St. Peter's was founded in 1876 by American missionaries on land granted by the Qajar monarch Naser al-Din Shah. The compound covers roughly ten acres in central Tehran and for generations has held not only the sanctuary but two schools and dozens of family homes belonging to Iran's recognized Armenian and Assyrian Christian minorities. A Revolutionary Court ruled in 1998 that the entire property should be transferred to the Execution of Imam Khomeini's Order, known by the acronym EIKO, a powerful state-controlled body with a long record of absorbing religious and private land. The Council of Evangelical Churches of Iran says it did not even learn of that ruling until 2008.
Twenty families, twenty-seven people in all, were given two weeks' notice to pack up and go. Church leaders say they were warned they would be arrested if they did not comply. With the last family gone, monitors now fear bulldozers will follow, and that a sanctuary raised by missionaries in the nineteenth century will be leveled inside the twenty-first.
United Nations human rights experts have condemned the seizure and called on Iran to reverse it and let the residents return. Their statement, issued through the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, noted that Armenians and Assyrians hold recognized minority status under Iranian law — a status that did little, in the end, to protect a church older than the Islamic Republic itself.
A People Put Out of Their Own House
Set that image beside a truth no court order can touch. A government can seize a deed. It can padlock a gate and send bulldozers up a drive. It cannot touch the actual dwelling place of a believer, because that dwelling was never the ten acres in the first place.
"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations." (Psalm 90:1)
Moses wrote those words in the wilderness, leading a people who owned no land at all, no temple, no capital city — only a promise and a pillar of fire by night. He did not say the Lord had given them a dwelling place. He said the Lord had been one. That is the harder, better thing to grab hold of. A house can be confiscated. A God who has carried His people since before the mountains were brought forth cannot be.
My friend, most of us will never be handed an eviction notice by a Revolutionary Court. But every one of us is, whether we admit it or not, a tenant somewhere we do not finally own. The bank can call the note on the house. The body can call the note on the years. Sickness moves into a life like a state order and announces the room is not yours anymore. If your peace is bolted to an address, a title, a plot of ground you can walk off and measure with your own two feet, then you are exactly as secure as those twenty families were on the eleventh of July — and no more.
"For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come." (Hebrews 13:14)
That word was written to Christians who already knew what it cost to follow Christ where the world despised Him. It was not written so they would grow careless about their homes and their labor. It was written so that when the home was taken — and for many of them it was — they would not lose their footing, because their footing had never been the house.
The families of the Qavam Church compound are Armenian and Assyrian believers whose people have kept the faith in Persia since before most Western nations had a name. Nobody needs to ask whether they loved their homes. Grief is the right and honest response to losing what a family built across generations. But this week they are also holding the oldest inheritance the church owns: the knowledge that Rome could burn Peter's city and never touch his hope, that Babylon could level the temple and never silence the psalm.
Carry these families before God even though the world will forget their names by next week. Carry the whole scattered, watched, pressured church in Iran the same way. And take the lesson home with you tonight, because it is not really a story about Tehran. It is a question about where you have built your own dwelling, and whether it will still be standing on the day your notice comes.