its future on the promise of Islam are rethinking that orientation, that's a huge open door for building faith - theirs and ours.
Info, articles, and thoughts for parents of kids at North Coast Calvary Chapel.
