Chapter 2 “Into the Commonwealth Stage” The Old Mission of the Evangelical Church

The Evangelical Church of Tehran

Presbyterian churches in Iran consisted of three “knots of members.”¹² There were ethnolinguistic Armenian and Assyrian Christians who embraced the reformed tradition and turned to born-again Christianity, and there were “Persian” converts from other religions.¹³ Iranian Protestants, reformed or converted, did not always adhere to Presbyterian doctrine, but it was because of American evangelicals that they or their families experienced a “paradigm shift in their ordered view of life from one perspective to another.”¹⁴ There are many layers of “conversion,” a process that radically alters the relationship between self, society, and world.¹⁵ In Iran, the choice was to leave one’s church, temple, or mosque to become a Protestant in a Muslim-majority society. This could lead to social ostracization, legal exclusion, charges of apostasy, and even death.¹⁶ Iranians who became Protestants experienced a considerable degree of ontological insecurity, not only for religious reasons, but because their mission was at once enabled and frustrated by their American partners and shifts in US-Iran relations. The Presbyterian Mission’s church in Tehran had at least three incarnations prior to the commonwealth stage, during its colonial history from 1876 to 1935.

The first Protestant church in Tehran was Armenian, and it opened in March 1876, a decade before the acquisition of Central Compound on Qavam al-Saltaneh. James Bassett, the founder of the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran, dedicated the church with eleven Armenians who, after experiencing a “change of heart,” parted with the “national” Apostolic church to congregate with American evangelicals. Three of the Armenians were elected elders and two became deacons of the new church. One of the deacons was Carapet Hagopian, who led the church for decades. Proselytizing was dangerous business in Iran, but the Tehran church sent evangelists to surrounding villages to reach more Armenians. The reaction from Apostolic Armenian leaders was swift. They denounced Protestantism, outlawed their flock from attending revivals, and banned Protestants from Apostolic church cemeteries. Until the First World War, the PCUSA’s church-planting mission in the Iranian capital centered on the Armenian Evangelical Church of Tehran.¹⁷ After its first decade, this church congregated at the Presbyterian Mission’s Central Compound.

At first, American Presbyterians engaged Iran’s ethnolinguistic Christians—Armenians in the capital and Assyrians in the northwest—but in the early twentieth century they turned attention toward Muslims and other Persian-speakers.¹⁸ The Persian side of Iranian Protestantism included charismatic converts and prominent families. As the Pahlavi state forced its citizens to take surnames, some converts assumed Christian names such as Masih [Christ] or Salibi [Cross].¹⁹ One such individual was Rajab Ali Nozad. He was born into a Muslim family and, after being baptized by American missionaries, took the name “Nozad,” meaning “newborn.” Among other positions, he worked at the Iranian Majles, for the Presbyterian Mission, and as a churchman in Tehran.²⁰ Other Persian-speaking churchgoers hailed from multigenerational Protestant families. The Nakhosteens were, to Americans, “one of our outstanding families of Moslem converts.”²¹ Adl Nakhosteen was secretary of the Iranian Bible Society from 1936 to 1966, and in the early 1960s he pastored a church and coordinated a Bible translation project.²² Adl’s brother, Ahmad, was on the Alborz College faculty, and he and other Persian Protestants had close ties to Americans such as Samuel Martin Jordan.²³

As they had done with Tehran’s Armenian evangelicals in 1876, the Americans opened a mission church in 1924 for the city’s Persian-speaking converts. While other groups had traditionally used the Presbyterian Mission’s chapel, the Persian-speakers constructed a separate building on Central Compound known as the “prayer room.”²⁴ Though located in downtown Tehran, the money to build and furnish the church came from around the world.²⁵ And though it was on a foreign compound, the house of worship was for Iranians. Their missionary sponsors were proud in 1924 that “the outstanding movement in the Teheran Evangelical Church during the past year has been that towards more definite self government.” As Americans understood the situation: “We have been preaching … and they have heard and are answering: ‘we accept your challenge.’ ” The challenge was for Iranian converts to establish a church, which meshed with “their desire to hold church services separate from the Armenians and Americans.”²⁶ Thus began a trend whereby Tehran’s Protestants, whatever their language or ethnicity, conducted business together but worshiped separately, as signified by the construction of the Persian prayer room on Central Compound.²⁷ For the next decade, the Persian-speakers and Armenians “were so distinct that they were practically separate churches.”²⁸ Despite their differences, the Presbyterian Mission sponsored both churches, which, prior to the Second World War, congregated in separate spaces on the walled-in grounds on Qavam al-Saltaneh.

Organizationally, however, what had been the Armenian Evangelical Church was now the Evangelical Church of Tehran. In addition to dropping “Armenian” from the name of the city church, a restructuring agreement divided the six church elders evenly between its two constitutive groups. In the first year, one missionary worked with Rajab Ali Nozad and his Armenian colleagues to govern the city church. They wrote a constitution that opened twelve deaconships to “both men and women.”²⁹ In contrast to the ABCFM’s Congregationalist ecclesiastical polity in Iran, which allowed local churches relative autonomy, the Presbyterians were institutionalists who imposed a hierarchical governance structure on Iranian churches.³⁰

What happened to the city church in 1920s Tehran had played out earlier and on a larger scale among the Assyrians of northwest Iran in the late nineteenth century. Assyrian evangelicals embraced Presbyterianism and used Syriac words for “synod” and “presbytery” as they built their church governance structure.³¹ In 1873, the Assyrians of Urmia formed Iran’s first internationally recognized presbytery. It was attached to the PCUSA’s Synod of New York, where the Board of Foreign Missions was located. In Iran, the Assyrians governed their church through a Knusha, which functioned as a synod and oversaw the presbyteries in northwest Iran. In 1890 the Assyrian Evangelical Church joined the Pan-Presbyterian Alliance. A year later, in 1891, American missionaries chartered the Eastern Persia Presbytery. Tehran was part of this presbytery, which was also part of the New York Synod.³² But the Assyrian community, which was now divided between the Church of the East and evangelical Presbyterianism, was concentrated in northwest Iran. Prior to its decimation during the First World War, the Assyrian Evangelical Church was relatively healthy, with its own church government and clergy.³³ With the exception of the Assyrians, however, Iranian evangelicals were ambivalent about the Presbyterian form of church government.

Nevertheless, the Presbyterian Mission unified all of its churches in northern Iran under one governance structure between 1932 and 1934. The process began in March 1932, when Carapet Hagopian—a leader of Tehran’s Armenian evangelicals for more than a half-century and an English professor at Alborz College—declared his members ready to be “united” with the other Presbyterian Mission churches of northern Iran.³⁴ In July 1932, the Assyrian Evangelical Knusha issued a formal invitation to all of the mission churches to unite. In 1933, an Assyrian named Rabi Stephen Khubyar and Ahmad Nakhosteen of Tehran comoderated an all-church conference in Hamadan, where the delegates wrote a proposal for unification, which was approved in 1934. Each presbytery, or anjoman, included clergy and laity, and the three regional districts sent delegates to the Synod, or ettehadieh. Under this arrangement, the Assyrian Evangelical Knusha became the Northern Anjoman. The Eastern Persia Presbytery, based in Tehran, became the Eastern Anjoman, and the West represented such cities as Kermanshah and Hamadan. Thirteen of the first fifteen elders were Iranian, and three were from Tehran. Mirza Jollynoos Hakim and Baron Nariman Nicogossian represented the city’s Persians and Armenians, respectively, and Merat Ibrahimian was an elder in Tehran and the church’s first moderator. The Evangelical Church of Tehran was now one piece of the Evangelical Church of Iran, whose first communion in August 1934 was held “a hundred years to the day since the arrival of the first American missionary in Iran.”³⁵

