Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: You're listening to Family Talk, the radio broadcasting division of the James Dobson Family Institute. I am that James Dobson and I'm so pleased that you've joined us today.

Roger Marsh: Well, welcome to Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh, the executive producer of the Family Talk broadcast. I'm also the Vice President of Content here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. When it comes to content, today's program is right up there with the top of the list of things that are very important to us in terms of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ through this broadcast ministry.

Today, we are continuing my conversation with Lana Silk. Lana is the President and CEO of Transform Iran Ministries. This ministry was born the very day the Islamic Revolution began and has spent more than three decades strengthening the underground church in a nation where owning a Bible can literally cost you your freedom.

Now, on the last edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, Lana Silk helped us understand the difference between nominal religion and true, costly faith—the kind that holds fast no matter the price. On today's Family Talk broadcast, she'll take us deeper into the remarkable story unfolding right now all across Iran. In the middle of a war and surveillance and uncertainty, hundreds of thousands of Iranians are turning to Jesus Christ. Lana is convinced that God is on the move in ways that we here in the United States can hardly imagine. So, let's rejoin this conversation with Lana Silk right here on today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.

Well, welcome back to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh, and we are continuing our conversation as we get into part two of my discussion with Lana Silk, who is the President and CEO of Transform Iran Ministries. Lana, it's good to have you back on the broadcast today.

Lana Silk: Thank you, Roger.

Roger Marsh: Transform Iran has been helping hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people come to faith in Christ. How are you doing so, Lana? I realize there's no simple formula, but your track record has been very successful over the years.

Lana Silk: Well, really it's about considering the barriers to the Gospel and making sure that we've overcome them. So, a lot of that just comes to access. We use all sorts of digital media, satellite TV, radio, social media, apps. We're using AI right now. We've developed an AI tool called Kairos, K-A-I-R-O-S. Viewers can check it out. It's available in 256 languages. It's kairoshat.ai.

It's these kinds of different tools that mean that Muslims in Iran who want to know about Jesus, but are either afraid to pick up a phone and call someone, or don't want to be tracked on their online activities, or don't know anyone that they could have a conversation with, could go into whichever zone they're more comfortable with and just explore and learn.

Our different tools constantly invite people to then make that personal connection with our team. They can call in or send an email and have a conversation with us. They can join digital church networks. It's a bit of a funnel, really, in just catching people wherever they feel safest.

Often radio or satellite TV and AI feel the safest for people because they feel impersonal. Then, as they start to dip their toes further in and learn more and have more questions, it just brings them in closer and closer to a digital church community, and then maybe a prayer room that meets in Zoom midweek, and then maybe make a phone call until they're ready to really make that personal connection.

Often, their human Christian community comes out of their own witness. We do send people on missions trips and we do engage in outreach in Iran, but of course we have to be very, very careful. But the reason the church is exploding in growth is because your everyday people are coming to know Jesus, finding that it's completely transformed their lives, and then bursting with it to their family and friends and communities. Sometimes at a great cost to them, but also very often great openness and people wanting to know what this Gospel is that's changed their lives, and churches are being born out of those interactions.

Roger Marsh: I'm so glad you shared that, Lana, because when I think of people who would say, "Okay, well, is it really going to church if you're doing this online?" We look at that here in the United States where people don't have to worry about getting their head blown off if they go somewhere. They don't have to worry about a threat of a bombing or something like that.

I don't mean to be overly dramatic, but the idea that even with the AI platforms, which I think is just so brilliant, when I was younger, I remember thinking, "How in the world is God going to get the Gospel into every language, into every tongue, to every tribe, every nation?" It just doesn't physically seem possible. And now with technology, you're seeing tremendous results, which has got to be so gratifying for you. Was there any internal resistance to moving in this direction, or was this just the Holy Spirit saying this is the next step?

Lana Silk: I think that because of the pioneering spirit that my parents have and how that has reproduced across the culture of Transform Iran, there's been a lot of appetite in our ministry to embrace the new and the exciting and the thing that will most quickly accelerate what God is doing.

Even then, we get surprised with how quickly these things get traction and grow. Kairos was only really released a few months ago. Within a couple of weeks, we had 130 downloads of the app. It's used all over the world. Open Doors puts out its watch list of the 10 or 30 most persecuted nations in the world. 27 of those countries now use Kairos.

Somalia, Korea, China, Sudan, all over the world in their own languages, able to have conversations, explore what Jesus's teachings were without the feeling of judgment. Some of these cultures have the culture of honor and shame, and they don't want to feel that they're exposing shameful things in their hearts to other people, but they're comfortable having a conversation with a robot. So that opens all sorts of new doors and we're seeing some wonderful testimonies come through from those kinds of activities.

