His release came after President Donald J. Trump personally raised Jin's case with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during a trip to Beijing in May. Chinese officials reportedly told Jin that his freedom was granted as a goodwill gesture tied to America's 250th Independence Day. Eight of his fellow church leaders remain locked up at the Beihai Detention Center in Guangxi province, where family members and advocates describe conditions as severe.
Zion Church, founded by Jin in 2007, grew into one of the largest unregistered house churches in China, drawing thousands who refused to worship under the watch of the state-sanctioned church system. Beijing shut the congregation down in September 2018 after Jin's church declined to install facial-recognition cameras in its meeting hall. The congregation kept meeting anyway, scattered and underground, until last fall's raid swept up its entire leadership.
ChinaAid, a U.S.-based religious freedom organization that has tracked the case for months, welcomed Jin's release and immediately called for the freedom of the eight men still held. Christians in more than forty countries had signed petitions and prayer campaigns on Jin's behalf in the months before his release, a testimony to how widely his imprisonment had been felt among believers who had never met him.
Now, a word about what this ordeal puts before us — because a man does not spend nine months in a detention cell for singing hymns and reading his Bible without something being laid bare about the nature of worldly power, and about the God who stands over it.
Every government on earth, Beijing included, answers to a throne higher than its own. The Zion Church congregation could be padlocked, its pastors hauled off in the night, its people scattered — and still the church did not die, because the church was never the building or the permit. It was, and is, the gathered people of God, and no bureau of state security has ever yet figured out how to arrest a testimony.
That is the sturdy old truth Ezra Jin's nine months in Beihai puts back in front of us. A government can take a man's freedom for a season. It cannot take what he believes, unless he hands it over himself. The apostles learned that in a Roman jail and said so plainly:
"We ought to obey God rather than men." (Acts 5:29)
That is not a slogan for rebellion — Scripture elsewhere plainly commands honor for those in authority, magistrates included. It is a plain statement of order: Caesar gets the coin with his face on it; he does not get the conscience. Eight men are still sitting in that detention center tonight for believing exactly that, and it is right to ask the Lord to move the hearts of those who hold the keys, and right to be grateful for a president who was willing to spend some of his own leverage on behalf of a pastor he'd likely never met.
But my friend, do not let this story stay a story about China. Every one of us is tempted, in smaller and softer ways, to trade the narrow way for the path of least resistance — to keep the faith quiet so the room stays comfortable. Ezra Jin's church would not install the cameras. What would it cost you to simply say what you believe out loud this week?
The Lord who kept watch over a packed-out church in Beijing for eighteen years without a building keeps the same watch over you. He is not surprised by Beihai, and He is not surprised by whatever quiet cost your own faith is asking of you today. Take courage from a pastor who just walked off a plane in Los Angeles still believing what he believed the day they locked the door.