Two separate responses—indicative of the divergent views of American and Iranian evangelicals—came from New York and Tehran. Iranian church autonomy from the New York Synod required approval from the PCUSA’s General Assembly, which came on June 6, 1935. The American churchmen “rejoice[d] to welcome to the fellowship of the evangelical Church throughout the world this new Church of Iran,” which, to their mind, was “so largely the product of the work of the missionaries.” After decades of having “carried this ancient country upon its heart and in its prayers,” they were certain that “the most glorious days of Christianity in past centuries may be surpassed by the service and faith of this new Church.”³⁶

In Iran, there were unhappy Armenian and Assyrian evangelicals. Both groups were, for their own reasons, nervous about being too closely attached to American missionaries and the Persian-speaking convert church. The Armenians of Tehran who felt slighted by the city church merger of the 1920s were infuriated to see a similar process unfold across northern Iran in the 1930s. A. J. Zakaryan saw the new ecclesiastical polity, specifically the Synod, “as the ‘Mission’ in another shape and form.” Because American missionaries effectively controlled it, Zakaryan recalled, “I did not favor at all the setting up in 1935 of a Presbyterian form of church in Iran.” As a result, some longtime Armenian church-goers parted from the Presbyterian Mission. As Zakaryan described it: “The storm came and the federated church had to face its consequences.”³⁷ The Assyrians had similar grievances about the developments of the interwar years. Assyrian Evangelical Church leaders told their partners from the United States that “our people, to the last man left in the East, or in America, shall remain grateful to your Board.” However, in a letter to the missionaries, Samuel Joseph and Yoshia Rabi Pera Amrikhas also wrote that, “It is regretful to point out that the Mission in Iran changed its policy, from the early twenties.” Instead of concentrating on Iranian Christians, the Presbyterians pursued converts from other religions, which meant establishing “Persian Churches” and “inviting all to join in fellow-ship.” To the Assyrians, “This was a fatal decision, on the part of your Mission, towards our people.”³⁸

The colonial stage of church-mission relations might have ended in 1935, but the Evangelical Church of Iran was mired in a commonwealth relationship with its American patrons until 1965. The church was nominally independent. But the Presbyterian governance structure frustrated many Iranians, and the Americans took half measures to keep the church they planted in Tehran dependent on the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions for money, staffing, property, and overall support. Even more, the Presbyterian Mission ran institutions—hospitals, clinics, schools, and cultural foundations—which dwarfed the work of the church and shifted resources away from Iranian Protestants and toward Iranian Muslims. The question of church-mission relations was a perpetual “thorn” between American and Iranian Christians between 1935 and 1965. During the commonwealth stage of US-Iran relations, most Americans told themselves that “the average man in the pew actually knows very little about what the Church is doing, and he feels that the Mission, in any case, is really in charge.”³⁹

While the Evangelical Church of Iran’s national congregation stagnated between its creation in 1935 and the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in 1965, the Christian population of Tehran exploded during the same period. In the mid-1950s the Evangelical Church of Tehran had 1,247 members, just below half of the national membership. While Assyrians were the largest group of evangelicals in the country, Armenians and Persians had historically been the main Protestant communities in the capital. However, internal migration shifted the balance between ethnolinguistic groups, and in the mid-1950s there were 547 Persians, 475 Assyrians, and 225 Armenians attending services in Tehran.⁴⁰ Evangelical Protestants were “a minority within a minority,” but non-evangelical Christians also gravitated toward Tehran after the Second World War.⁴¹ When considering the entire Iranian Christian population, 20 percent lived in Tehran in the 1940s compared to 61 percent in the 1960s.⁴² While past centers of Iranian Christianity were Urmia and Isfahan, Tehran was the capital of Iranian Christendom between 1935 and 1965. However, the Evangelical Church of Tehran was never simply for Iranian Protestants. It was a base from which American evangelicals pursued their own mission. In the 1940s and 1950s that meant supporting the expansion of US hard power into the Persian Gulf during the Second World War and, thereafter, waging Cold War with religious righteousness.

GI Jimmie Meets the Iran Mission

The US occupation of Iran during the Second World War temporarily transformed the intra-Christian evangelical mission into an intra-American one between Presbyterian missionaries and US soldiers. The wartime colony that was the stage of this transformation was, to borrow from the historian Brooke Blower, a “seemingly eccentric, out-of-the-way scene” that, despite its eccentricities and historical inaccessibility, “gets to the heart of the nature of U.S. state and empire building.” The war made the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran like other US bases, enclaves, and colonies; it became a means of US power projection and global management.⁴³ Tehran was also a site of “duality” where Americans felt as if they were “at once abroad and at home.” Missionaries and soldiers served different masters, but both attempted “to define themselves by reference to their distant homeland.” There was not, in early 1940s Tehran, the kind of “America Town” that the scholar Mark Gillem found at other more contemporary US military outposts. But Americans in Tehran sought “familiarity” through each other’s company in a shared place. After the upheavals of the late Reza Shah period, the sudden and exponential growth of the American colony during the war enabled the Presbyterian Mission to reclaim its ontological security by going “homeward bound.”⁴⁴ The convergence of the sacred and secular American missions was nowhere more evident than in a Presbyterian Mission film titled “GI Jimmie Meets the Iran Mission.”⁴⁵

The Presbyterian pursuit of ontological security and the US government’s national security interests converged in Iran, which was, for the United States, among the largest noncombat theaters of the Second World War. In summer 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed that the Persian Gulf was a region where early Allied cooperation could prove consequential. Operations in the Gulf relieved Washington’s beleaguered ally in London and preserved access to the region’s oil, especially the British-controlled refinery in Abadan. In addition to economic considerations, Iran was a land bridge between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea and a convenient route for shipping American Lend-Lease aid northward to the Soviet Union. The Moscow Protocol of October 1941 began the process. When the US Army opened the first American military mission in Iran, “feverish military planning” began for a “war in the outposts” of the Persian Gulf. Lend-Lease aid bound for Russia began to arrive in January 1942, just as the “Big Three” signed a treaty with the shah that gave the Allied powers near total control of his country until the war ended.⁴⁶ For cooperating, the Pahlavi government was rewarded with an aid package in May 1942.⁴⁷

The soldiers, technicians, and engineers with the Persian Gulf Command displaced missionaries as the majority group of Americans in Iran.⁴⁸ The first 5,500 soldiers arrived in December 1942, and the Persian Gulf Command reached peak size in August 1943 with a troop strength of thirty thousand. Whereas the missionaries operated in small enclaves in Iran’s northern cities, the US military roved through a six hundred–mile corridor that hugged the western edge of the country. Many Americans unloaded ships and upgraded facilities in southern ports, some were closer to their Soviet liaisons in the north, and others were stationed at camps in between to develop transportation infrastructure and oversee the expedient passage of aid. The Lend-Lease Administration (later Foreign Economic Administration) had headquarters in Tehran, where the US Army built Camps Amirabad and Atterbury. To borrow from the historian Ashley Jackson, the soldiers at those camps “did not face enemy bombs and bullets, but service in Iran presented its own challenges.” Soldiers fell ill and were killed by disease and in accidents, and the infusion of young, foreign men into a Muslim-majority country created many social problems.⁴⁹ Because Tehran was the “gateway of supply,” its streets put on “war’s fashion show” as uniformed soldiers from the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union roamed the streets of a city that resembled “old Harbin.”⁵⁰

One of those American soldiers was “GI Jimmie,” the subject of the Presbyterian Mission film and an actual person named Jimmie Drake. He was a graduate of the Ohio State University, stationed at Camp Amirabad with the 301st Army Service Forces, and played trombone in the band.⁵¹ The Presbyterian Mission’s silent film that bore his name was compiled during the war and produced around 1945 to document the encounter between missionaries and soldiers in wartime Tehran. A slide in the film explained that, when “a certain GI named ‘Jimmie’ heard of an American Mission and decided to investigate” downtown Tehran, he found the chapel at Central Compound on “a strip of desert that now blossoms like the rose.” There, he made “friends” and worshipped with “Mission members and real American children.” Later, “a ‘missionary kid’ takes him on a tour of Teheran.” In addition to introducing Jimmie to the capital, the Del Be Del network provided him with a sense of home and belonging. In wartime Tehran, “it was just too much ‘GI.’ ” As the film characterized the scene, it was “GI this and GI that; GI shoes and GI hat; GI brush, and GI comb; and GI wish that I were home.” In this context, ontological security could be found in the most familiar routines, such as when the missionaries threw Jimmie a birthday party and, with each bite of dessert, “the cake has the home he longs for.”⁵²

