A mighty work of the Holy Spirit in ... Iran?

Wouldn't it be remarkable if God were more powerfully at work today in "radical Muslim" Iran than in "Christian" America?

This is from the Mideast coordinator of HeartCry Missionary Society:

Back in March, when I spent a few days in Turkey (one of Iran's neighboring countries) I met a few Koreans who were serving in Iran and Turkey as missionaries. If you know anything about South Korea, one element that will certainly stand out is the rapid growth of Christianity within its borders over the last 50 years. South Korea now sends out a large number of missionaries, most of whom are radical witnesses of the Gospel. These that I met were no exception. While I won't go into detail about their ministry, I will say that they are being greatly used to help the underground church in Iran.

The Korean brother told me one very encouraging statistic about the church in Iran that came as quite a shock. I know that statistics can often be misleading, however, I think this gives us a bit of insight as to what the Lord is doing in Iran.

Last year there was a large gathering of Iranian pastors in Turkey. The meeting was promoted through the underground house church (really the only kind in Iran) network and as many of these pastors as could make it made their way across the border and into Turkey.

During the course of the meetings that took place, a census was taken from all of these underground pastors in order to get an idea as to how many Christians there were in Iran. The Korean told me that he would have guessed that there were probably about 1 million Christians in the entire country, a number not much bigger than the Christian population of Iraq. However, the initial figure that was produced unveiled over 7 million Christians in the country!

To avoid an inflated number, for the sake of accuracy the census takers rounded the number down to 5 million, thinking that most likely several people were doubly represented. My Korean brother told me that he disbelieved the number at first, but said that the more he is in Iran, the more he believes the number is accurate.

Just think, almost one tenth of this radical Shiite Muslim nation is now a believer in Jesus Christ!

LINK TO FULL REPORT

Admittedly, these are very informal statistics ... but praise God for the progress of the Gospel in Iran!