Devolution and revolution: mission and church in Iran
Part two of a three-part series contextualizing mission-focused GA227 overtures
The Presbyterian Historical Society continues its series contextualizing items of business before the 227th General Assembly. Here we turn to the overtures addressing the restructuring of the PC(USA)’s World Mission and calling for a new missiological statement.
Overtures 005 and 006, addressing the restructuring of the PC(USA)’s World Mission and calling for a new missiological statement, recall the efforts of Presbyterians inside the United States and abroad to reshape their relationships during the middle 20th century.
In the global political transformations just following the Second World War, Presbyterian mission workers found themselves in between declining imperial powers — chiefly Great Britain and France — and the national churches of newly independent nations. As the people who they worked alongside, harvested crops with, taught, and were taught by demanded independence — in Cameroon, in Lebanon and Syria, in Iraq and Iran — mission workers and administrators found the centralization of authority over missions in New York City and Atlanta to be incompatible with the new age. And so missions changed.
Many stories of Presbyterians finding their way through an utterly changed political reality can be told. Our second installment introduces the Presbyterian mid-century in Iran.
Devolution and revolution: mission and church in Iran
In 1958 COEMAR, the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations, “handed down something close to an ultimatum” requiring mission workers to devolve responsibility and to integrate their work with local churches. Mission integration paralleled the UPCUSA’s strategy for healing divided society stateside — make an integrated Church and an equal society will emerge perforce.
Despite entreaties from COEMAR headquarters in New York, integration of missions and churches across the Middle East was gradual. In 1959 the Syria-Lebanon Mission integrated itself with National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon (NESSL). Property transfers continued through at least 1967; the last COEMAR representative in Beirut was the treasurer, the Rev. Ben Weir. In Iraq, mission work continued after the overthrow of King Faisal in 1958, only ending in 1969 as the Iraqi Ba’ath Party nationalized education and expelled foreign mission workers. In Iran, mission devolution began in 1958 and the final disposition of Presbyterian Church-owned property was concluded in 1985.
The mission was among the oldest in Presbyterianism. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent its first missionaries to northwestern Iran in 1829 to work among Assyrian Christians. By the time the PCUSA Board of Foreign Missions assumed responsibility for the ABCFM, the mission counted stations at Urmia, Tabriz, Tehran, and Hamadan. Schools opened themselves to Iran’s growing middle class — developing into Alborz College for boys, and Iran Bethel School for girls. Mission hospitals were built at Rasht, Mashhad, and Tehran. The future Shahbânu, Farah Pahlavi, would be born at the American Mission Hospital in Tehran in 1938.
Given its history, the Iran Mission’s response to COEMAR’s instructions was conflicted. One group of Americans called for total dissolution of the mission, despite their misgivings about the Evangelical Church of Iran’s capacity. The fact the ECI was “lacking in authority and prestige” could only be treated by Americans taking a step back. “The American Church can express its active concern for mission without necessarily having a mission.”
Another group called for more and deeper evangelism in Iran, an intensification of mission work. They did this for ideological reasons and for pragmatic ones. So long as any Americans remained in Iran, regardless of the ecclesial structure governing them, they would still ask for all the appurtenances of mission life: visas, paychecks, health benefits, pension credits, transportation, furniture, shipping, child care and education. Some kind of mission handled that.
Movement for change in the mission relationship was inevitable, emerging from the grassroots as well as from COEMAR, driven by events outside the control of the churches. The ECI was a church of multiple peoples and languages. After the Second World War, Armenian and Assyrian Christians migrated in numbers to Tehran, and the city’s burgeoning Protestant congregations required both self-government and mission funding and support.
By 1959 even the staunch evangelist William McElwee Miller moved for a joint board to bring the Mission and the Church more closely together. Habibullah Yusafzadeh in a 1961 letter decries the “unilateral” decision-making coming down from COEMAR. A.J. Zakaryan writes to the mission in 1962 calling for its dissolution, partly on the grounds that it serves two masters: “The Mission did not come to this country in reality to preach the Gospel, but to introduce a sort of Americanism into the country.”
(Overlap between the Iran Mission and American intelligence occurred. Missionary Theodore Cuyler Young, as one example, has been identified as first an OSS member and, during the period in which the CIA was attempting to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh, as a CIA consultant.)
A reorganization committee of 28 Iranians and 10 Americans worked on a plan of integration for seven years, and gradually the Mission handed over leadership of committees and governance to the Church. The ECI would join the World Presbyterian Alliance as a national denomination in 1963, and full independence would be announced on January 1, 1965.
Church and secular missions in Iran had worked in parallel and together to improve the lot of the people — Presbyterian social work and literacy campaigns overlapped with the Shah’s development program, the “White Revolution” — so the Mission was in some quarters missed. The American expatriate presence after 1965 began to be substantially businessmen and military advisers. As one Iranian correspondent wrote, “All the good American influences had disappeared from Iran and all that remained were elements the people considered, rightly or wrongly, primarily supporting the regime.”
The American presence in Tehran grew over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, despite the official winding-down of the Iran Mission. The 50,000-strong American community gradually decamped to North Tehran and the Community Church moved to the northern Saltanabad neighborhood — in part for reasons familiar to stateside Presbyterians. Matthew Shannon writes, “As the city expanded, churchgoers in Tehran liked the northern location because there was plenty of room to park.”
Also north of the city, Frances Mecca Gray, Presbyterian educator, spent time walking off land gifted to the UPCUSA by the Shah. A new school for women, Damavand College, named after the holy mountain north of Tehran, would open in 1968. The exurban landscape would remain desolate for a time. As late as 1978, the missionary newsletter Del Be Del called the area “a bleak and lonely place, and at night you can hear the jackals.”
Change came fully in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution, the evacuation or expulsion of Americans, and the seizure of Church assets. At Damavand, Mehdi Mohaghegh assumed the presidency; he was relived in 1980 when all private schools were folded into the Islamic Republic’s education ministry. Disputes over property among the ECI, the PC(USA) and the government would persist until 1985, when the American church declared that formerly-Presbyterian properties “in reality have belonged to the Evangelical Church of Iran.”
Agents of Christ, American intelligence assets, vehicles for learning, zealous evangelists, friends of the Shah, wary observers — the people of the Iran Mission in the late 20th century held many roles. Their destiny, the end of the mission endeavor, would only come as a result of epochal political and cultural change, happening quite outside of Presbyterian will.
Learn more
RG 161. United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations Secretaries' Files: Iran Mission, 1944-1973.
RG 417. William McElwee Miller papers, 1908-1994.
Matthew Shannon. (2024). Mission Manifest: American Evangelicals and Iran in the Twentieth Century.
Michael P. Zirinsky. (1993). "Render Therefore Unto Caesar the Things Which Are Caesar's: American Presbyterian Educators and Reza Shah."
Peter Grace. (2022). “The Intel Intellectuals: how social scientists helped legitimize the Central Intelligence Agency,1950-1953”
David Hollinger. (2017). Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America.
Stephen Kinzer. (2003). All the Shah's Men: an American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.
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