But the missionaries enjoyed Jimmie’s company, too, enough to make a film about him in 1945 and for the children of missionaries to reflect fondly about the encounter sixty-five years later. The soldiers helped the Presbyterians with various projects. As examples, they signed out Army jeeps for out-of-city excursions with their newfound friends, and they helped the children of missionaries charter the Boy Scouts of America’s Tehran troop number one. According to a 2010 interview with the children of John and Ruth Elder: “There were some big events that Jimmy Drake and other soldiers took us to,” including variety shows. “When you have musician friends in the army, you can learn all kinds of interesting things” from the local gossip chain and about the intrigue of power politics. Whether one considers world-shaping summits or day-to-day routines, members of the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran recalled that, during the war years, “we felt we were legit.”⁵³

Despite the militarization of the American colony, the Presbyterians enjoyed the facelift and liked their compatriots. Missionary careerists were taken aback because “never before had we seen US soldiers in this country.” They admired “the fine new roads which have been built by the Allies across the length and breadth of the land,” and they watched “thousands of American trucks speeding over these deserts loaded with all kinds of goods needed in the north.”⁵⁴ It was, to another missionary, “very novel and pleasant to have crowds of American soldiers about,” as “hardly a day goes by that we are not in contact with them.”⁵⁵ The Presbyterians in Iran were, like many American Protestants, swept up during the war in a “spirit of righteous nationalism.” The US Federal Council of Churches, of which the PCUSA was a member, supported the war. And while overseas missionaries tended to be less jingoistic than evangelicals at home, that was not the case with the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran. Whether because Iran was a noncombat theater, or because Presbyterian missionaries were both Christian and American, the “heady mix of patriotism and faith” that the historian Andrew Preston identified in the wartime United States flew like a flag in the breeze in occupied Tehran.⁵⁶

Wartime expressions of national mission were routinized through patriotic rituals that involved evangelicals and soldiers. On one Memorial Day, a long-serving missionary visited the US Army camp to the north of Tehran. In contrast to Great Britain and the Soviet Union, she did not consider the United States an occupying power. Quite the contrary. From her view, “the majestic, snow-capped Alborz mountains looked down on an army very different from the many which had marched across the Iranian plateau in centuries past.” The missionaries interpreted the US military presence less in terms of occupation or conquest than in relation to their own subjectivities and lived experiences. “After years of comparative isolation,” that same missionary wrote, “the ramifications of this Great War had brought to the land of the Medes and Persians many of our countrymen.” Having been abroad during the first Great War, Presbyterian Mission careerists were relieved to not again experience the “peculiar sense of deprivation in being far from one’s homeland in time of war.” To them, the soldiers were “our boys.” Whether passing in the streets or dining in homes, the missionaries felt “a sense of ownership” toward their fellow Americans.⁵⁷ While the Presbyterian Mission’s properties typically facilitated relations between people of different national, ethnolinguistic, and religious backgrounds, Presbyterians and GIs shared nationalist sentiments at mission properties, churches, and homes during the war.

In a tangible expression of shared mission, the Presbyterians leased the grounds of the shuttered Hospital Compound to Uncle Sam for three years beginning in fall 1942. Given that the property was vacant, it seemed like a practical decision and, given the wartime context, a patriotic one.⁵⁸ Writing from New York, J. L. Dodds informed the US Department of State that, after receiving the recommendation from a committee of missionaries in Tehran, the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions “voted to authorize the Iran Mission to lease the property to the United States Army for the duration of the war.” The arrangement was to be reviewed annually, and the terms of the contract were to “be considered reasonable by the Mission and the Army in consultation.” This was official business, and the Board of Foreign Missions requested that the US government communicate its wishes through the legation in Tehran.⁵⁹ The contract was signed on September 30, 1942, by the treasurer of the Presbyterian Mission and an officer with the Persian Gulf Command’s Quartermaster Corps. It went into effect on October 1, when the missionaries agreed “to hand over and to surrender possession to the Government” of the Hospital Compound. The US government paid $400 per month in rent and was contractually bound to use the property “as a hospital … and for no other purpose.” A final stipulation stated that the American military “expressly agrees not to store any arms, ammunition, or other war material therein.” This was the only limit to the ties between the Presbyterian Mission and the US Army in wartime Tehran.⁶⁰

The Presbyterian Mission benefited for years to come from the expansion and modernization that military funding and efficiency brought to the Hospital Compound. Barracks went up to house soldiers, and the army installed a deeper well with an engine-fueled pump that provided bountiful quantities of clean water.⁶¹ At first, the military used the hospital as just that, a hospital. After the military constructed a new hospital in Tehran, the compound became a rest-and-recreation center for American GIs.⁶² Late in the war, the missionaries understood their old stomping grounds as a place “for men who come up for a few days to get away from the heat of the Gulf” and spend some time in “the garden.”⁶³ Officers relaxed in the McDowell House, and the grounds were “full of GI’s [sic] sitting around reading under trees, riding bicycles, or pitching baseball, while radios blare.”⁶⁴ All of this added some general excitement and familiarity to American expatriate life. Missionaries paid weekly visits to the Hospital Compound, “and in this way came to know many lonely men who were glad to see someone who was not in uniform.”⁶⁵

Central Compound, where the different branches of the Evangelical Church met, was just as bustling. During the war, English-speaking soldiers from the United States and Great Britain “added another valued color to the prism of church life.” The Presbyterians had, in the past, held small English-language services for their children and the handful of other Americans in the city. But the Allied occupation created demand for multiple English services at the mission chapel. In addition to scalar growth, the English-speaking community diversified during the war. Christians of all denominations attended church services, as did British nationals, who did not yet have an Anglican institution in the city. Because the Presbyterians had a monopoly on English-language Protestantism in Tehran, soldiers “made the Mission their spiritual home.”⁶⁶ On Sunday mornings the pews turned into “a sea of khaki suits and ruddy faces” with islands of decorated military brass and attentive army chaplains. African Americans were, by federal mandate, 10 percent of US fighting forces, and the demographics of the Persian Gulf Command were no exception. Black soldiers made an impression as “the first of the soldiers to preach in their singing the Gospel message to the people of Iran.”⁶⁷ They were also, by most accounts, “the first American colored people ever to come to Iran.”⁶⁸ As an American evangelist reported home about the church in Iran: “There is no Jim Crow law here.”⁶⁹ Whatever the denomination, nationality, or race, visitors told the missionaries that “your beautiful little church under the trees of the quiet mission compound will not be easily forgotten.”⁷⁰

Wherever the interaction, the Presbyterian Mission was conjoined with “America” through domesticated tropes of home. There were many GI Jimmies, and to the soldiers’ missionary hosts, “it has seemed to mean so much to them to be in a home, to sit down to an attractive table with food which did not come out of tin cans—and afterwards to use the easy chairs and the radio in the living room.”⁷¹ American GIs affirmed that mission properties gave them “a home away from home.”⁷² As one group of soldiers confessed, “When we left the States we didn’t know where we were going … or if we would ever see another American outside of us boys.” Then, the group continued, “one evening we came into Teheran and found this church.” The “devoted friends” of the missionaries felt “relief” upon learning that they would “be able to worship God in an American church in this strange land.”⁷³ Another soldier wrote a “glowing tribute” to their favorite missionary host. “His home has been an oasis for the soldiers who have visited there—a bit of Tennessee transplanted to the heart of Persia.” Missionaries were, to this estimation, “the greatest morale builders” in “rendering invaluable aid and comfort to our soldiers stationed near their home.”⁷⁴ After two years in Tehran, Jimmie Drake had become familiar enough with the missionaries and their mission to feel as if “I’m almost a part of it.”⁷⁵