Roger Marsh: Let's get into an area that is maybe a sensitive subject for a lot of people because when you think about a country that has been historically a Muslim theocracy, and the roles that people do or don't have, we see a lot of images here in the West especially of women and children being treated just inhumanely.

How do you minister to them? I would imagine it's got to be a revelation where they're reading passages like Jesus saying, "Let the little children come to me," and seeing the women as well as the men being ministered to. That's got to be just a real transformation in process. Do you have specific resources available through Transform Iran to help them?

Lana Silk: We do, yes. Jesus really did dignify women in a culture where their voice didn't matter, their testimony didn't matter, and their contribution wasn't worthy in the same way that men's contributions were. It's such a joy for us to be able to bring that example to Iranian women and to say, "This is what your Creator really thinks of you."

Bear in mind we're talking about a culture that systematically has degraded and downgraded women for decades now. Women have really bought into the lie that they're worth less. Even many women who've come to know Jesus, that's something that is ingrained in their thinking.

I remember at one of our conferences, our training events happening somewhere in the Middle East, we were talking about—it was a women's event—making a difference back in Iran. What could they do when and if they get to go back? What would they do to make a difference?

There was a woman there who was very, very smart, academically very intellectual, who had just assumed there was no high-level contribution that she would be able to make as a woman. She was talking about learning the typical trades that you would associate with women in that culture. Maybe she could be a beautician or a hairdresser. Not knocking any of those trades; if God is calling you to that, then that is wonderful.

But she seemed to have just assumed that was where God was taking her. It was so wonderful to watch the leader say to her, "But you're so gifted in this and this and this. Have you considered that one day you might be the next Minister of Education in Iran?" Just this woman really rethinking her future. "Wow, I could have that kind of impact on my country." So, there are lots of stories like that. We have a ministry called Pearl of Persia that is really designed to deal with the issues of trauma and abuse and addiction and help people overcome these hurdles, but then also relearn identity and what God says about them and find their place in the kingdom.

Roger Marsh: There's a practical side of what we're talking about here, too. Obviously the spiritual work is phenomenal. I just get so encouraged as you share these stories of the different out-reach that Transform Iran has and the ways that we as Americans can take a look at what you all are doing and support it, pray for it, whether it be tangible support or not.

There is a part—and we see this as an ongoing battle here in the United States—where there's a movement to try to secure the borders, to try to keep immigration legal and safe and productive. In all honesty, the vast majority of people who do come to immigrate into the United States do so legally and there's not a problem. But the media dramatizes the poor and despondent, and all we ever hear is they're just here seeking asylum, they're looking for help. Well, in some of those cases that's legitimate, some of those are not.

I'm sure you encounter a lot of people who are saying, "Okay, this underground church thing, I'm a Christian now, I've got to get out of here. God's leading me to a different place and I've got to find asylum and it takes resources." What kind of support are you able to provide? What kind of counsel? Is there a financial component along with that? That's a hugely loaded question, but take a moment or two here to unpack that for us if you will.

Lana Silk: It's a really, really tough road for people who want to legitimately escape that kind of persecution and come to Western countries. We have Iranian Christian refugees in Turkey who've been stuck in that system waiting for a NATO path for decades, ending up raising their children in limbo, not knowing where they'll end up, not knowing which languages to learn. It's been a very, very tough road and I know that Iranians are not the only nationalities that get caught up in that.

So, we absolutely can't generalize any of these topics. It's so nuanced and there are so many layers to it. It is true to say there are people with real need that we have a responsibility for in the West to get behind and serve and love and financially support. In a lot of these asylum cases, they do need finances. We certainly aren't in a position to be bankrolling those things. We would never be able to do it adequately. You're talking about $10,000 to $30,000 per person that you have to be able to prove that you have some kind of financial stability for the government to be willing to consider your case.

So, it's so messy. Then at the same time, you have people with evil intent, governments like Iran, who abuse these systems and use them to infiltrate their networks and their agents into Western countries to do their bidding—sometimes as a sleeper cell for years and years before they're activated. I can see the tension and I can see the arguments on both sides. There's no perfect answer to this. Without supernatural wisdom to know who the people are who are worthy of our help and who are the people who are actually up to no good and we need to be careful of, I don't know if there's any perfect solution to this.

