Since Thursday, police have detained nearly 30 pastors and staff members of Zion Church, an influential Chinese house church network, in what many fear is the beginning of a new wave of persecution against Christians in China.
The arrests took place in at least six cities across China. More than 10 officers broke into senior pastor Jin “Ezra” Mingri’s apartment in Beihai, Guangxi province, on Friday and searched his home all night before taking him away in handcuffs, according to the nonprofit ChinaAid. Authorities detained one pastor at the Shenzhen airport. Church members have lost contact with more than a dozen congregants in Beihai and are uncertain whether they’ve also been arrested.
Jin’s daughter, Grace, who lives in Maryland near Washington, DC, first heard about the roundup on Friday morning as she woke up to see her father’s prayer-request letter about Zion pastor Wang Lin’s arrest. Then she received a call from her mom, who also lives in the US, saying she had lost contact with her dad. They later found out he was under arrest in Beihai.
Grace always knew thiscould happen. In 2018, the government shut down Zion Church’s sanctuary in Beijing. Yet since the pandemic, the church has grown rapidly through its hybrid model of livestreaming services to small groups across the country. Today the church network includes nearly 10,000 people spread across 40 cities. Likely because of this growth, the Chinese government has increasingly targeted the church, breaking up services and detaining pastors and church members—although typically releasing them after several days.
“I didn’t want to believe this was happening,” she said. She tried to downplay her father’s unavailability, thinking perhaps officials had just invited him to “drink tea” (a euphemism in China for police interrogations). “I did not want to look at what it entailed.”
Jin, an ethnic Korean from northeast China, became a Christian after the Tiananmen Square massacre left him disillusioned about the country’s Communist government. At a local church, he found hope he couldn’t find anywhere else. In 2007, he started Zion Church with fewer than 20 people. A decade later, it was one of the largest unregistered house churches in China, with about 1,500 members and more than 20 pastors. When I visited the church in Beijing in 2018 before the crackdown, the church was meeting on the third floor of an office building with a spacious modern sanctuary and its own coffee shop and Christian bookstore.
The government began threatening to close the church in August 2018 after Jin refused to install security cameras in the sanctuary. Authorities pressured about 100 church members to stop attending. In September, the government officially banned the church, sealing off the church property. Police detained Jin and other leaders for a few hours before releasing them.
This week’s roundup was different, said Sean Long, a Zion pastor pursuing a doctorate in theology at Wheaton College. In a coordinated attack, police in cities around the country carried warrants to detain the leaders and staff. They face charges of “illegal dissemination of religious information via the internet,” Long said.
Yet Long noted that Jin had long anticipated a crackdown. In 2018, even before the church was shut down, Jin sensed persecution coming and sent Long and his family abroad so an arrest of pastors would not leave the church leaderless. Jin’s wife, daughter, and two sons also moved to the US so the government could not use them asleverage.
This year Jin again sensed a storm coming. In one Zoom call with Jin, Long asked what would happen if all Zion’s leaders were arrested. Jin replied, “Hallelujah, because a new wave of revival is coming.”
The arrests still shocked Long: “It’s a brutal violation of … the Chinese Constitution that grants every Chinese citizen freedom of religious belief.”
A prayer letter Zion Church released Saturday listed other house churches recently facing persecution: In May, Xi’an police detained pastor Gao Quanfu of Zion’s Light Church for allegedly “using superstitious activities to undermine the implementation of justice.” In June, authorities imprisoned 10 members of Golden Lampstand Church in Linfen on fraud charges. They sentenced pastor Yang Rongli to 15 years in prison.
With the leaders inside China detained, Long and several other pastors who reside overseas—including in South Korea and Canada—will continue to shepherd Zion Church.
On Sunday, three days after the crackdown began, Zion’s 100 church plants—gatherings that number between 5 and 50 people—will meet for worship asthey do every week, Long said. Some groups meet inside living rooms, while other rent out private restaurant rooms. They’ll watch over Zoom as a Zion pastor who resides in South Korea preaches a sermon on the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:54–60), the first Christian martyr, followed by a short encouragement and benediction by Long. After that, they’ll hold in-person discussions or Bible studies. Some will share a meal together.
“No suffering, no glory—that’s the most important spiritual DNA of the Chinese house church movement through history,” Long said. “We are willing to pay the price to bear the cost of discipleship.”
