We continue with lessons learned from Sheep Among Wolves, Volume II, a documentary about disciple-making movements in Iran.

The film was released in 2019, but some of what I heard about the Ayatollah I’m hearing today. An October 6, 2022, editorial in the Wall Street Journal said that the Ayatollah’s actions are a “gift to secularism,” declaring correctly that “religion doesn’t flourish when it’s compulsory.”

But the Iranian believers were saying several years ago:

The best evangelist for Jesus is the Ayatollah. People are finding out that Islam is a lie. They’re 40 years into their “utopia,” and it’s not there…Mosques are empty in Iran. – From Sheep Among Wolves, Volume II

Their philosophy of ministry is that they are always discipling people, even before they become believers. Jesus did. They point out that there was A LOT the original twelve didn’t understand. With a large number of new believers, pre-believers the “church” is messy. But that’s ok:

In the graveyard, there is perfect order. Nurseries are messy. Samson wouldn’t be a leader in our churches: he had character issues, anger issues, and lust issues.

The bottom line?

The “software” of the gospel will not run on the “hardware” of the west in the Middle East. (It doesn’t run well in the US either!)

Again, it’s a film worth seeing on many levels.

Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth. (Colossians 1.5, 6, ESV)