You are accustomed to it. You've always been told on the slightest whim that you need a government permit to pray in the church and even inside your home in the village of Al-Furn, and that goes for all other towns across Egypt. Yet no actual law or code exists requiring anyone anywhere in Egypt to have a permit for prayer.

The foot soldiers of ISIS are doing just the opposite. While they are destroying other people's history they are busy remembering and recovering their own Islamic history, as they see it. They are returning to the past with a vengeance, pressing the COPY and PASTE button on history to transfer and impose it on the present.

As recent US foreign policy decisions about Iran made news headlines, I caught up with Shariat by email to hear his thoughts about this year's travel bans, Iran's next generation of Christian leaders, and the work of Iran Alive.

The Iranian church is seeing explosive growth, despite every effort to silence it. How is this?

Now, China Aid’s Annual Persecution Report for 2016 found that incidents of Christian persecution rose about 20 percent on the previous year, while the number of Christians imprisoned went up by nearly 150 percent. Officials with the Chinese Communist Party, which is officially atheist, also called for the forced demolition of churches and removal of church crosses.