“It” meant different things to different people, but to Americans in Tehran it implied a convergence of religious and national missions during the Second World War. “It” was symbolized by Franklin Roosevelt’s stay in Tehran in late 1943 when, on the occasion of the first Allied war conference, the US president had a street named in his honor. The missionaries “had a thrill watching President Roosevelt” as his security detail was “whisking him about in the byways of Teheran.”⁷⁶ A contradiction of the commonwealth stage of US-Iran relations was that, as Roosevelt committed to Iran’s independence in the Tehran Declaration of 1943, the US occupation drastically expanded the size of the American colony in Iran.⁷⁷ When the colony contracted in late 1945, the missionaries were sad that “many of our British and American soldier friends had gone away.” In spring 1946, with US Army chaplains gone, a Presbyterian Mission preacher “buried the last American soldier to be laid to rest.”⁷⁸ That marker notwithstanding, “it”—or the convergence of Presbyterian and American missions in Tehran—continued into the Cold War.

Consequently, the US government presence transformed Tehran’s built environment and further reoriented the Presbyterian Mission’s place in the city. In 1944, the US State Department bumped up its legation in Tehran to embassy status. In 1951, the US embassy relocated to Takht-e Jamshid Avenue, a street named after the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis. There, less than one mile from Central Compound, the US embassy came to be known as a “nest of spies.”⁷⁹ As US influence in Iran increased during the Cold War, Roosevelt Street, which ran past the US embassy, was joined on city maps by Eisenhower and Kennedy Avenues.⁸⁰ In this context, the Presbyterian Mission did not only work with Iranian Christians, but American ones, too, and the flow of English-speaking Christians into Tehran during the Cold War led to the establishment of Community Church. In 1953 the Federal Council of Churches provided seed money to establish the new church, which, while technically independent from the Presbyterian Mission, held services at the chapel on Central Compound for more than a decade before finding its own property. While Community Church was formally established during the Cold War, its origins as an international English-speaking congregation date to the Second World War, when thousands of soldiers collided with the Presbyterian Mission and reoriented its place in Tehran.⁸¹

Evangelicals and soldiers in Tehran found ontological security in life during wartime through invocations of shared home. However, these developments were politically controversial signs that American global hegemony would become locally manifest in Iran. Missionary activity in Iran was always problematic, but the Presbyterian Mission’s brush with the Persian Gulf Command marked its “end of innocence.”⁸² With the benefit of hindsight, some missionaries knew that many Iranians “could not understand why the United States had joined forces with the Russians and British in World War II.” The occupation was “a great blow to American prestige” and led the United States to be, in the minds of many Iranians, “classified with their enemies.”⁸³ But these new realities took time for Americans to comprehend. At the time, the Iranian theater was a “bridge to victory” for the Allies, and the Presbyterian Mission was a bridge to home for GI Jimmie.⁸⁴ In wartime Tehran, the ontological security of the Presbyterians and the national security of the US government were one and the same.

Cold War Church

The Second World War and Cold War were “crusades,” or religio-nationalist endeavors to remake the US mission in Iran and around the world. The historian Andrew Preston explained that, to Presbyterian statesmen such as George Kennan, John Foster Dulles, and Dwight Eisenhower, “Soviet communism seemed to present not just a rival ideology but a rival religion.” During the first decade of the Cold War, Preston wrote that the US government’s “high priests” saw a world divided between “fanatical atheism and true religion” and staged “a moral offensive that only religious faith could muster.” The Presbyterian Mission’s preachers—John Elder and William Miller—shared those views and waged “religious Cold War” in Iran. Elder and Miller were, in Tehran, what Kennan, Dulles, and Eisenhower were in Washington: Presbyterian architects of the US strategy of containment.⁸⁵ Elder and Miller defined ontological security in relation to evangelical mission and the ideologies of Cold War. Between 1946 and 1953, the Presbyterian Mission did not inform US and Iranian government policies, but the missionaries, like statesmen, opposed the rival ideologies of communism and postcolonial nationalism.

The two Americans responsible for the religious life of the Evangelical Church of Iran hailed from different parts of the United States with competing Presbyterian traditions. John Elder boasted that he had “the blood of Puritan preachers in my veins.”⁸⁶ Born in Tidioute, Pennsylvania, he studied at Washington and Jefferson College and Chicago’s McCormick Theological Seminary. He entered missionary service after the First World War and lived in Iran with his partner, Ruth, until the mid-1960s. During the postwar decades, John Elder was mission secretary, taught at schools, chaired committees, published books, and organized relief work. Elder was, in other words, an elder of the Presbyterian Mission. Beyond all else, he was devoted to the Evangelical Church. He was involved with church governance, and, after leading churches in Kermanshah and Hamadan, he moved to Tehran to serve as lead pastor.⁸⁷ John Elder was an institutionalist, and the business of the Evangelical Church was carried out through committees on media, education, law, and literature.⁸⁸ Elder chaired the literature committee and shepherded many publications to press, including a church magazine titled Light of the World [Nur-e Alam].⁸⁹ Elder was also the Presbyterian Mission’s official chronicler, having published its history in the early 1960s.⁹⁰

The Presbyterian Mission’s lead evangelist was William McElwee Miller, a third-generation minister with a divinity degree from Princeton University. He was born in Middleboro, Kentucky, and before Princeton earned two degrees from Washington and Lee. He was a member of the Southern Presbyterian Church, attended its general assembly, and spoke favorably of Billy Graham’s “powerful message.” Despite his Southern upbringing, he was a missionary with the PCUSA and a longtime resident of the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia; the city’s mainline was home to his generous sponsoring church. Like Elder, Miller began his missionary work outside of the Iranian capital but spent the last two decades of his career in Tehran.⁹¹ In addition to the itineration of a traveling evangelist, Miller trained Iranian Protestant leaders at a property in North Tehran called the “Garden of Evangelism.”⁹² While used for other purposes, the annual staple was a three-month seminar held each summer beginning in 1947 to cultivate the next generation of Iranian church leaders. Sponsored by the Evangelical Church’s board of evangelism, the school and property were personally associated with Miller even after his retirement in the mid-1960s.⁹³

The careers of Miller and Elder in Tehran coincided with the Cold War, a period of profound ontological insecurity and feverish anticommunism for American evangelicals.⁹⁴ During the early Cold War, Elder wrote a pamphlet on the “triple urgency” that evangelicals confronted around the world. He lamented that, at a moment of rapid global integration, the world was “torn in all directions by conflicting ideologies and religions.” Elder’s generation saw themselves as part of “an unparalleled stream of missionaries” in the vanguard of “a mighty awakening” that was supposed to make globalization equivalent to Christianization. Yet, ideas such as communism and nationalism created a world that was “one body” with “many warring minds.” In this situation, Elder sought solace in evangelism, which was “the peculiar mission of the church.” To his mind, evangelicals needed to be proactive because “events of recent history have given to this crusade an unparalleled importance.” Because of the competing ideologies of the era, “We must be more urgent and sacrificial in promulgating the truth than others are in promoting its opposite,” Elder wrote. The Presbyterian Mission’s leaders saw the Cold War in totalizing terms. “In the battle for the allegiance of the minds and hearts of men, we are all on the front line. There must be no slackers.”⁹⁵ Through pursuit of the old mission and the waging of Cold War, Elder aimed to find “hope and security in the atomic age.”⁹⁶

