The three were formally arrested in March 2023 with a local procuratorate's approval. In April 2025, authorities changed their status again, placing them back under residential surveillance and releasing them on bail to await trial. The disposition of the fraud case against the elder Lian and Fu Juan remains unclear even now that the younger pastor has gone home.
Church statements describe repeated abuse during the detention. Lian Xuliang, 41, was reportedly struck by interrogators on eight occasions, including once in his father's presence, and during his first month in custody was given only a single steamed bun and half a cup of water per meal, leaving his health, in the church's own words, "greatly" diminished. His father has said he was threatened with harm to his son, had smoke blown into his eyes during questioning, and on one occasion was denied use of a bathroom for 27 hours. Chinese authorities have not publicly addressed the torture allegations.
Fraud charges of this kind have become a familiar tool against Chinese house churches that decline to register with the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement, according to groups that track religious liberty cases inside China. The Xi'an Church of Abundance is one of many congregations that has continued to gather outside that state umbrella, at real cost to its leaders.
What a Government Fears
Sit with that a moment. A regime with an army, a police force, and the full machinery of a modern state spent four years and untold manpower chasing down a preacher and his aging father over the collection plate of a house church. That is not the behavior of a government that thinks these men are dangerous criminals. That is the behavior of a government that knows exactly what it is afraid of, and it is not fraud. It is the gospel, preached plainly, gathering ordinary people in living rooms and back rooms who will not bow to Caesar's substitute for the living God.
My friend, the world has never needed a law to make it hate the truth. It only needed an excuse. Rome called the early believers atheists and traitors. Empires since have called them fraudsters, extremists, subversives — whatever label the moment allows. The label changes. The old hatred underneath does not.
"Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." (2 Timothy 3:12)
That is not a threat tucked away in the fine print of scripture. It is a promise, plain as daylight, given so that when the steamed bun and the half cup of water come, the believer is not surprised, and is not shaken loose from the hope that put him in that cell in the first place. Lian Xuliang did not sign up for comfort. He signed up for Christ, and Christ never once promised him an easy road — only His own presence on it, and a crown at the end of it that no magistrate can seal shut.
Scripture does not leave the rest of the church standing on the sidelines watching this from a safe distance either.
"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)
Remember them. Not merely feel sorry for them from a comfortable chair, but remember — hold them in the mind and in the heart as though the chain were around your own wrist. The body of Christ is not divided by a border or a visa. What is done to a pastor in Xi'an is done, in the truest sense, to every believer everywhere who bears that same name.
Pastor Lian is home tonight. His father and Fu Juan are not fully clear of the case that has hung over all three for four years. The steamed bun, the smoke, the twenty-seven hours — none of that undoes what has already happened, and none of it guarantees what comes next. But the gospel these men were accused of "defrauding" people with is the one thing in this account no interrogation room could touch and no charge sheet could contain. It was true before the arrest, it was true in the cell, and it is true now that the door has opened.