Reza Mohammadi was a software engineer in Tehran who had secretly converted to Christianity in 2018 through an underground house church. In Iran, apostasy from Islam can carry the death penalty. Reza attended his house church with extreme caution — changing locations weekly, using encrypted communication, and telling no one outside the fellowship. But he felt a growing conviction that the Gospel needed to reach more people than the twenty who gathered in living rooms.
The Anonymous Platform
In 2021, Reza built an encrypted website and Telegram channel where he posted daily Bible reflections in Farsi. He used a VPN, a pseudonym ("Mehrdad"), and routed the site through servers in three countries. The content was simple: a Bible verse, a short reflection in conversational Farsi, and a prayer. He posted every day at six a.m. Tehran time. Within three months, the channel had five hundred subscribers. Within six months, two thousand. By 2023, the platform had twelve thousand active followers — mostly in Iran, but also in Afghanistan, Iraq, and among the Iranian diaspora.
The Secret Believers
What stunned Reza was not the numbers but the messages. Thousands of Iranians were secret believers — people who had encountered Jesus through dreams, through satellite television, through the Farsi Bible that circulated in digital form across the country. They had no community. They could not attend church. They prayed alone. Reza's platform became their church — a digital fellowship where they could ask questions, request prayer, and know they were not alone. One message, from a woman in Mashhad, read: "I have followed Jesus for three years. You are the first Christian I have ever spoken to."
The Close Call and the Migration
In late 2023, Iranian cyber police began investigating the channel. Reza received a warning from a contact in the diaspora community that the platform had been flagged. He migrated the entire operation to a new encrypted platform in forty-eight hours, losing no subscribers. He has since trained twelve other secret believers to create and manage similar channels in Arabic, Kurdish, and Dari. Reza never shows his face. He has never met most of his subscribers. He may never meet them. "I am a programmer," he says. "I write code. But the best code I ever wrote was the code that brought the Bible to twelve thousand people who had no other way to read it. God does not need a church building. He needs a connection."