The immediate threat to the ontological security of the Presbyterian Mission, along with the national security interests of the US and Iranian governments, was communism. In Iran, the Cold War began when the Soviet premier, Joseph Stalin, ignored the Tehran Declaration of 1943, which pledged the Allies to withdraw military forces from Iran within six months of the war’s end. The evacuation date came and went, yet the Red Army remained in northwest Iran and attempted to establish two “people’s republics” in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. The US and Iranian governments opposed the move, and in March 1946 Iranian diplomacy and pressure from the United Nations compelled Stalin to pull support for Azerbaijani and Kurdish communists. Later that year, with the backing of the United States, the shah’s military marched into the northwest and put out the embers of the separatist revolt. Northwest Iran did not fall behind the iron curtain, but the episode brought Iran into the Cold War.⁹⁷ “Owing to our nearness to the iron curtain,” Elder recalled nearly fifteen years later, “communism has been prominently in our thinking.”⁹⁸

The 1946 crisis reignited the sense of ontological insecurity among American evangelicals that temporarily subsided when Washington and Moscow allied during the war. Elder was alarmed by “the bewildering fiasco of Azerbaijan,” which came “like a bolt from the blue.”⁹⁹ Miller was a circuit rider who traveled through northern Iran, and he was adversarial toward Soviet communism and the Iranian Tudeh Party. He wrote a series of anxiety-ridden letters to America in 1946 stating that, if trends continued in Azerbaijan, “the rich province … will before long become a part of the Soviet Union.”¹⁰⁰ Elder had the same fears. He worried that Iran could become a “communist satellite,” and he considered it “one of the modern miracles” that the “Battle for Azerbaijan” was won by the shah’s government. “Over night the whole situation changed,” Elder recalled fondly. “Oh how happy people were.”¹⁰¹ Elder and Miller would have agreed with a former diplomat who wrote that “the Battle of Azerbaijan was as significant in its outcome as Bunker Hill, Bull Run, or the First Battle of the Marne” because it “awaken[ed] the free world to the dangers of Soviet aggression.”¹⁰²

During the Cold War, the anticommunism of Elder and Miller aligned with the aims of the US and Iranian governments. The shah’s national mission, both its divine mandate and anticommunist bent, crystalized in 1946. In explaining the military campaign to reimpose Iranian national control in northwest Iran, the shah emphasized the importance of “divine intelligence.” As the monarch told an interviewer about his decision: “It was really inspired and decided by that mystical power to which I owe my career and its direction.” The fall of the Soviet-backed republics became a symbol of the Pahlavi national mission that was celebrated each year on December 12 with military parades on “Azerbaijan Day.” The outcome of this early Cold War crisis reinforced what the shah described as “my deep belief in this mystical life of mine and the mission ordained for me by higher powers.”¹⁰³ Northwest Iran was briefly in the Soviet sphere of influence in 1946. But in 1956 American and Iranian Christians gathered in Urmia to commemorate the history of American evangelicalism in Iran.¹⁰⁴

While communism was the first threat to the Presbyterian Mission, the second was the nationalist ideology of Mohammad Mosaddeq. He led Iran’s National Front from the Majles and orchestrated the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in March 1951. The following month he became prime minister. As in 1946, the missionaries were unsure about their future in Iran during the early 1950s. On the one hand, Mosaddeq was a European-educated lawyer and reformer who almost succeeded in checking monarchical absolutism. On the other hand, Mosaddeq was a Third World nationalist who identified with leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and, in Iran, attempted to claim economic sovereignty from the clutches of the British oil monopoly. In response, the British organized an international oil boycott that torpedoed Iran’s economy and shook up the country’s political life as Mosaddeq engaged in futile diplomacy with London and Washington over the question of oil rights.¹⁰⁵

American opinion of Mosaddeq was mixed, though there was little ambiguity among the Del Be Del network at the time.¹⁰⁶ In May 1951, Miller opined that there was “an evil spirit at work in this land” that was “playing into the hands of the unseen forces from the North.” He derided Mosaddeq’s nationalism for its “opposition to the ‘Imperialism’ of Britain and America,” rather than the Russian variety.¹⁰⁷ To Miller’s mind, the National Front planted the “seeds of hatred and revolution” and encouraged “an anti-foreign spirit more bitter than I have ever before seen in this land … noted for hospitality and friendliness.”¹⁰⁸ In an expression of that sentiment, British missionaries were expelled and Americans who departed Iran struggled to secure return visas during Mosaddeq’s premiership. To Miller and his colleagues, the Mosaddeq era resembled the late Reza Shah period and made the early 1950s “a time of uncertainty.”¹⁰⁹

After two years of intrigue—and the shah’s flight from the country—an Anglo-American coup unseated Mosaddeq on August 19, 1953, restored royal authority, and placed Iran’s oil under an international consortium.¹¹⁰ Most missionaries applauded the overthrow of Mosaddeq. “It is true that in August we had very anxious times,” Miller wrote, “But God intervened and we were saved from anarchy.” Miller equated monarchical restoration with protection for Americans and Iranian Christians. The “Yankee Go Home” signs and graffiti were removed from Tehran’s urban landscape, and the Iranian government began again to issue visas to American missionaries. While Iranians were less free after the coup, Miller boasted about having “more freedom for our Christian work than we have had for two years.”¹¹¹ Elder saw the situation similarly. After 1946, the Mosaddeq era was “the next time” that the evangelical mission was threatened and that the Tudeh Party was “on the verge of taking over.” After the coup, Elder was pleased that the shah’s government was able “to smash the communist conspiracy at the heart.” The coup did away with the “hostile atmosphere,” and, as Elder told an interviewer, “the next day everybody was smiling, everybody was cordial.” It was “an amazing change that again happened just overnight.”¹¹² While overstated, there were differences between Mosaddeq’s “negative nationalism” and the shah’s “positive nationalism,” the latter of which rejected “the fallacy of neutrality” and allied with the United States to contain the Soviet Union.¹¹³

In post-1953 Iran, the US-Iran alliance was codified in a treaty of “amity, economic relations, and consular rights.” It was signed in August 1955, two years after the anti-Mosaddeq coup. Elgin Groseclose, a former missionary in Iran who was, in the mid-1950s, at the US Department of Commerce, passed along news of the treaty’s signature to his evangelical friends. Groseclose explained that “the pertinent clause” for the evangelical enterprise was in article 2, section 2, which applied to Americans in Iran and Iranians in the United States. It authorized them “to travel therein freely and reside at places of their choice,” and gave them “the right to hold religious services” and “to engage in philanthropic, educational and scientific activities.” Prior to this point, Americans were required to carry a “red card” with them to move about Iran. New “residence and travel” provisions were not initially favored by the State Department because of their potential to offend Iranian nationalists and derail the treaty negotiations. But this “counsel of timidity” was overcome, and the provisions were pushed through. Writing from his office in Washington to the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions in New York, Groseclose explained that the 1955 treaty “establish[ed] for the first time a juridical basis for missionary activities in Iran.”¹¹⁴

The Cold War church of John Elder and William Miller was in conflict with the rival ideologies of communism and nationalism between the Azerbaijan crisis of 1946 and the anti-Mosaddeq coup of 1953. Both ideologies threatened the Presbyterian Mission’s place in the country and the ontological security of the Del Be Del network. In waging Cold War, evangelicals realized that their ontological security was dependent on the national security strategies of the US and Iranian governments. While the Presbyterian Mission was degrees removed from the affairs of state, the missionaries shared with other Americans and Iranians an antipathy toward communism and popular nationalism. The Presbyterian Mission’s anticommunism did not cause problems within the Evangelical Church. However, the hardline against Iranian nationalism presaged the points of contention that defined church-mission relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at the high point of global decolonization.

