Shared Church in an Unlikely Place

One of the fastest-growing church movements in the world astonishes us Westerners. This Christian movement lacks most of what we may think a church needs to flourish. Growing at nearly 20 percent a year, its progress leaves us dumbfounded. The movement owns no buildings. Has no denominations. No Bible schools or seminaries. Lacks any centralized leadership. Is made up completely of former Muslims.

And It’s In . . . Iran

A feature-length movie about this rapidly-expanding Christian community has recently been released. Sheep Among Wolves (Vol. 2) documents the Gospel-eruption taking place in Iran. Produced by Joel Richardson and directed by Dalton Thomas for Faith Alliance International, the film says maybe a million people in that Muslim nation now follow Jesus. Sheep Among Wolves lets us hear the stories both from Iranian Christians themselves and from outsiders who work closely with them when they visit other Muslim countries.

Broadly Shared Leadership

The film leaves no doubt: Jesus is forming a shared-church environment in Iran. As Thomas explains: “The leadership is decentralized and it is distributed [see diagrams]. It’s not based around a particular model. It’s not based around a particular individual or skill set or gifting. It’s built around an Ephesians 4 framework of empowering everyone in the body.”

Thomas continues: “The entire body of Christ should have the yoke of leadership upon them for disciple-making, for the apostolic, for the prophetic, for the evangelistic, for the pastoral and for the teaching. But if we reduce the church to pastoral and teaching ministry, and we sever the rest of it . . . it’s going to undermine the church’s ability to actually be the church.”

Non-Western Approaches

These Christians in Iran are not constructing church buildings. In fact, the regime is closing and destroying such buildings within its borders. Instead of wood and concrete, the church is being built of the “living stones” of I Peter 2:5—disciples willing to follow Jesus even if it costs them their lives. An anonymous believer explains, “Everything is foundational on prayer. We start with prayer, we find people of peace through prayer. We even find locations through prayer. When we have prayed and found a person of peace, we start speaking to that person.” Another says, “We don’t convert to disciple; we disciple to convert.” Thomas says, “When we talk about church planting in the West, generally what we’re talking about is a pastor or a teacher starting a community . . . who listen to him give speeches for half an hour to an hour once a week. This is foreign to the Iranians.”

The typical church model so familiar to Westerners, which depends on stage performances and sundry programs, does not work in Iran. Using a computer analogy, Thomas says, “The ‘software’ of the gospel will not run on the ‘hardware’ of Western church in the Middle East. . . . In fact, I don’t even think it can run in the US, and I don’t think it can run in Europe, but we’re still perpetuating this model, and we’re still selling the hardware even though we haven’t quite realized in the West that our software doesn’t run on it.”

A Majority are Women

Women play a major part in this distributed leadership. They make up about 55 percent of the Iranian-church movement and leadership. Most have endured unspeakable suffering. As one woman puts it: “Every day I ask the Lord, ‘What part of my testimony will help the person in front of me?’ The Holy Spirit shows me what part of my testimony I need to share with women. I tell that part of my testimony, and I wait on what the Holy Spirit wants me to do next. I will talk about when I was raped, or how I was beaten, or how my father didn’t love me, or my suicide attempts.”

One story comes from the experience of a girl who cannot recall a time when her father was not raping her. She says, “If God can forgive Adam and Eve after he’s given them everything, and just loved on them, then I can forgive my father that has raped me all my life.” The inserts from the movie—Fatma, Ali, and Shirin—show vignettes of other women and men now bearing Gospel fruit in the Iranian church.

Are We Being Rocked to Sleep?

The film sounds a wake-up to the West. It includes the story of a Christian couple who moved from Iran to the U.S. After living in America for a while, the wife begged her husband to return to their home country. He thought she was out of her mind. “Who wants to go back to Iran under all sorts of oppression where the sharing of your faith could bring the end of your life or brutal incarceration or rape or all sorts of horrible things?” But she insisted, explaining, “There’s a satanic lullaby here. All the Christians are sleepy—and I’m feeling sleepy.”

Iranians Who Love Israelis

Sheep Among Wolves recognizes the great gulf between Iran’s government and the church growing within its borders. The film quotes an Iranian official as saying, ““We were not created for this world. We were chosen to wage jihad. We shall fight them on a global level, not just in one spot. Our war is not a local war. We have plans to defeat the world powers. We are planning to break America, Israel, and their partners and allies. Our ground forces should cleanse the planet from the filth of their existence.”

Commenting on this official perspective, an Iranian disciple of Jesus says, “This is the message that we receive inside of Iran—that Israel loves to kill the Palestinians and watch their blood run in the streets. This is why many Iranians hate the Jews. But God transforms our perspective on the Jews when we come to Christ, and we fall in love with the Jews.”

A Biblical Parallel

After watching Sheep Among Wolves, I recalled the scene when David showed up in King Saul’s army and offered to fight Goliath. Saul, meaning well, thinks he can best protect this naïve young son of Jesse by outfitting him with his own armor. A deadly serious situation? Yes. But the episode turns comical. Watch the king, who towers over almost everyone else. He lifts his impressive bronze helmet from his royal head, stoops down, and installs it on this boy. The heavy armor sags as Saul drapes it over the much younger body. Then, over the baggy armor, the king straps his own sword on David. In The Message paraphrase, David tells Saul, “‘I can't even move with all this stuff on me. I'm not used to this.’ And he took it all off” (I Sam. 17:39).

Thinking like Saul, we Western Christians seem to believe doing church takes a lot of weighty gear. But more like David, this church in the Middle East has no need for all our heavy equipment. Apparently Jesus, who is building his church there, affirms that. One in the film says, “The Lord is using the Iranian church to speak to the church in the West.”

From our Iranian brothers and sisters, what might we learn about doing church?

Click here to watch the film on YouTube.