US Christian ministries reach out to help vulnerable children in Iran
by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – US Christian ministry Heart4Iran has joined with CBN’s Superbook to conduct an outreach to thousands of desperately vulnerable children in Iran, CBN News reports. Many of these children are from families of Afghan refugees who escaped the Taliban, and many are orphans who lost their parents to COVID-19.
There are around 4,600 children working on the streets of Tehran, looking for recyclable garbage, cleaning cars, and doing other hard tasks, CBN reports. Many are homeless and susceptible to being trafficked and abused. “According to Iranian human rights groups, children in Iran are facing intense child labor, physical abuse, child-trafficking, forced marriages,” Mike Ansari, president, and CEO of Heart4Iran told CBN’s Christian World News. “Iran is an Islamic country and according to Islamic Sharia law, kids, especially girls, can marry as young as nine,” he added.
Heart4Iran is working to raise awareness about the situation and to help strengthen families in Iran.”We need to focus on families and build a strong infrastructure for the fragile and persecuted church in Iran as these children are the future leaders of this country,” Ansari said.
Heart4Iran is therefore partnering with CBN’s Superbook (a safe website for children to play online games and learn about God) to broadcast a “strategic, virtual Sunday-School program using Superbook as a core tool to engage them and teach them about Jesus.” The weekly shows will be dubbed into Farsi and broadcast by Mohabbat TV, which presents gospel programs via satellite.
“Iranian children, much like their counterparts in the U.S. are on their devices and many are looking for a kind of spiritual truth,” Ansari noted. “So, a while back we partnered with CBN and took their award-winning Superbook series, dubbed it into Farsi and we started using social media and we did a beta test and put the content in front of Iranian families and children inside Iran and the response was tremendously positive.”
“Children started giving their hearts to Christ, moms and dads started launching house churches, where they used Superbook as the core tool to learn about Christianity,” he explained.
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