Presbyterian Decolonization

Decolonization—the process of gaining independence from colonial or commonwealth control—was intertwined with the Cold War era.¹¹⁵ As Presbyterians in Iran knew well, “This desire of peoples to be free in the political realm has not bypassed the churches.”¹¹⁶ In some parts of the world, people successfully adapted missionary religions to local circumstances to create “indigenous churches.”¹¹⁷ In other parts, postcolonial governments expelled foreigners and were suspicious of Christians.¹¹⁸ In Iran, some Americans accepted the inevitable and recognized that they were “visitors, transients.” Others found the transition from commonwealth to independence to be unsettling. For the most part, borrowing from the writer J. M. Coetzee, the Presbyterian Mission’s “submerged mind” focused on “how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.”¹¹⁹ While the process was slow, centrifugal forces in the international arena and centripetal forces in Pahlavi Iran pushed the relationship between the Presbyterian Mission and the Evangelical Church out of the commonwealth stage between 1958 and 1965. In other words, the Cold War church of John Elder and William Miller became an Iranian church.

In 1958, the two northern branches of American Presbyterianism—the PCUSA and the United Presbyterian Church of North America—merged to form the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA). The Presbyterian Mission still reported back to New York, but to the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations (COEMAR) instead of the Board of Foreign Missions.¹²⁰ COEMAR and its parent churches had important decisions to make. Many Americans understood that, in an age of decolonization, “it is no longer wise and expedient to parallel the church with a mission organization.” But this was not a forgone conclusion. In the early 1950s, the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions “responded with alacrity” to calls for “integration” between foreign missions and local churches. Reservations in New York were muted after 1958, when the united church’s leadership “handed down something close to an ultimatum” that charged COEMAR and its so-called fraternal workers around the world with reimagining their work. Presbyterians in the United States were diminishing in size and influence, and they saw the “writing on the wall.” Whether because of the reckoning with race at home or empire abroad, by 1958 mainline Protestants knew that “policies of an earlier day simply must go.”¹²¹ This policy directive came at the height of the postwar Presbyterian errand in the so-called Bible lands.

The questions of if, when, and how American Protestant churches would decolonize their mission fields formed the parameters of the great missiological debate of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Missiology, put simply, relates to the study and practice of Christian missions. The mid-century debate created a perceived “crisis of missions” within American Protestantism. On the one hand were the relatively liberal mainline churches, such as the UPCUSA, which came to see foreign missions as a form of cultural imperialism. On the other hand were the more conservative Christian churches and organizations that prioritized foreign missions as a perennial fact of evangelical life.¹²² However, this division also cut through individual churches and mission fields, and in Iran the mid-century missiological debate involved Presbyterian missionaries working in Tehran and church administrators working on behalf of COEMAR.

R. Park Johnson was the Presbyterian field representative in the Middle East throughout the 1950s and, after 1958, his charge from COEMAR was to reorganize church-mission relations throughout the region. Johnson was an Ivy League–educated Pennsylvanian who joined the faculty of Alborz College just prior to its closure. Afterward, he earned a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Princeton and began an administrative career with the PCUSA’s Board of Foreign Missions.¹²³ In the early 1950s, Johnson oversaw “the world missionary strategy” along “an unbroken line of Christian witness” that included missions in Iran, Iraq, and Syria-Lebanon. Combined, the three missions employed more than 150 missionary envoys in seventeen stations spanning two thousand miles from Beirut, Lebanon, to Mashhad, Iran.¹²⁴ After 1958, when the two northern churches merged and consolidated their overseas holdings, the UPCUSA had missions along “a great arc through the Muslim heartland” that stretched from the Nile to the Indus and employed nearly five hundred missionaries, approximately half of all Protestant workers in the Middle East. In this region, American Presbyterians enjoyed the “overwhelming preponderance of responsibility for work among Muslims.”¹²⁵

Despite that preponderant presence, or perhaps because of it, the Middle East became an increasingly difficult place for Americans to live and work. As Johnson and other evangelicals of his generation saw it, the trouble stemmed from the creation of Israel and the resultant Arab resistance to the Jewish state and its backers, such as the United States.¹²⁶ The situation intensified in the 1950s and spread beyond Palestine. In 1958, free officers in Iraq toppled the Hashemite monarchy, withdrew from the Western alliance in the Cold War, and expelled foreign missionaries.¹²⁷ Regional fallout from Iraq’s revolution, which included the Anglo-American invasions of Jordan and Lebanon, hastened the mainline evacuation from the Middle East. In 1960, the Evangelical Church of Syria-Lebanon took over work that had previously been administered by Americans.¹²⁸ Then, in June 1967, Israel seized East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, wrested the Golan Heights from Syria, and occupied Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. The war brought an end to the missionary experiment in the Levant and was, according to the historian Heather Sharkey, “a moment of rupture that left no American missionaries resident in Egypt.”¹²⁹ Therefore, the international politics of the Middle East, coupled with the American Protestant mainline’s rejection of foreign missions as an appropriate form of Christian witness, hastened Presbyterian decolonization.

Still, Iran was momentarily spared from these regional crises and, whatever Johnson’s charge from COEMAR in New York, the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran was divided over how to proceed amid calls for decolonization. Some wanted “a ‘modern’ plan” based on the ideas of John Nevius, a former missionary to China, to elevate “the principle of self-support” over foreign control in church-mission relations.¹³⁰ Others claimed that the Evangelical Church of Iran was unfit for self-rule. For years, the “staunch opponent[s] of any change” staged what the proponents of decolonization equated to “Custer’s last stand.”¹³¹

One group of Americans put forward a modern plan that called for the dissolution of the Presbyterian Mission and self-determination for the Evangelical Church of Iran. In 1959 Richard Irvine, Frederick Wilson, and Frank Woodward, all of whom were with the Presbyterian Mission, joined the Del Be Del network’s matriarch, Sarah McDowell, in the call for dissolution. In an intramission letter, they wrote that, “after 25 years of trial and error,” the Evangelical Church of Iran’s ecclesiastical polity was “lacking in both authority and prestige.” They appreciated the ethnolinguistic rifts within the church, and they knew that the governance structure did “not represent more than the Assyrians adequately.” Moreover, missionaries controlled the committees in Tehran and the flow of financial requests to New York. The Presbyterian governance structure, inherited from the 1930s, had become “a hollow organization” with “no life of its own.” Worst of all, most Iranians thought it was “merely a front for the Mission.” The authors of the letter thought that evangelical work would be more effective in the hands of “national churches,” augmented by the “personal witness” and “dynamic outreach” of “foreigners abroad.” Irvine, Wilson, Woodward, and McDowell anticipated that some colleagues would decry the proposal as an “abdication” of mission, but their goal was to begin the new decade with the Evangelical Church as an Iranian church. Writing in 1959, they called to “dissolve” the Presbyterian Mission as an administrative entity at the start of 1960. To their minds, “The American Church can express its active concern for mission without necessarily having missions.”¹³² The call for dissolution reflected the UPCUSA’s postcolonial missiology.

Another group of Americans—the George Armstrong Custers of Tehran—disagreed and called instead for “advance.” John Elder and William Miller were the leading voices of this group, and they argued that the evangelical mission would be best served, as it was in 1946 and 1953, if they “waited out the storm” and then pursued Elder’s “proposal for advance.” He equated dissolution with “abolishment,” which was deemed “unrealistic and inadvisable.” It was unrealistic because, as long as Presbyterian institutions existed in Iran, a reorganized church-mission flowchart would not diminish the perception of American control. It was inadvisable because, as long as Americans lived and worked in Iran, they would need administrative support for securing visas, managing property, and handling other logistical matters. Not surprisingly, “the position of evangelists” in the Presbyterian Mission was that “the Church in Iran needs not fewer but more missionary evangelists.” In addition to their religious calling, evangelists like Elder and Miller believed that, at the height of US global power, “American Christians have today a very special opportunity and responsibility for ‘making disciples’ in this land.”¹³³

