BREAKING: Pastor Safa: The Day I Left Iran, I Said To My Mother— “Mom I Don’t Think I Will Ever Come Back
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According to a video on CBN News, on Thursday June 4, 2026, Reza Safa, an Iranian-born Christian pastor and broadcaster, recalled the painful moment he made the decision to leave Iran permanently, a decision driven not by politics alone but by a deep personal sense that the country he had known and loved was being lost to chaos and extremism.
Safa came to the United States from Iran in 1978 as a college student. He was a devout Shia Muslim at the time and held strong views about both America and Israel, views shaped by the ideology of radical Islam.
When the Iranian Revolution took hold in 1979, Safa returned home to witness it firsthand. Led by radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolution overthrew Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and replaced his government with an Islamic theocracy.
What Safa encountered when he returned was disorder, fear, and a country being reshaped by force.
Unable to reconcile what he was seeing with any hopeful future for himself or his family, Safa made a decision that would define the rest of his life.
He told CBN’s Kelly Wright about the moment he spoke those words to his mother before departing.
In his words, Reza Safa said, “One day I said to my mother, I said, I’m leaving Iran and I don’t think ever again I will come back. And so I left and went to Sweden.
“And in Sweden I met two Swedish missionaries that loved on me and took me to their homes and fed me, gave me a Bible in Persian. And I start reading the Bible,” he said.
That departure ultimately led to his conversion to Christianity and a lifetime of ministry.
Safa now leads TBN Nejat TV, broadcasting the Christian faith into the very country he once fled, reaching millions of Iranians who have no access to such content through official state-controlled channels.