Roger Marsh: There isn't, and yet I think God is working out His perfect will in the searching and the digging for those answers. We're grateful that there's a ministry like Transform Iran that is actually working in that area. I would imagine, too, on a more personal level, that once someone who has grown up in this horrible regime and they've been brutalized, whether emotionally or financially, physically—once they come to a saving faith in Jesus Christ, there's a part where they realize, "I've seen some stuff." What kind of trauma counseling do you make available or do you point people in the right direction for? Because I can imagine for some it must be really severe.

Lana Silk: We're actually working on an iteration of our response to this need right now because the scale of need is so great that we just can't possibly train enough counselors to meet it properly. We do have a trained trauma counselor and she has offered training and provided training to our follow-up team and our pastors who to a lesser degree can provide some kind of help to people who come through with those needs.

But you're talking about, in the best case, hundreds of people a year that we'd be able to help in that kind of intensity with the help that they need. So, our response to that has been to use AI. Kairos has been a phenomenal success in discipleship and evangelism. We have managed to, by God's grace, overcome some very significant AI issues in terms of avoiding hallucinations, ensuring it quotes Scripture accurately, ensuring it can't be manipulated or coerced to condone sin.

Once we saw that our barriers were working and it really was an effective middle step for people from that human connection to just completely out in the water, then we thought, "How can we develop it to offer counseling as well?" We are teaming it together with some very carefully curated and created scripted videos that we've just finished recording.

The website is in production. Really, this is just early stages, but in the next few months, we'll be looking at launching a website where people can go and have a dialogue with this iteration of Kairos, get help, watch the right videos, do the right activations, and have space to process these things in the interim while they're waiting to actually speak to a person. Because we're anticipating tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, will immediately need that kind of help and we can't keep up with it.

Roger Marsh: Lana, we had a conversation at the beginning of our discussion about what the leadership looks like and how, for many on the Western side of the equation, when we see headlines of war and destruction and bombs being blown up and uranium stockpiles being massacred, we realize that what's happening in Iran—there's a huge revival going on even if a lot of the church is underground.

But that leadership that you mentioned earlier that was very brutal—the Islamic type of revolution and the Islamists that were running it—now it looks like there's a leadership succession going on. A couple of the key players are no longer playing. What does that mean for the church, for everyday Iranians, many of whom are Christians, and your ministry to help them?

Lana Silk: I would say, if anything, the situation is worse in Iran today than it was before the war. The reason for that is we don't have a new regime. I've heard that in the press before; that language is totally inaccurate. We still have very much the same regime. We do have new leadership, but that new leadership is younger, has more energy, is more aggressive, and more intense in the way they're just pushing through things.

There's a sense of urgency, I think, that they have that their predecessors didn't. If we just even look at the way the new leadership in Iran has interacted with actions that the US government have taken over the last few months, there was a patience that the Islamic Republic demonstrated. For them, this was the long game; they didn't want to engage in any immediate wars. They had almost like a bigger fish to fry kind of thinking behind them.

Now you're seeing authorities that are very comfortably sending drones and missiles and whatever it takes, putting mines through the Strait of Hormuz. The sort of actions that they're taking are very different and much more aggressive than the actions that their predecessors were taking.

Internally, there's also a gloves-off kind of approach with the people. The way people are being pulled aside on streets, in cars—we had one of our pastors pulled aside in her car a few weeks ago. She was told to hand over her phone. They're just spot-checking phones and going through your chat histories and what you've interacted with on social media and trying to find evidence of anti-government activity, which of course Christianity would be included in that.

She tried to find a way out of it—"Oh, I'm sorry, was I breaking any traffic laws? Is there any reason you pulled me over?" He didn't even answer her. He just hit her so badly with the back of his rifle that he broke her jaw and her teeth. That's the kind of regime we're talking about now. There's no tolerance, there's no pretense anymore. They're just rounding people up. They're raiding people's homes and making them strip down and looking for evidence of injuries that might have occurred in the protests and then arresting them on the back of that and disappearing them; you just don't hear about those people again.

Roger Marsh: Incredible. So, you have to wonder how much of this move by the United States government was not anticipating that type of response. They were anticipating the old long game, and maybe that's why this is more of a prolonged situation there.

Lana Silk: Yeah, I think that's right. But I do think that God has—of course He's foreseen this—but I think that God is working through all of this. He is getting ready to do something spectacular in Iran. I think it was the steps that the US government took and the Israelis took that have unearthed a lot of things and exposed a lot of things. In the long term, that can only be good.

As Iranians, we're all just praying that they will follow through, that they won't be lulled into an, "Okay, now we're just getting on fine and we can just patch things up and call it a cease-fire, have a deal and move on." That would be the worst for everyone. For Iranians, Europeans, Americans—that would just buy the Iranian government time and fund them as part of this deal to get themselves reorganized for another round. But I'm sure that there's a lot more going on behind the scenes that we're not aware of in Capitol Hill, and I'm sure some of these things are already being discussed.

