Chinese authorities have formally arrested Pastor Xianfeng Edward Cui, founder of the unregistered Beijing Jiaquan Church, on a charge of fraud, his wife said Monday. She said the arrest took place on Oct. 23, and word of it has only now reached the outside world.
His wife, Jin Young Gu, a Korean national who lives outside China, said the fraud allegation concerns the offerings given by church members. Cui was first taken into custody on Sept. 4, she said, when about 100 police officers raided the congregation. Police in the Beijing district of Shijingshan did not answer a request for comment, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions about the pastor.
Gu said she has been refused a visa to return to China as a family member since 2023. Charges of fraud and illegal business operations have been used before against leaders of unregistered Protestant congregations, which meet outside the churches the state approves and oversees. In October 2025, authorities arrested some 30 leaders of one of the country's largest networks of such churches after overnight raids in several cities.
So the facts stand this way. A pastor who gathered believers outside the government's approved system was raided, held for seven weeks, and charged with a financial crime. The only account of the case comes from his wife, and the state has offered none. A man's family is waiting on the other side of a border, with no visa and no answers.
What a tithe is, and what a charge can do to it
I want you to see what is being called a crime here. People put money into an offering plate. They gave it freely, to keep a roof over a meeting and bread on a pastor's table. When the state can take that gift and call it fraud, it has decided that a church is a business, and that anyone who gathers believers without its permission is a swindler. It is an old trick. It does not have to prove a man false. It only has to make his faithfulness look like a crime.
The apostles knew that trick. They were hauled before the council and told to stop speaking in the name of Jesus. Their answer is one of the plainest sentences in the Bible, and every government on earth needs to hear it.
"Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men." (Acts 5:29)
That verse is not a call to rebellion. It is a line drawn around the one thing no ruler owns. Caesar may have the coin. He may collect the tax. He does not own the conscience, and he does not own the pulpit. Christ is Lord of His church, and no bureau, however large, can sign that title over to itself.
Here in America we have a First Amendment, and too many of us treat it like a coat we can leave on the hook. A church in Beijing meets in an apartment and risks a hundred police. A church in this country can meet on Sunday morning and nobody asks permission. That is a gift, my friend, and gifts can be lost. It is held by people who value it enough to use it, defend it, and speak up when it is threatened anywhere.
Remembering a man you have never met
The Bible gives a short instruction for days like this one.
"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)
Notice the words "as bound with them." The writer does not say to feel sorry from a distance. He says to remember as though the chains were on your own wrists. Pastor Cui is a stranger to most readers. In the body of Christ he is a brother. His wife is a sister who cannot go home to him. They belong to us in the one way that counts.
Prison has never been a stranger to the gospel. Paul wrote some of his best-loved letters from a cell, and the Word of God was not bound. A pastor in custody is not a pastor silenced. The church in China has grown under pressure for decades, and no raid has yet managed to arrest the Spirit who builds it.
Say his name. Learn the case. Let the officials who hold him know that the free world is watching a fraud charge brought against a shepherd for receiving the gifts of his flock. And hold fast to the Savior who was also arrested, tried on false charges, and handed over, who went to the cross and rose again so that no prison would have the last word over those who are His.