Annahita Parsan (Courtesy Photo)
A former Muslim woman who received Christ as her personal Lord and Savior has since joining ministry led more than 1,500 Muslims to Christ.
She leads two churches and trains other Christian organisations how to reach out to and disciple Muslim background believers.
Annahita Parsan, a Journalist and an ordained minister in the Church of Sweden revealed during an exclusive interview with CBN News that no one would have thought that she, a Muslim woman who was simply trying to stay alive in an abusive marriage in Iran, would one day lead two churches.
The 48-year-old told CBN News that during her abuse, she read the Bible, but kept it a secret from her husband. Although she began to feel the peace and love of God, the abuse proved to be too much.
Parsan admits being beaten with a shovel by her then-husband. As a battered wife, with bruises and cuts all over her body, Parsan eventually tried to kill herself with pills, but she survived.
Annahita Parsan’s journey to Christ and across two continents is one that included several brushes with death.
Parsan, her husband and her children fled Iran through the mountains to Turkey in 1984, where she and her daughter faced more danger, before landing in a Turkish prison. They would finally make it to Denmark where she divorced her still-abusive husband, and also heard the gospel for the first time. Then she moved to Sweden where she and her two children walked into a church and prayed, “We are Christians, from now on.”
Parsan revealed during the CBN interview that she entered ministry in 2012 and has led more than 1,500 Muslims to Christ.
“I work specifically with the Muslim community, many are also Farsi-speaking,” Parsan said. “Sometimes they come to the church because they are curious. Sometimes they are asylum seekers and sometimes they are just visiting from places like Iran and Afghanistan, so they secretly get baptized and then they go back.”
According to CBN News, Muslim immigration has also made Sweden a home for dangerous radicals, and Parsan said she has received death threats, and lives with the knowledge she could be killed.
“I have serious threats at least a couple of times per year, a threat of a knife attack or a bomb attack. I have a police officer attached to my case I can always call, and we have security during our services. I have other threats from my own distant family members,” she added. “But for me, what I do is worth it.
“I hope people out there who have lost their faith, will maybe hear my story and be inspired to come back,” Parsan said.
As a young woman living what seemed like a hopeless existence in Iran, Annahita Parsan saw no plan and no purpose in her abusive marriage, only random violence. But God had a plan.
“God loved me and he was in my life from the beginning,” she said.
