By Ruchelle Shifman

IN A sermon marking the international day of prayer for the persecuted church, Anglican minister Dan Gifford preached on the persecution of Christians in Iran.

Speaking to the congregation at St. John's Anglican Church in Vancouver on November 8, Gifford based his sermon on the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr.

He focused on two young Iranian women, Marzieh Amirizadeh and Maryam Rustampoor, who were being held in Evin Prison in Tehran for converting from Islam to Christianity.

Gifford spoke of Maryam and Marzieh's strong faith. When they were in court in August, despite pressure from the prosecutor to renounce their faith, the two believers refused to deny Jesus. Gifford compared the two to Stephen, whose story is told in Acts 6 and 7. Like Stephen, the two women have been empowered with boldness through the Holy Spirit to talk about Jesus, he said.

The pair were released from prison November 18. However, the Open Doors ministry -- which began an e-mail campaign for the women months ago -- issued a news release cautioning that "their release does not automatically mean they will be living in complete freedom now."

Fifty copies of Iran 30, a booklet about the Iranian Christian church's prayer needs published by Elam Ministries, have been distributed to the St. John's congregation to encourage them to pray for Iran.

This is not the first time St. John's has focused on Iran.

Mahnaz and Ebrahim Imani (not their real names), a Christian couple who escaped from Iran, have since found a home at St. John's.

An art student at Tehran's Open University, Mahnaz was just 18 when she was first taken to the notorious Evin Prison. Like other young people, Mahnaz was fed up with the restrictions of the Islamic regime. "We weren't protesting about having to wear scarves," says Mahnaz. "We wanted basic freedoms such as freedom of thought, expression and religion. We were fed up with seeing journalists imprisoned for expressing their views."

Mahnaz's beliefs took her in and out of prison over a period of six years. "I was imprisoned many times, for periods of between 10 days and four months," she says. "I was both in solitary confinement and in crowded cells."

The last time that Mahnaz was arrested she was found to be wearing a cross, while Ebrahim was carrying a Bible. "I always wore a cross, but with the type of clothing that we wore in Iran, no one could see the cross. Then, when they searched me, they found the cross," says Mahnaz.

Once the Islamic police found evidence that the Imanis were Christians, they conducted a full search of their home and found Christian literature. "Our computer was confiscated and, of course, it contained a lot of evidence that we were Christians," she says.

Christian prisoners receive particularly harsh treatment in Iranian prisons, alleges Mahnaz. "The Iranian regime considers apostasy -- conversion to another faith from Islam -- to be the worst of all crimes," she says. "They say Islam permits the execution and rape of Apostates, but they also rape political prisoners, men, women, girls and boys."

Mahnaz says she has known many people who were raped. "The guards told me gleefully that the rape of converts and infidels was permitted in Islam. They told me Christians were allowed to have many husbands, so rape was not an issue."

The raping of prisoners in Iranian prisons has been going on for the last 30 years, according to Mahnaz. "We knew about it long before [it] became international news," she says.

Girls due to be executed are raped systematically in Iranian prisons because Islam forbids the execution of virgins, says Mahnaz.

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The Imanis' final prison term lasted four months and, during that time, the couple had no news of each other. "We were blindfolded whenever we were taken out of our cells. We were then taken up and down staircases and along long corridors. Sometimes, we were tricked into tripping up over obstacles that did not exist," says Mahnaz.

The Imanis were finally released from prison under strict orders to not take part in any further political activity. Mahnaz was also expelled from university. The couple went underground for six years before being forced to escape Iran via the harsh mountain terrain that lies between Iran and Turkey.

The escape to Turkey, however, brought little relief to the Imanis. The couple had no passports and were imprisoned in Turkey as illegal immigrants. "We spent eleven months in a Turkish prison, where conditions were even worse than those in Iranian prisons," says Mahnaz.

The couple finally came to the attention of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and were given refugee status. They were then allowed to leave prison while they waited two further years in Turkey for a host country to accept them.

"While we waited, we received no financial help from any organization," says Mahnaz. "In Turkey, refugees do not have work permits and have to work in the black economy. Conditions were so bad that cardboard containers and fruit boxes became like gold dust. Iranian refugees collect these to burn for heat in the harsh winters."

It was at this point that Nazanin Afshin-Jam, an Iranian Christian and former Miss Canada, became involved with the Imanis and campaigned to get them admitted to Canada. She is a human rights activist, and co-founder of the non-political human rights group Stop Child Executions.

Afshin-Jam took the cause of the Imanis to a Parliamentary International Human Rights Subcommittee in Ottawa. As a result, the Imanis were finally able to obtain Canadian immigration visas and arrived in Vancouver earlier this year. The couple was able to connect up with St. John's.

"Through our involvement with another Iranian refugee, our church community has become sensitized to the plight of those fleeing religious persecution in Iran," says Sandy Harmel, a member of St John's and a friend of the Imanis.

"In the Canadian church, we have no inside knowledge of 'persecution unto death' for our faith," says Harmel. "We know nothing about escaping our country for the sake of the Gospel and losing our family, language and heritage. We have much to learn from these persecuted ones. As our rector, David Short, said recently, we need these folks as part of our community, more than they need us!"

Harmel says having refugees in the congregation gives them a taste of what Heaven will be like because, according to Revelation 5:9, "[Christ's] redeemed church will come from every tribe and language and people and nation."

St. John's, says Alan Sheen, senior volunteer member of staff for Afshin-Jam's office, "has been so helpful and unbelievably generous in settling them in their new environment in Vancouver. We do not know how the Imanis could have managed to settle in comfortably without their help."

Talking from her Vancouver home, Mahnaz says she loves Canada but she cannot forget all those people still in prison in Iran. "I am sitting here on my balcony on a beautiful day in Vancouver, but I keep thinking that someone is being interrogated in an Iranian prison right now, someone is being raped," she says. "I suffer for the people who are in prison in Iran, both the religious prisoners and the non-religious prisoners.

"When I told people in my church about what we had been through, they sat down and cried. Then they said that they would pray for Iran every Sunday. The empathy of Canadian Christians was very precious for me because, when you are in prison, you feel that no one is hearing your voice."

November 26/2009