Christians inside Iran are discouraged but never without hope, according to Dr. Sasan Tavassoli, a missionary with The Outreach Foundation.
When the "Prisoners of Hope" podcast asked what the Church in the West should be praying for right now, his answer was simple: Regime change.
"We cannot have a regime that threatens the world, threatens the region, wants to export its revolutionary anti-Western ideology, apocalyptic Islamic radicalism," he insisted. "We cannot just make peace with them. We cannot negotiate with them."
He said Christians in Iran are discouraged and understand that from an American perspective, the war is not going well. But citing a recent report from the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN), a Netherlands-based research project, Tavassoli is encouraged that a significant portion of Iranians were seeking regime change earlier this year.
"According to their survey, about 25% of the population of Iran participated in the January protests," he relayed. "That comes to about 14 million people."
He noted that Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University who studies nonviolent resistance, has said that is more than enough to effectuate the change.
"If 3.5% of the population participates in a significant event, their cause usually wins," Tavassoli summarized. "The reason that I have hope that the Iranian regime cannot last forever is because of things like this."
And while no one knows what will trigger the regime change, he recognized that nothing is too big for God.
"As Christians, we pray that God would uproot evil from that land and bring freedom and democracy because the Iranians are hungry for it," Tavassoli said.
While high-ranking U.S. officials and the president have frequently voiced rhetorical support for a popular uprising or regime collapse in Iran, and though the Trump administration has previously attempted covert arms transfers and openly discussed the idea of arming anti-regime groups, the United States is not actively negotiating a formal deal to supply weapons to ordinary Iranian citizens.
