8 minute read
This is My Great Commission Story
Honoring the SBC’s First Missionaries to Iran, George and Joan Braswell
George Braswell, Jr., 1973 DMin in Theology and Missions
First Southern Baptist Missionary to Iran, Emeritus Professor of Missions and World Religions, SEBTS 1987 Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award, SEBTS 1998 Distinguished Professorship by the Board of Trustees
Dr. George Braswell knows what it means to be on mission. He’s traveled to far off places, conversed with leaders of world religions and was the only Christian at the time to be invited to teach at the Faculty of Islamic Theology of the University of Tehran. He has led students to engage with world religions in their own communities and has pioneered mission work in Muslim contexts. As the first Southern Baptist missionary to Iran in 1968, Braswell has influenced thousands of students to give their lives to fulfilling the Great Commission and has led churches to be missions-minded for over 50 years.
Sitting and chatting over tea and cookies, Braswell is never without a story to tell. Walking through their Wake Forest home feels like walking down memory lane. Persian rugs line the living room floors and photos and trinkets from Iran are in all areas of the house. Braswell’s home office is covered from wall to wall with memorabilia from Africa and the Middle East and even his hometown of Emporia, Virginia where he first heard stories from the Bible that would one day lead him go to the mission field. “I am tremendously indebted to my local church to sow those seeds of the Great Commission,” said Braswell. “I had no idea then I’d be a foreign international missionary, but that’s the way God worked it out.”
From an early age, Braswell’s heart was drawn to foreign missions. Through Sunday school lessons on the magi and hearing missionaries speak in church, the Lord was stirring a desire in him to one day go to the nations. He was called to ministry in high school and went to college at Wake Forest University, where he met his wife Joan in his sophomore year. After graduating from Wake Forest University, he decided to pursue his master’s at Yale Divinity School.
Dr. George and Mrs. Joan Braswell
Upon graduating from Yale, Braswell became pastor of Cullowhee Baptist Church in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Throughout his five years pastoring, he organized an annual trip for high schoolers from his church to attend Foreign Mission Week at the Ridgecrest Baptist Assembly, where missionaries would come to share about their experiences on the field. While Braswell prayed for students to walk the aisle to accept the call to missions, he felt the Lord tugging on his heart to go. Before he knew it, he and his wife Joan were walking down the aisle at that 1966 conference to say yes to God’s call to go to the mission field.
Two years later, they were commissioned by the Foreign Mission Board as the first Southern Baptist missionaries to Iran. The Braswells set sail with their three children to Rome, boarded a flight to Beirut, and finally arrived in Iran— their home for the next five years.
Braswell remembers the first time his wife Joan and their three children arrived in Tehran, Iran in 1968. Luggage in hand, the Braswells sought to obtain a work visa in the next 90 days before their tourist visa expired. In God’s providence, they connected with a Presbyterian missionary, who introduced Braswell to Dr. Muhammad Muhammadi, the dean of the Faculty of Islamic Theology of the University of Tehran.
The two discussed topics from Iranian culture to Braswell’s educational background at Yale Divinity School over multiple cups of hot tea. At the end of their conversation, Dr. Muhammadi offered Braswell a job at the school teaching comparative religions except for Islam. The Islamic Theology Division at the university had approximately 600 students and 35 faculty members, and Braswell was the only non- Iranian and Christian teaching at the university at the time. This opportunity to teach at the university opened up doors for Braswell to build relationships within a country that was 98 percent Shi’ite Muslim.
This is just one of many crosscultural experiences that Braswell recounts in his new book, 14 Journeys. A prolific author in the field of evangelical missions, Braswell outlines encounters with religious leaders across a variety of world religions. His desire is for the Church to be encouraged and equipped to engage in gospel conversations in an increasingly pluralistic country. As the nations are coming to the United States, Braswell’s hope is that his book will serve as a guide for those seeking to better understanding how to converse with those of other faiths in their own backyard. “[Our country] is growing tremendously in religious pluralism, and our churches need to be awakened. This book tells a more personal journey,” said Braswell.
