Protestant church in Iran urges help against seizure

Saint Peter Evangelical Church in Tehran. Herbert Karim Masihi via Wikimedia Commons.

I have been thinking a lot about the people I met at our General Assembly, especially our ecumenical partners from the Middle East. Hearing their stories firsthand makes global news feel deeply personal, and a recent report out of Tehran has me incredibly worried about the safety of our Christian brothers and sisters there.

Iranian authorities and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are moving to seize the historic Saint Peter Evangelical Church compound in central Tehran.

Security forces recently raided the nearly 150-year-old Protestant landmark, which many know as the Qavam Church. They went in to identify the people attending and gave church leaders a strict ultimatum.

Even worse, about 20 low-income Christian families from the Armenian and Assyrian minority communities who live on the church grounds have been ordered to pack up and leave within weeks. If they do not, they face legal action and possible prison time.

Did you know? Many of the Assyrians in the Chicago-area are Presbyterians.

The Synod of the Evangelical Church of Iran has put out an urgent call for help to the international community. They reported that a large 10,000-square-meter garden on the prime church property has already been illegally re-registered under the name of the IRGC.

This hostility is not new. The regime has systematically targeted evangelical and Protestant institutions for decades, restricting Persian-language services and using a 1998 Revolutionary Court ruling to slowly choke out the legal status of the church council.

However, human rights groups and church leaders note that the situation has grown significantly more dangerous following the major U.S. and Israeli military strikes against Iran earlier this year.

With the regime facing immense domestic instability and international fallout from that conflict, authorities have become aggressively emboldened, using the chaos to accelerate their crackdown. This follows the recent demolition of another evangelical church in Mashhad, showing a clear effort to permanently push out the remaining Protestant institutions in Iran.

Remembering the faces and voices of the partners we just sat with at the General Assembly drives home how fragile religious freedom can be. Please join me in keeping these families and the leaders of the Evangelical Church of Iran in your prayers as they face an incredibly uncertain and dangerous time.