Photo: Unsplash/MostafaMeraji
Iran’s population is about 83,000,000 people, and Islam is the religion of 99.4% of Iranians.
Changing faith from Islam to Christianity is not allowed in Iran however, one Christian organisation believes that God is miraculously revealing Himself to the nation.
Hormoz Shariat, founder of Iran Alive Ministries (IAM), told the Christian Post that Christianity is fervently spreading throughout Iran, bringing hope and freedom to its people.
According to Shariat, media ministry is a key tool for Iranian Muslims to encounter the Gospel message – and he set out to reach 1 million of them. He states, “By God’s grace, through media, I have passed this number multiple times.” Shariat told the Christian Post that many who follow Islam are attracted to Christianity because it is a faith-based on love.
Much as the government of Iran has made it incredibly difficult for Iran Alive Ministries to thrive, by for example blocking their website and phone lines, Shariat reports “…we have the names of over 37,000 people who have received Christ, and we know there are several hundred thousand who have made decisions but haven’t been able to tell us.”
Those who are able to contact IAM have reported experiencing God through dreams, visions and miraculous events.
“Jesus appears to them all the time through visions, dreams and miracles. Sometimes I feel these days if you want to see Jesus, you have to be a Muslim. It’s almost like Jesus is looking at the rest of the world, saying, ‘Look at me. I love them. I’m healing them, I’m appearing to them. Will you love them with me?’” Shariat told the Christian Post.
IAM’s website shares this statistic: “According to the latest release of the Operation World manual, Iran has the fastest growing Evangelical population in the entire world! This is not because it has grown from ten people to hundreds of people, but because it has exploded from hundreds of Persians to hundreds of thousands of Persians and continues to grow exponentially. At a 19.6 percent growth rate, the Evangelical population is doubling every four years!”
Adding: “We believe Islam is experiencing its greatest defeat in its history in Iran today. There is much work still to be done. There are currently no visible churches among Muslim background Christians. The government uses psychological warfare to oppress people through fear and isolation. They are trying to contain the spread of Christianity, but are not succeeding! Iran is full of hopelessness and despair. Drug use is the highest it’s ever been. Iran is #1 in the world in per capita drug use. Suicide rates are skyrocketing, especially among women. Iran is the only country in the world where the suicide rate among women is higher than men. The Qur’an gives men permission to abuse and oppress women. This is a culture of corruption on all levels: political, religious, domestic, etc. Persians living in Iran are saying they are living in a prison – that Iran is a living coffin!”
Shariat has a deep passion to see Muslims come to Jesus, and Iran to become a Christian nation.
Born into a devout Muslim family in Iran, Shariat received Christ as His personal Lord and Savior when he moved to the U.S. to earn his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence. Around that time, he experienced a period of “spiritual questioning.”
“I asked, ‘Is God there? And if He is there, He’s with Islam because Islam is taking over the world. Maybe I should pay more attention to my roots and my religion that I grew up with,” he said.
“After studying the Quran front to back, I thought, ‘This didn’t add anything to me,’” Shariat continued. “But something in me — which I now realize was the Holy Spirit — said, ‘How can you come to such a big conclusion by reading just one book? You need to study more before you decide if God is there.’”
After reading the book of Matthew, Shariat began to struggle with the person of Jesus, who he found to be “so different from the prophet that Islam teaches us.”
“I struggled for hours, for days, re-reading Matthew, trying to figure out this person of Jesus,” he said. “After a few months of struggle, somebody invited me to a church in downtown Los Angeles. That’s where I heard this simple message of the Gospel, which transformed my life.”
Additional Reporting by the Christian Post and Christianheadlines.com
