Haik Hovsepian-Mehr

Life and Ministry

Haik Hovsepian-Mehr was born in AD 1945 to Armenian Christian parents at Tehran, ordained an Assemblies of God minister in his twenties, planted churches among the Armenian, Assyrian, and Persian-speaking believers of central Iran, and rose to become the superintendent of the Iran Assemblies of God in AD 1981 and chairman of the Council of Protestant Ministers of Iran from AD 1990. Under the strictures of the Islamic Republic he refused to sign documents undertaking that his churches would not admit Muslim converts, refused to register them under the legal category of an ethnic minority faith available only to Armenians and Assyrians, and conducted Farsi-language services openly when the law restricted Christian worship to non-Persian languages. He was a fluent musician and wrote much of the modern Persian hymnody used in the underground Iranian church.

Circumstances of Death

On 13 January AD 1994 Hovsepian secured the temporary release of his colleague Mehdi Dibaj after a nine-year imprisonment, publicizing Dibaj's case through international media channels and shaming the Iranian judiciary into a stay of execution. Six days later, on the evening of 19 January, Hovsepian disappeared from a Tehran street where he was last seen carrying his vestments to a church meeting. His body was discovered by police on 20 January in a Tehran morgue under an unidentified-male number; he had been stabbed twenty-six times, and the burial had already been arranged in an unmarked grave when his family pressed for identification. The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence has been credibly identified by subsequent defectors as having ordered the killing in retaliation for Dibaj's release.

Legacy

Hovsepian was buried at the Armenian Christian cemetery at Doulab in Tehran with the largest funeral his Protestant community had ever held; his son Joseph Hovsepian has continued the family's witness through Hovsepian Ministries from exile in California. His witness is that the bishop dies for his prisoner: he secured Dibaj's release at the cost of his own life, and his name belongs to the chain of pastors who give their lives for their flock. The hymns he had written are still sung in the Farsi-speaking house churches across Iran.