ATLANTA —This past October, my husband and I joined eight Atlanta Presbyterians on a two-week Iranian journey that repeatedly challenged our expectations. We expected loads of anti-American posters; we saw exactly two (plus a billboard for a Jesus movie).
The women in our group had worked hard to pack conservative clothes and headscarves, and so we were amused to see über-fashionable Iranian ladies sporting mountains of carefully-coiffed hair with the obligatory scarf barely clinging to the summit. And from the moment of our arrival, people fell over themselves to welcome us.
At Isfahan’s Armenian Orthodox cathedral, we encountered a group of schoolgirls on a field trip. These giggling young ladies asked us to pose with them for photos while their teacher tried her best to herd them into the church. The fact that these Muslim students were taking a field trip to a church and welcomed us so warmly left us gleefully astounded.
The heart of this journey was to live into the Body of Christ, meeting brothers and sisters in a land where the Church is as old as Pentecost. It was our particular joy to visit fellow Presbyterians, members of churches whose seeds were planted by American Presbyterians in the mid-nineteenth century.
Today, the Evangelical (Presbyterian) Church of Iran has approximately 6,000 members in six congregations, most of which we visited. Our last evening was at St. Peter’s Presbyterian in Tehran. Elders came to our hotel, tucked the ten of us neatly into three cars and pulled into the always-harrowing Tehran traffic.
After a loud and swervy trip to the city center, we entered St. Peter’s compound, which was founded in 1876 for American Presbyterian missionaries, and remains in use by the Iranian church. Our guide was a gregarious elder with a storehouse of energy and mischievous sense of humor.
He showed us the compound’s library, which Tehran University students reorganized and continue to use as a resource. We saw a filled-in passageway that used to lead to the Presbyterian school, which was seized by the government after the Revolution.
St. Peter’s also hosts a Korean congregation of diplomats, businesspeople, and their families. The sanctuary, recently renovated with support from the PC(USA), is a beautiful place to worship.
Seats in the front pews were reserved for us and a congregant translated the service for us. As at the other Presbyterian services we attended, we were impressed by the number of young people and the energy flowing from the leaders. We left that night full of the Spirit, encouraged by our brothers’ and sisters’ faith, perseverance, and joy.
Editor’s note: Elizabeth Sanders and her husband, Marthame, served as PC(USA) mission workers in the West Bank from 2000 through 2003. More about their service is at the Salt Film’s Web site [www.saltfilms.net]. Their trip to Iran was a collaboration between Peachtree Church and Oglethorpe Church in Atlanta. For more about PC(USA)’s mission work in Iran, visit their Web site [www.pcusa.org/worldwide/iran]. This article first appeared in Highlights, a twice-yearly publication of Presbyterian World Mission. To subscribe, visit their home page[www.pcusa.org/worldwide/highlights.htm].
