As a Christian, I believe in miracles. I have already seen one; now, I am praying for one more.
My father, Pastor Mingri “Ezra” Jin, has been in prison in China for almost seven months for doing nothing more than exercising his faith. It has now been more than 200 days – 227 days and counting.
One morning in October last year, no one could reach my father. We frantically tried to locate him and finally we learned his fate. More than 20 plain-clothes officers had stormed into his small apartment in China and had taken him to Beihai No. 2 PSB Detention Center. They handcuffed him and shaved his hair.
My father was not the only one. On that fateful day, nearly 30 pastors and church leaders were simultaneously arrested across 11 cities in China. The crackdown was orchestrated with a level of sophisticated coordination that shows all the tell-tale signs of a deliberate, government-led campaign to intimidate and dismantle religion in China.
My father never wanted to cause trouble. He simply wanted to practice his faith freely. Yet today, he remains behind bars in deplorable conditions, held in a crowded room with more than 30 people.
My father founded Zion Church in 2007 with a simple mission: to remain faithful to scripture and to serve families and communities. Starting with just two families – fewer than 20 members – the church grew by God’s grace into one of China’s largest urban house churches, with more than 1,500 members and over 20 ministers within a decade. But it also made Zion Church a target of the Chinese Communist Party.
Since 2015, the Chinese government has pursued what it calls “Sinicization of religion” – officially framed as making religions “more Chinese.” Beginning in 2016, China’s regulations were rewritten to formalize unprecedented control over religious organizations in the country and to push believers to embrace “socialist core values” and submit to Party oversight in matters of doctrine, leadership, and practice. Portraits of Xi Jinping replaced crosses. Revolutionary party songs replaced hymns. Symbols of Communist Party propaganda replaced Christian symbols. The goal was clear: to eliminate any aspect of daily life in China, including in the most sacred spaces of faith, that exists independent of CCP authority.
Beginning in 2018, a far-reaching crackdown on the Zion Church began. The government officially banned my father’s church and confiscated the main church grounds after he refused to install CCTV cameras, which would allow the government to surveil his congregations. It asserted further control over my father by placing him under an exit ban, forcibly separating him from our family in the United States for more than seven years.
My father turned to online services and smaller in-person gatherings, where Zion Church continued to flourish. But the government simply could not tolerate the idea of spaces, even online, where the Party is not supreme, where another authority – God – takes precedence.
Make no mistake: Any institution that operates independently of Party control, no matter how peaceful or beneficial to society, is viewed as a threat to the regime. This is why the government arrested my father and many of his fellow church leaders last year. This week, the cases of my father and two other imprisoned pastors were submitted to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, underscoring the injustice of detaining these faithful men.
For more than 200 days, I haven’t slept well. I have worried constantly for my father’s safety and well-being.
Yet my father has taught me a simple truth through his compassion and relentless commitment to God: Even authoritarian repression cannot extinguish faith.
I am sometimes indeed fearful. After all, I know that I am seeking to expose and hold to account the second most powerful country in the world. Yet for the past 227 days, I have never lost hope. As I navigate the halls of Congress and face the omnipresence of Chinese government intimidation, I remember and try to replicate my father’s courage every day.
Last week, President Donald Trump met with President Xi Jinping at a much-anticipated summit in Beijing and raised the issue of my father’s detention, for which I am deeply grateful. President Trump said Xi agreed to strongly consider releasing my father. The attention President Trump placed on my father’s case, and the news he shared about President Xi’s response, truly feels like a miracle. It has brought me and my family tremendous joy and hope – more hope than we have felt in months.
Despite this, there are moments when I feel powerless. I know that, even with President Trump’s support, it will take one more miracle to win my father’s freedom. Nevertheless, I’ll continue to pray and to speak up for the release of my father and others wrongfully imprisoned. Just like my father, I draw strength in knowing that my God is a God of miracles and that even these bleakest moments might be used for bigger things. This work is not in vain.
As my father wrote in a letter from prison not too long ago, “I see this as a good opportunity to share our true stories with others and to educate and grow ourselves. God works all things together for good to those who love him (Romans 8:28). In such trials, our faith is refined, becoming pure as gold; our hope grows brighter, shining like the morning star.”
As a Christian, I believe in miracles. I hope you do too.
