Nine of the eleven were released by the following Saturday morning. Two men were held far longer. Elder Wu Wuqing and church member Shen Xiaoqing were sentenced to ten days of administrative detention on accusations of "illegally organizing proselytizing activities." Wu was fined 500 yuan, roughly seventy American dollars; Shen was fined 300 yuan. Police first described the matter as an investigation into a "cult." Both men were released after serving the full ten days, on or about September 21.
Among those detained was 73-year-old He Futao, a survivor of surgery to remove a cancer-stricken lung, who fainted during the ordeal. Most of the group were in their sixties and seventies; only two were in their fifties, and several were managing chronic illness. Bob Fu, who leads a U.S.-based group that tracks the treatment of Chinese Christians, said authorities have increasingly turned to frequent short-term detentions and administrative harassment to wear down congregations like this one.
Early Rain Covenant Church was once among the largest unregistered congregations in China. It has lived under pressure from the state since a mass raid on December 9, 2018, when its founding pastor, Wang Yi, was seized along with dozens of members and later sentenced to nine years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power." Nearly eight years on, elders of the scattered congregation — grandfathers and grandmothers, some of them frail — are still being hauled to police stations for the crime of gathering to read and pray.
There is something almost absurd in it, if it were not so grievous: a government so uneasy about the souls of old men and women that it must send officers to a teahouse to break up a reading circle. Strip away the modern trappings — the police station, the yuan fines, the paperwork calling it a cult investigation — and underneath is a very old story. The world has never much cared for the sound of praying people gathered in a small room.
A Kingdom the Police Cannot Detain
The gathering those officers broke up was no different in kind from the gatherings the apostles held after Pentecost — ordinary people meeting to read the word and hold one another up, with no army, no treasury, and no political ambition. Only the conviction that Jesus Christ was crucified, buried, and rose again on the third day. That conviction has outlasted every empire that ever tried to stamp it out, and it will outlast this one too.
Scripture never promised the church an easy road. It promised the opposite, and told believers plainly what to expect when they follow a Lord the world already rejected once.
"Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also." (John 15:20)
He Futao is seventy-three years old. He has already given up part of his own body to cancer, and now he has fainted in a police station for the crime of reading Scripture with his friends. He did not do this because it was safe. He did it because he has found something worth more than safety — a Savior who bought him with His own blood and will not turn loose of him, whatever police station he sees before he goes home to glory.
You may never be dragged to a station house for meeting with fellow believers, my friend. But the same gospel that holds Wu Wuqing and Shen Xiaoqing fast in a Chinese jail cell reaches you wherever you are reading these words. No fine, no charge, no locked door can hold back a Christ who walked out of His own tomb. The door to Him stands open still. Walk through it while it does.