In his book, Braswell tells the story of encountering magi in Iran. He had only heard about these men from stories in the Bible as a young boy. As an adult, he stood face-toface with them proclaiming the good news of the gospel to them just like he had read about in Luke 2.
Braswell talks with a Magi priest in Iran
Braswell recounts the story below in his newly released book, 14 Journeys.
Visit With the Magi and Talk About Jesus
The story about my visit to the Magi on my first morning in Iran became a media article later upon our return to the States. It was titled, “Meeting the Magi: Calm, Cool, and Collected.” That morning I could not sleep and got up and learned that the temple of the Magi was near-by. After my visit I returned to the guest house and had another breakfast with my jetlagged family.
Traveling by jet from Beirut to Tehran, we arrived at 3.a.m. to a quiet Mehrabad International Airport. Since we were the first appointed missionaries from our mission agency to Iran, there were no Baptist missionaries to meet us. The Presbyterians did, and took my wife and three kids and me to their guest house in the center of the city.
Upon settling in, it was about daybreak. They were exhausted and fell asleep upon the hard mattresses and doubly hard pillows. I was exhilarated and keyed up to capacity. It was 6.a.m. and bread with butter and jam and hot tea were being served to the early risers.
After greetings, my first question was, ‘Where do the Magi live?’ My Sunday school teachers had taught me about the three Wise Men of Persia as a little boy. I had studied the biblical characters of the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius. At divinity school I had studied comparative religions with a professor who told us he visited the Magi in Iran and had studied their Zoroastrian religion.
I was in luck. Just up the street from the guest house was a Magi temple. Knowing only a few words of greeting in the Farsi language, I set out by myself, boldly to find the temple. Along the sidewalks were ten-foot tall mud walls behind which were residences and other low-lying buildings. I came to the recognizable green gate. I pushed the buzzer. A man dressed in white robe and white cap and wearing sandals appeared. He let me in, took me to another Magi so dressed who knew English, and my life-long dream of conversing with a Wise Man began.
I told him my story about the Wise Men, about the three Magi who traveled a long way to arrive at Bethlehem and present to the baby Jesus the very best gifts they had: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I told him how pleased I was that they did not tell old King Herod all that they knew. They really were wise and fearless.
The Magi looked so calm, cool, and collected as he tended to the sandalwood fire. The fire has been kept burning for eons of time. Their deity, Ahura Mazda, wanted it to be. He told me of his prophet, Zoroaster, sometimes called Zarathustra, of the battle between good and evil, between light and darkness, between Ahura Mazda and the evil one.
I felt the warmth of the fire as well as the warmth of his personality. He told me there were so few Magi and Zoroastrians left in Iran and even in the world. He had studied the Bible and its narratives about the Magi. He said he honored Jesus as a prophet and a very wise man.
As I drank my second cup of tea dissolving a sugar cube in my mouth, I looked at this Magi with his sparkling eyes and distinct Persian nose. After a few hours in Iran, I had found the Magi. He poked another piece of sandalwood into the flames, its incense refreshing in the air. I felt calm, cool, and collected around him. I told him the story of the Jesus I knew who grew up from that manger scene with the Magi and taught such beautiful lessons for the living of our days and who was crucified on the cross and was resurrected from the tomb. I told him I called him Savior and Lord.
He looked at me and said that he too had heard that story and read it in the Bible. And then he said to me what I had heard years before in my studies of Zoroastrianism, “We teach that there is a ‘Son of Man’ coming in the future for whom we are to watch.” I smiled with him and said, ‘I believe that ‘Son of Man’ has come.’
As we walked to the green gate, I thanked him for letting a stranger in, for a warm cup of tea, and for the gifts long ago of the Magi to Jesus. As I walked back to the guest house, I felt like a little boy of long ago. I really talked with a Wise Man! Wait until I tell Joan and the kids.
To read more about Dr. Braswell's story, check out his new book called, "14 Journeys: Engaging an Increasingly Pluralistic World with Christian Civility and Charity." Now available on e-book and print on smile.amazon.com.