Roger Marsh: Well, it kind of plays in nicely with a mission statement of yours at Transform Iran, where you say your hope is not destruction but restoration. We're not trying to just go—who's got bigger weapons? We'll destroy you here and you destroy us there, and then let's get Israel involved. It's just that never-ending cycle, that endless loop.

And yet, what you're giving us hope for is the fact that Transform Iran and other ministry organizations in Iran are leading this charge of the Iranian church and taking advantage of these opportunities where God says, "Look, you might have meant this for one way, but I'm going to use it for My good," which ultimately, God's sovereignty means He always gets what He wants. It may not come about the way that we anticipated it. Lana Silk is the President and CEO of Transform Iran Ministries. We have a link for transformiran.com up at drjamesdobson.org.

Lana, as we wrap up our conversation here, how can we specifically pray? How can we as families, as parents and grandparents, but how can we as Americans here in the West who are watching this from a distance and maybe not getting the whole story, now that they've heard this conversation that you and I have had, how can we specifically engage in this battle for our brothers and sisters, in many cases new brothers and sisters, who are facing these seemingly insurmountable odds?

Lana Silk: I think the posture of our prayer is really important. Just remembering that we pray in authority to a loving God who hears us, who is very able to intervene at the right time and do the right thing, who is still sitting on His throne, who has not been defeated. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves some of these things when we look at world events and we think, "Oh my goodness, everything's gone wrong, now we're in trouble."

We don't want to be praying out of fear or desperation or begging God to do something good. God already has good things in mind that He wants to do and is inviting us really just to partner with Him and be part of that adventure of seeing God work out His purposes. I'm reminded of that Scripture that says, "If My people who are called by My name would humble themselves and pray, then I will hear them and I will heal their land." Millions of Iranians have been humbling themselves and praying for their land.

I am absolutely convinced that God is on a path to healing Iran, restoring Iran, and using Iran to display His glory. Some of the things that have been happening in world events, where you think, "Oh my goodness, I wish that leaders would do this or this instead," I think God is using all of that to ensure that no earthly government or person can take the glory for what God wants to do in Iran.

So as Christians praying, this is our starting point. Understanding God's will—that He wants to establish His throne in Elam like He says in Jeremiah. That He wants to display His glory. That He wants to come and heal this land. That He wants to bring righteousness and joy and peace that are fruits of His kingdom wherever the church is.

And then we just pray in agreement with that and we see that come through. Of course, we want to be practically involved. We send a prayer letter every month; you can sign up on our website. It will say very specific things, like certain people have been arrested, or we're launching a new Bible translation—pray for the people involved in that. Or we're about to do a whole new AI-led trauma ministry—pray for the technology behind that.

Really specific things that are exciting to get to back in prayer and then see what God is doing through that. Pray in confidence that God has good things in mind for Iran. We give a lot of guidance in that on our website. We talk about praying for the Iranian leaders, praying for those Damascus Road conversions. We talk about praying for the church, praying for courage and strength and safety. Praying for the lost who really need Jesus.

All of this death, all of this suffering is because Iranian people are desperately fighting for freedom and hope and a future. The Word of God tells us that God has already gifted that to them in Jesus. Let's pray that that's what they will find—the ultimate perfect version of those things they so desperately longing for. And then, of course, we welcome prayer for our ministry because we're front lines and we need support in that network.

Roger Marsh: Amen. Well, thank you, and we praise God for the work that your mother and father were called to start and that you and your sisters are continuing on, and everyone who supports Lana Silk and the Transform Iran ministry. Lana, thank you so much for the work that you have done and continue to do as President and CEO of Transform Iran. We've got a link for transformiran.com up at drjamesdobson.org. Lana, thank you so much for being with us today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.

Lana Silk: Thank you, Roger.

Roger Marsh: Millions of Iranians are humbling themselves before God, and Lana Silk is convinced that He is on a path to heal and restore that nation for His glory. Praise the Lord. You're listening to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, and we just heard the conclusion of my conversation with Lana Silk, President and CEO of Transform Iran Ministries.

If you missed the first half of our program, or if you'd like to share this broadcast with someone who needs to hear how God is moving in Iran, you'll find both parts one and two online at drjamesdobson.org or jdfi.org, if that's easier to remember. While you're there, be sure to follow the link to Transform Iran, where you can sign up for their monthly prayer letter and stand alongside believers on the front lines.

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Well, I'm Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk—the voice you trust for the family you love.

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