The arrest came on or about Sept. 28, when the pastor and a small group stood on the public walkway in front of the embassy to pray and to protest Beijing's treatment of religious minorities. The Secret Service, which guards foreign missions in the capital, removed him. In a public post on Oct. 4, he said Chinese diplomats had asked that the group be removed. "I was arrested by my own government," he wrote, responding to the demands of those diplomats.
The dispute did not begin that day. Days earlier, the group said, barricades had gone up along the embassy frontage, and they were told that anyone walking past them to pray would be arrested. The group maintains that the sidewalk is a public way, open to any citizen. A religious-liberty law group has agreed to represent the pastor in court. No ruling has been made, and the charge is only an accusation. The Secret Service has not been quoted in the coverage reviewed here.
So the facts stand plain. A man of God prayed. A government barrier stood between him and the sidewalk. He was taken away, and he now has a court date. Whether the law allows it is for a judge to decide, and the officers who made the arrest were doing the job they were handed. But a free people ought to ask a hard question. Who gets to decide where an American may kneel?
The oldest collision in the world
This is not a new thing. Long before there was an embassy row or a Secret Service, the rulers of Jerusalem hauled Peter and John before the council and told them to stop speaking in the name of Jesus. The apostles were not rebels by temper. They paid their taxes and honored the authorities over them. But when a command from men ran straight into a command from God, they did not stammer.
"Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men." (Acts 5:29)
Notice what Peter did not say. He did not say the council had no office. He did not call for a riot. He said, in effect, that there is a throne above every throne, and when the two disagree, the believer knows which way to turn. The same Peter was later jailed for it, and the church prayed all night.
The Christians the pastor went to pray for are the reason this matters. In China, house churches are raided, pastors are imprisoned, and children are barred from the worship of their parents. The prayer on that sidewalk was not a stunt. It was a plain act of remembering those who cannot stand on any sidewalk at all, because they are locked behind walls.
"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)
It is a strange day when an American who tries to obey that verse finds a barricade across his path, put up at the wish of a foreign power that persecutes the very people he is praying for. Our nation was founded on the idea that a man's conscience answers to God first. The right to pray in public, to assemble peaceably, and to petition against wrong is not a gift from any ambassador. It was written into the First Amendment because the founders had seen what happens when a government decides which prayers are convenient.
None of this calls for bitterness toward the officers on the street or toward the diplomats behind the glass. They are men and women made in the image of God, and the gospel is meant for them as much as for anyone. Christ prayed for those who drove the nails. The believer's weapon is not rage. It is truth spoken plainly, a clean conscience, and a willingness to be inconvenienced for the sake of the name.
My friend, you may never stand in front of an embassy. But every one of us will one day stand before a higher court than any in Washington, and the question there will not be whether we kept the peace with every power on earth. It will be whether we knew the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for sinners and rose again on the third day. Fear of men is a snare. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and in that fear there is a freedom no barricade can fence off.
Pray for the prisoners in China. Pray for the pastor who will stand before a judge on Oct. 21. And ask yourself plainly whether you would pray where he prayed, if the price were a charge and a courtroom.