Jin founded Zion Church in 2007 and built it into one of China's largest unregistered Protestant congregations, with more than 1,500 members meeting outside the state-sanctioned church system. Chinese authorities arrested him in October 2025 in a sweeping operation church members call the "10.9 Church Case," part of a broader campaign against unregistered house churches across the country.
Jin's wife, Anna Liu, said in a public statement that the couple was reunited after eight years of separation. She thanked those who had advocated for her husband's release, but her statement did not end in celebration alone. Eight other Zion Church 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. Chinese prosecutors have charged the eight with fraud and illegal business operations, allegations centered on church offerings and tuition collected for seminary training.
"In this moment of reflecting on the past and looking toward the present, my heart remains heavy," Anna Liu said. "I ask everyone to continue to fervently advocate for the eight pastors and coworkers still in detention."
Now here is a thing worth turning over in your mind. A government with an army, a police force, and the full weight of a one-party state spent nine months holding one preacher, and still could not make him stop being a pastor. They could lock the door. They could not touch the church.
A Church No Government Can Padlock
That is because the church was never a building to begin with, my friend. It is not a registration number filed with a bureau. It is people — bought with blood, gathered in a name, meeting where they can, however they can, because the Lord Jesus Christ said He would build it Himself and nothing would stand against it.
"And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." (Matthew 16:18)
Notice He did not say gates of hell would not try. They have tried in China for decades. They tried in Rome under the Caesars. They are trying today in a dozen countries you could name and a hundred you have never heard of. But a gate is a defensive thing — it holds a line, it does not advance one. Hell has been playing defense against the church since the day the stone rolled away from a certain tomb, and hell is losing.
Pastor Jin is free tonight, sleeping under his own roof for the first time in eight years of a marriage lived mostly apart. Give thanks for that, and give thanks for a president willing to spend some of his own political capital on a stranger's freedom because that stranger's freedom to worship mattered to him. That is a thing worth naming plainly and being grateful for.
But do not let the good news of one man's freedom put the other eight men out of your mind. Yin Huibin. Gao Yingjia. Wang Lin. Liu Zhenbin. Lin Shucheng. Wang Cong. Wu Qiuyu. Wang Zhong. Say the names. They are not statistics. They are shepherds sitting in a cell tonight because they took up offerings and taught young men to preach, and a government decided that was fraud.
Scripture does not tell you to feel sorry for the persecuted from a safe distance. It tells you something with teeth in it.
"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which are in adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)
As bound with them. As if the chain were on your own wrist. That is not sentiment, that is instruction. You will likely never see the inside of a Chinese prison. You can still carry Yin Huibin and Wang Cong and the rest of them to the throne of grace tonight, and you ought to.
The world watches a pastor step off a plane in Los Angeles and calls it a diplomatic win, and it is that. But behind it stands a truth no summit produced and no treaty can revoke: the gospel does not need Beijing's permission slip, and it never has. Wherever two or three still gather in His name, in a basement, behind a curtain, under a false address, the Lord Himself is there in the midst of them. No padlock reaches that far.