R. Park Johnson, as COEMAR’s “Presbyterian bishop” in the Middle East, had the unenviable task of resolving these seemingly irreconcilable views about the future of church-mission relations in Iran.¹³⁴ Johnson was, from a missiological perspective, somewhere between the two aforementioned groups. But, with regard to international politics, he was a pragmatic administrator who knew that “the social and political revolution in the Middle East is apparent, and it is to be reckoned with.”¹³⁵ As he separated the wheat from the chaff, Johnson penned a revealing “meditation on mission in Iran.” His thesis was that decolonization was a prerequisite for the ontological security of evangelicals. He appreciated that the great missiological debate forced all involved to confront personal “questions relative to the cause to which we are devoting our lives ‘in Christ.’ ” However, given dwindling stateside resources and regional upheaval, American Presbyterians could no longer sustain mission churches abroad. The “world climate” of the 1960s signaled to Johnson that the continuation of semicolonial practices was “no longer advisable or justified.” This was not a cause for lamentation. He was confident that, given the circumstances in late Pahlavi Iran, Americans would stay on as fraternal workers whose “traditional prestige and protection would remain unchanged” as they supported “the Church in its mission.”¹³⁶

With directives from New York and pressure in Tehran, a reorganization committee hammered out a plan between 1958 and 1965.¹³⁷ The chosen path was neither dissolution nor advance, but a middle ground called “integration.” To Iranians, the assumption was that the Evangelical Church would gain independence and assume control of postmission institutions. To Americans, integration meant little more than cutting funds to the Evangelical Church and handing over its governance structure and committees to Iranian Christians.¹³⁸ Three parties had to agree on the terms: the Presbyterian Mission’s Executive Committee, the Evangelical Church’s Synod Council, and COEMAR in New York. Yet the heavy lifting was done by the committee in Tehran, which included twenty-eight Iranians and ten Americans.¹³⁹ They were outnumbered, but the Americans pushed their views through committee and, against the wishes of many Iranian Christians, compelled the church to “become more conscious of its ‘Presbyterian-ness.’ ” In 1963, the Evangelical Church of Iran applied to be a member of the World Presbyterian Alliance, a decision that Americans applauded because it “align[ed] them with an honored and specific tradition of Christian faith and order.”¹⁴⁰ Clearing this and other administrative hurdles paved the way for a final agreement. Independence day for the Evangelical Church of Iran came on January 1, 1965, when Americans reported from Tehran to New York that “the old missionary organization … ceased to exist.”¹⁴¹

Out of the Commonwealth Stage

As Americans debated the meaning of Christian mission, Iranian Protestants pushed for Presbyterian decolonization and vied for control of the Evangelical Church as it moved out of the commonwealth stage. There were limitations, but during the 1960s and 1970s, as the scholar Marcin Rzepka has argued, “Protestantism in Iran changed its character from being a missionary religion to being a religion chosen by the Iranians.” In other words, the Evangelical Church became “a reproduction of Western Christianity through the lens of Iranian culture accommodating the cosmopolitan aspirations of the Iranians.”¹⁴² As Iranian Christians congregated in Tehran, they developed a new awareness that was, as with other Iranian religious minorities of the late Pahlavi era, informed by the nationalist tendencies of the time.¹⁴³

In contrast to the decades prior to the Second World War, all three ethnolinguistic groupings of the Evangelical Church moved off the Presbyterian Mission’s Central Compound and acquired their own houses of worship in downtown Tehran in the postwar years. The Assyrian and Armenian migrations to the capital created urban enclaves with institutional needs different from those of Persian-speaking Christians. As the Assyrian exodus from northwest Iran accelerated, the “weight of migration” bore heavily on the capital. Many newcomers spoke Syriac and Turkish and needed their own facilities and leadership, so they repurposed an old mission-affiliated property in the Amirabad neighborhood. The “newly decorated” Saint Thomas Assyrian Evangelical Church opened for Easter 1949. Qasha Polus Sadeh moved to Tehran to pastor the church. In the 1960s, the Assyrians had the largest and only self-sustaining church in Tehran’s evangelical network. Iran’s Armenians were also on the move, and “a steady flow of Armenian villagers” relocated to Tehran after the Second World War. In 1948, they built Saint John’s Armenian Evangelical Church near Nader Shah Avenue.¹⁴⁴ Unlike the prominent structures of the Armenian Apostolic Church, a researcher found that Saint John’s “is not so easy to find without a guide” and is an “otherwise invisible church.” In the postwar years, congregants at Saint John’s and Saint Thomas worked with the Americans and Persians in the Protestant community in Tehran.¹⁴⁵ While organized under one governance structure, there were multiple evangelical churches in Tehran after the Second World War.

In the immediate postwar period, Persian-speaking Protestants, still meeting at the prayer room on Central Compound, reimagined their relationship with their American sponsors. While 1954 was the first year that the so-called Persian church in Tehran had a nonmissionary pastor, the Reverend Iraj Amini and other church elders still needed American support.¹⁴⁶ After 1958, as the global Presbyterian network reorganized, Ahmad and Adl Nakhosteen appealed, with other Persian Protestants and some American missionaries, to COEMAR for continued support in the form of personnel and finances.¹⁴⁷ However, those same individuals were Iranian nationalists who prodded their American sponsors for control of the church. Ahmad Nakhosteen was an early advocate for distinguishing the missions of American and Iranian Christians in Tehran. At the very least, he urged the Americans to keep their nonreligious institutions “far from the Church.” The presence of so many foreigners at Central Compound gave other Iranians “a false idea about our Church and the Mission.”¹⁴⁸ These were strong words from one of the church’s leading families. Ahmad’s history with the Presbyterian Mission dated to his days at Alborz College, and his brother, Adl Nakhosteen, succeeded Iraj Amini as pastor of the congregation in Tehran.¹⁴⁹ Their American friends remembered the brothers as having “a weighty voice in the councils of the Evangelical Church.”¹⁵⁰

The same was true of Habibullah Yusefzadeh. In 1961, when he was moderator of the Evangelical Church’s Synod, Yusefzadeh confronted the Presbyterian Mission over its “unilateral decision” to resolve the church-mission question without input from the Iranian church’s leadership. By this point, Iranian church leaders had come to expect one “ultimatum” after another from the Americans. Therefore, in March 1961, at the start of the Persian New Year, the Synod issued a statement with “a rather definite threat that if the Mission is stubborn … it can simply go its own way alone.”¹⁵¹ Iranian Protestants were agents in their own history, and when “frank discussion” began about the future of church-mission relations in the early 1960s, the missionaries discovered that their Iranian counterparts had “a genuine desire to participate in a cooperative reorganization of the Christian program in Iran.”¹⁵² Presbyterian decolonization, it appeared, was imminent in Iran. As one American wrote, the longer the discussion went on, “the more aware the missionary has been that he is not a national and the more aware the national has become that he is not a foreigner.”¹⁵³

In September 1962, at the height of the decolonization debates, A. J. Zakaryan, an Armenian evangelical in Tehran, penned a forceful call for the Iranian church’s independence. In a letter to COEMAR in New York, he lamented the loss of his community’s “free and independent church” to the Presbyterians in the 1920s and 1930s: “It was a grave mistake on the part of the [Presbyterian] Mission to make a group of people, who for almost a century had cooperated with the Mission[,] to forget their identity.” He and “a good number of us Armenians can proudly call ourselves … ‘child of the Mission,’ ” Zakaryan wrote, “but the most important point … is not what one side has done or does to or for the other side, but what sort of relationship has been maintained.” He thought that, in the mid-twentieth century, church-mission relations failed to incorporate the interests of the Armenian evangelical community. On an individual level, Zakaryan called out what he felt was “a discriminating policy” toward himself and other Armenians. On an institutional level, he castigated the Presbyterian Mission for “virtually turning the church [in] to a foreign establishment.”¹⁵⁴ Zakaryan knew that the 1960s were, like the interwar years, a moment of change for the Evangelical Church.

