evanoff
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Wednesday, December 22, 2004
THOUSANDS TURN TO CHRIST IN IRAN
By Jeremy Reynalds
Special Correspondent for ASSIST News Service
LOS ANGELES, CA (ANS) -- Iranians are turning in droves to Christ.
“This should cause any missiologist to wonder why (so many people from) the nation which had become a model for the rest of the fundamental Muslim world to emulate – the same country that introduced suicide bombing to the world – are now turning to Christ,” said Shah Afshar, Foursquare Regional Coordinator for the Middle East, in an e-mail interview.
This phenomenon didn’t take place through the efforts of foreign missionaries, Afshar said, because after the country’s Islamic revolution of the late 1970's, all foreign missionaries were expelled from Iran.
Much of the evangelism of Muslims in Iran, Afshar said, has been done through shortwave radio and satellite television programs by Iranians who came to know Christ while outside their own country.
“With the revolution there also came a mass exodus of almost 6 million Iranians out of Iran to various countries around the world,” Afshar said. “It was there that for the first time many of these exiles were exposed to the gospel, and eventually a great number of them became followers of Jesus—50,000 by some estimates. It is because of these exiled believers and other faithful ones who never left Iran that (this) phenomenon is unfolding.”
Understandably, the Iranian authorities are concerned that their influence is waning. One employee of the country’s Ministry of Education, Hasan Mohammadi, hired to teach Islamic precepts to high school and university students in the country run by Islamic clerics, encouraged his audience to “Be aware young men; safeguard your beloved Shiite Islam.”
When issuing this admonition at a gathering of senior high school students in the north of the Iranian capital in April 2004, Afshar said Mohammadi underscored his point by saying, “Unfortunately, on average, everyday 50 Iranian girls and boys convert secretly to Christian denominations in our country.”
According to Afshar, reportedly quoting from a comment made by the 47-year-old cleric and heard by Hamad Egbali, whose son Ali was in the audience, Mohammadi “unknowingly admitted the defeat of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a theocratic regime in promoting its Islam.”
Continue story here:
http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/s04120082.htm
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Lisa Evanoff
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Christian Activism News
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