The pastor is John Cao, 60, a lawful permanent resident of the United States who spent seven years in a Chinese prison on charges tied to his work establishing schools along the China-Myanmar border. Cao completed his sentence more than two years ago, but Chinese public security officers seized his passport shortly before a planned trip home, and he has been held under an exit ban in the city of Changsha ever since. He has since been diagnosed with stage-four, metastatic prostate cancer and wants to spend whatever time remains with his wife and two sons in the United States.
The senators' letter also named Pastor Gao Quanfu and his wife, Pastor Tang Bingyi, and eight remaining leaders of Beijing's Zion Church, urging the release of Christian prisoners of conscience held by the Chinese government. The lawmakers pointed to a precedent for hope: Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of Beijing Zion Church, was released to the United States on July 3 after 266 days in detention, a release advocates credit in part to Trump raising Jin's case directly with Xi during a May visit to Beijing. Jin's passport, too, had been withheld for a period after his release before he was allowed to leave.
Advocacy groups including ChinaAid and Christian Solidarity Worldwide have spent recent weeks pressing the White House to add Cao's name to the agenda, calling his situation an urgent humanitarian matter given his diagnosis. A companion petition drive has circulated asking the administration to secure Cao's passport and safe passage home before further summits pass him by.
A Government That Still Holds the Keys
Set the diplomacy aside for a moment, and look at what is actually happening to this man. John Cao gave years of his life teaching children on a hard, poor border. He paid for it with seven years behind bars. He came out, and instead of freedom, he found a smaller cage — no bars this time, just a government official holding a passport in a drawer. Now cancer is doing what prison could not, and still the passport sits in that drawer.
There is something in that picture every one of us recognizes, even if we have never been near a Chinese prison. It is the picture of a soul trying to get home, and something standing in the way that has no right to stand there. Sin does that to every one of us. It holds what belongs to another. It tells a man he cannot go where his Father is calling him. And no government on earth invented that trick — it only borrowed it.
Here is where the gospel steps in, my friend, and steps in hard. The same Book that tells us to remember the prisoner also tells us that the door of the greater prison has already been broken down.
"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 verse does not let a comfortable man stay comfortable. It ties his own body to the body in the cell in Changsha. You cannot read it and shrug. It asks you to feel the weight of that passport sitting in the drawer as if your own hand were reaching for it.
But there is a second bondage under all of this, and it is the one the gospel was sent to break. Every man and woman walking free today is still, apart from Christ, shut up under sin, with no earthly senator able to write the letter that sets him loose. Only one Name opens that door. Christ did not send a diplomat to negotiate the terms. He went to the cross Himself and paid the ransom in full, and on the third day He walked out of the tomb that had no more claim to hold Him than Changsha has a claim to hold a sick old preacher.
Whatever happens at that summit table this week — whatever answer Xi Jinping gives or withholds — the door Christ opened stands open regardless of what any government decides. Pray for John Cao's release, yes, and pray for it plainly and by name. But do not let this story end with a pastor's passport. Let it end at the tomb that is still empty, and the freedom no exit ban can touch.