In that context, Zakaryan called for the Presbyterian Mission’s dissolution. It is not surprising that, in a letter to Frank Woodward, Zakaryan wrote that, “amongst the present members of the [Presbyterian] Mission, I have found you only who has shown the will of a better understanding of the present difficulties,” which extended across the spectrum of church-mission relations.¹⁵⁵ He did not have to convince Woodward, who was also a proponent of dissolution, so Zakaryan explained his opposition to integration in a letter to Presbyterian administrators in New York in 1962. Whatever the situation looked like “in the eyes of the Mission and at the sight of the American people,” he insisted that any agreement that stopped short of the Presbyterian Mission’s dissolution and the Evangelical Church’s independence would be “doomed to failure soon[er] or later as far as the Persians are concerned.” For evangelical Christianity to succeed in Iran, “the Mission must … resign once and for all,” or dissolve. Through Zakaryan, the Armenians of Tehran asserted “the right of community self-government” with a clear message: “The church in Iran will only grow if it is and exists as an Iranian church.” To Zakaryan, ecclesiastical independence was not compatible with attempts “to attach the church to any dogma, creed or denomination appertaining to any foreign country or community.” He considered Presbyterianism a “sheer imposition” and a “foreign system of government which is alien to church members.” Moreover, the Presbyterian place in the larger American colony, and the conflation of sacred and secular missions during the Second World War and Cold War, gave Iranian Christians the impression that “the Mission did not come to this country, in reality to preach the Gospel, but to introduce a sort of ‘Americanism’ into the country.”¹⁵⁶

As the previous section demonstrated, the church-mission integration agreement went into effect in January 1965. Therefore, Zakaryan’s argument did not carry the day, and his views did not represent all Armenians, let alone the entire Iranian evangelical community. But his petition underscored the nationalist tendencies within the church. Despite sources of unease, Armenian evangelicals made amends, at least institutionally, with the mission network after the Evangelical Church of Iran gained its independence in 1965. That summer, the Del Be Del network learned that “the Synod has now accorded official recognition to the Armenian Evangelical Church in Tehran, thus resolving a long standing source of unease.”¹⁵⁷

Institutionally, all three branches of the Evangelical Church of Tehran came into their own after 1965, and their American friends, many of whom were by this point retired missionaries in the United States, stayed up-to-date through the Del Be Del newsletter. Nerses Khachaturian was the Armenian pastor at Saint John’s for most of the 1970s.¹⁵⁸ Tateos Michaelian, a secretary of the Iranian Bible Society, was ordained at Saint John’s in the mid-1970s, and, on at least one occasion, he represented the Evangelical Church of Iran at the World Council of Churches.¹⁵⁹ In the mid-1960s, after the death of Qasha Polus Sadeh, Samuel Ishaq assumed the pastorate at Saint Thomas Assyrian Evangelical Church, the Syriac-language church in Tehran.¹⁶⁰ He stayed in that role for more than a decade and ensured that the Assyrians retained what the Del Be Del network knew was “the strongest evangelical church in Tehran.”¹⁶¹ The Persian church also evolved after 1965. In the late 1960s, Persian-speaking evangelicals built Immanuel Church, just off of Pahlavi Avenue.¹⁶² In the 1970s, the “old-time members” who continued to worship at Central Compound found that “attendance is down in that ‘Inner city’ church.”¹⁶³ Despite dips in attendance and the consecration of new churches, the Americans and Iranians of the Del Be Del network continued to gather on Qavam al-Saltaneh, at the mission chapel in old Tehran, through the 1970s.

Administratively, after the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in 1965, the top post of the Evangelical Church’s governance structure went to Jonathan Marzeki. Born along the Turkish-Iranian borderlands to a Sunni Kurdish family and refugeed during the First World War, he grew up in Tabriz and studied at a Presbyterian Mission school where, as he wrote, Christian teachings “captured my heart.” Calvinistic predestination and born-again Christianity appealed to Marzeki, who, as a refugee early in life, was “a staunch believer” that “God picked me up as a wriggling worm in the dust and gave me life … in Jesus Christ by His own grace.” He was baptized in the 1920s and declared that “the old man in me is dead.” Thereafter, he relocated to Tehran to study and eventually teach at Alborz College. However, Marzeki did not pursue a career in academia or the church. From 1933 to 1961, he was a manager for the Anglo-Iranian/National Iranian Oil Company. In retirement, he got involved as a layperson with church administration.¹⁶⁴ He served a three-year term, from 1965 to 1968, as executive secretary of the Synod of the Evangelical Church of Iran. His American colleagues acknowledged that he was “the first person to have served in this capacity.” In other words, he was, within the context of Presbyterianism, the first Iranian to preside over an independent Iranian church.¹⁶⁵

A younger cohort of Iranian evangelicals also worked for the independent church after 1965. Mehdi Abhari was among the ordained Iranians who assumed responsibility for the church. Like Marzeki, Abhari worked for the Evangelical Church and the Iranian government, as a translator with the Plan Organization. He also had deep ties to the Presbyterian Mission, having been mentored by William Miller before attending seminary abroad.¹⁶⁶ Abhari urged his American friends to moderate their old mission and sideline overt evangelism in favor of other forms of engagement more appropriate for the postcolonial era.¹⁶⁷ Likewise, Zarin Pakizegi was friendly with Americans but critical of those who clung to a colonial ethos. She was an evangelical but acknowledged that, because of the multigenerational tilt in church-mission relations toward the Presbyterian Mission, the church did not have a sustainable cadre of Iranian preachers.¹⁶⁸ That is why, despite the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in 1965 and resulting independence of the Evangelical Church, American missionaries, including but not limited to Presbyterians, were living and working in Iran through the entirety of the 1970s.

The ontological security of American evangelicals hinged on the successes and failures of their “old mission.” That mission centered on evangelicalism, more specifically, church-planting. There were other forms of evangelical witness. But this chapter demonstrated the obvious, namely that Presbyterian missionaries prioritized mission churches, which they considered earthly manifestations of the New Testament’s Great Commission. During the commonwealth stage of US-Iran relations, the old mission was conditioned by the particularities of place, the local and global politics of the mid-twentieth century, and sources of religious and national inspiration.

Church-mission relations was an intra-Christian affair that involved the Americans and Iranians of the Del Be Del network. The Evangelical Church of Iran provided religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities with some standing and security in a Muslim-majority country. However, the Presbyterian Mission was possessive of the church and harbored some prejudices toward the Iranian congregants. This became clear during the commonwealth stage of church-mission relations. Iranian nationalism did not bypass the Iranian Protestant community, and a small but important number of church leaders were, in their relations with Americans, at once Christians and nationalists. Both the American and Iranian arms of the Del Be Del network worked within a milieu that traversed simple divisions and designations and was an example of “Christian Internationalism.”¹⁶⁹ In the narrow confines of church-mission relations, Americans and Iranians negotiated what it meant to be an evangelical Christian in Tehran.

The Presbyterian Mission in Tehran was also part of the American global mission, with its sacred and secular ideals. During the Second World War, missionaries and soldiers worshipped together, reminisced about their home country, and transformed the Presbyterian enclave in Tehran into an American colony. During the Cold War, Presbyterian evangelicals joined other Americans and Iranians, with convictions about mission and world order, in a shared antipathy toward the rival ideologies of communism and postcolonial nationalism. The zeal of overseas missionaries was moderated by mainline Protestant church politics in the United States, especially after 1958, with the creation of the UPCUSA and COEMAR. Therefore, the old mission also operated outside of church-mission relations and in relation to the US military, Cold War ideologies, and religious developments in the United States. Despite its religious calling, the Presbyterian Mission promoted a brand of “Christian Americanism” that was defined between compatriots during the Second World War and against the rival ideologies of the Cold War.¹⁷⁰

As the Del Be Del network wrestled with its Christian and American identities and interlocutors, purportedly modern and secular ideas never displaced the old mission. However, over the course of the twentieth century, the Presbyterian Mission’s engagement with US globalism and Iranian nationalism necessitated a “new mission,” rooted in ideas and practices with broader appeal than evangelical Protestantism.