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Vahid was born in Iran to his father's second wife. When his parents divorced, he was four years old, and he was raised in the first wife's household — in his own description, as a slave. He was not allowed to eat with the family. His stepmother beat him. His half-brothers, who stood to lose from his existence, plotted against him over the inheritance.
He slept on a balcony through the winter.
At eight years old, he stood on that balcony and decided to jump. Something stopped him. He did not have a word for it then.
There is a scene he still tells. He was watching his father through a kitchen window, waiting to be noticed, and he was not noticed. And this boy — who had never read a Bible, who had never met a Christian — prayed something that in Islam is blasphemy: "My earthly father doesn't see me, but you are my heavenly father."
He did not know it was blasphemy. He did not know anyone was listening.
He learned to fight. He became a kickboxer, because a boy who is beaten either learns to hit back or does not survive. At eighteen he became a tailor and slept in the factory where he worked. In winter, when the factory was too cold, he sheltered in mosques — which is how a homeless teenager ended up giving the call to prayer five times a day.
Then he left Iran for Turkey.
At twenty he was reading the Quran forty-five minutes every day, looking for something that would tell him there was hope. What he found instead were verses commanding hatred. He stopped reading.
One night at half past one in the morning, on a beach in Istanbul, he shouted at God:
"Do you know pain? Have you been tortured? Have you been rejected? If not, how can you understand human?"
He got no answer that night.
What happened next did not look like an answer either. A Muslim roommate invited him to an Iranian church — and Vahid went to argue. He went to defend Islam.
He walked in during the middle of a service and found a room full of Iranians singing to God as Father.
He collapsed and wept.
Someone put a New Testament in his hands. He opened it and got as far as Matthew 11:28 — "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest" — and stopped there. Rest was the one thing he had never had in his life.
He told Jesus he would give him three months to prove himself. It took considerably less than three months.
The answer to the beach came later, in worship. He understood it as: yes. I know pain. I was tortured. I was rejected. I came for you.
The part of this story that is hardest to explain is the ending.
Vahid forgave the family that tortured him. Not as a gesture — he went back to them. He led his half-sisters to Christ. His stepmother, the woman who once put bleach in his shampoo, watched his worship broadcasts alone in her room, wept, prayed along with the invitation at the end, and gave her life to Jesus. And the half-brothers who had plotted to kill him asked him to be their pastor. He disciples them now.
He has written more than 250 worship songs. They are sung in house churches across the Farsi-speaking world and broadcast by satellite into Iran, and people who knew him as a street kid recognise him on television.
He is careful about what that means. His own line:
"There's a donkey carrying Jesus, and everyone is shouting Hosanna, and the donkey thinks they love him so much. Then he notices — that's not him. It's the one sitting on him."
There is one more thing worth saying, and it is the reason this story sits on this website rather than only in a sermon.
As a hungry child on the street, Vahid used to point at the houses he passed and wish he lived inside one of them.
His worship is inside those houses now. All of them.
Nobody argued him into the kingdom. He came in through a room of people who were singing, and a stranger who handed him a book, and a friend who invited him even though he was coming to fight. That is not incidental to what RTN teaches — it is the whole method. It is how he was reached, and it is what he trains the Church to do.
“My earthly father doesn't see me, but you are my heavenly father.”