Jin built Zion Church from a gathering of fewer than twenty believers in 2007 into a network of nearly 10,000 members spread across some 40 cities, making it one of the largest unregistered Protestant congregations in the country. Authorities had already banned the church and confiscated its property in 2018 after its leaders refused to install government-mandated surveillance cameras inside the sanctuary. The church adapted, moving to livestreamed services broadcast to small home gatherings, and kept growing.
The eighteen leaders detained last October were accused of "illegally using information networks," a charge tied to the very broadcasts that had let the congregation survive underground. President Donald Trump raised Jin's case directly with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during a summit in Beijing this past May. Chinese officials released Jin as what they termed a goodwill gesture, but eight of his fellow leaders remain behind bars in China: Pastors Yin Huibin, Gao Yingjia, Wang Lin, Liu Zhenbin, Lin Shucheng, and Wang Cong, along with Preacher Wu Qiuyu and Elder Wang Zhong. Their release has not yet come.
A Cell Cannot Hold What God Has Called
Now here is a thing worth sitting with a while. A man builds a church out of twenty souls meeting in secret, and the government of the most populous nation on earth decides he is dangerous enough to lock away. That is not a small compliment, my friend, even if nobody meant it as one. It tells you the gospel still shakes the foundations of empires. It always has. Nero thought so. The Sanhedrin thought so. Now Beijing thinks so too.
Jin walked off that plane into his family's arms after eight years apart. That is a mercy, and every Christian ought to be glad of it, and glad too that a president was willing to spend his voice on behalf of a pastor most Americans had never heard of. But mercy for one man is not the end of the story. Eight names remain on a list somewhere in a Chinese prison ledger tonight. Yin Huibin. Gao Yingjia. Wang Lin. Liu Zhenbin. Lin Shucheng. Wang Cong. Wu Qiuyu. Wang Zhong. Say them slow. They are not statistics. They are shepherds who stayed with the flock when the flock had to hide in living rooms to sing a hymn.
The writer of Hebrews did not tell the early church to forget its prisoners once the news cycle moved on. He told them to remember, and to remember in a particular way — as though the chains were wrapped around their own wrists too.
"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)
That is not a suggestion for the tender-hearted. It is a command for every believer who has ever sung "Amazing Grace" in a building nobody threatened to tear down. Somewhere tonight a Chinese elder is lying on a concrete floor because he would not stop teaching what the New Testament says about the Lord Jesus Christ. You and I are bound to him whether we feel it or not, because the body of Christ does not stop at a national border, and it does not honor the Great Firewall.
The Lord has a long history of opening prison doors in His own time and His own way. Peter walked out past sleeping guards with an angel's hand on his shoulder. Paul sang at midnight with his feet in stocks, and the foundations shook. The Psalmist did not write it as poetry alone when he said the Lord looseth the prisoners. He wrote it because it is true, and because it has been true in ten thousand jail cells since.
So pray for those eight men by name, and do not stop because Jin made it home. Pray for the courage of the American voices willing to speak for the persecuted church abroad, whatever the cost to diplomatic comfort. And examine, while you are at it, how much you would risk to keep singing in your own living room if the cameras came for your church next. The gospel that got a pastor locked up in Beijing is the same gospel preached in your town this Sunday. Do not treat it as safe furniture. It is fire, and fire still gets men thrown in prison — and still gets them walked back out again, in God's good time.