Zion Church Under Attack
On the evening of Saturday, October 10, in Beihai, Guangxi (广西北海), more than twenty police officers stormed into the home of Pastor Jin Mingri (金明日, Ezra Jin), the head pastor of Zion Church (锡安教会), just after he and his elderly mother-in-law had finished dinner. One officer waved a piece of paper in front of Pastor Jin — an arrest warrant, they said — and handcuffed him. His eighty-year-old mother-in-law, who had never witnessed such a scene before, was overcome by fear and shock. The police conducted several hours of raid, confiscating Pastor Jin’s phone, computer, books and personal belongings before sealing off his study and bedroom. Then they took him away.
The day before, Pastor Wang Lin (王林) and a staff member from Zion Church’s Shanghai branch had been detained. Over the following two days, October 10 and 11, police in Beihai — armed with a list of names — launched coordinated raids across Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Zhejiang, Shandong, and Sichuan, arresting nearly thirty Zion Church pastors and staff. All were taken to Beihai, a city of 1.8 million people on the Gulf of Tonkin, on the northwestern arm of the South China Sea.
As with the nationwide crackdown on human rights lawyers a decade earlier, an operation of this scale and scope — spanning multiple provinces — could only have been deployed at the national level, by China’s Ministry of Public Security.
According to a statement from Zion Church, as of this week, a total of twenty-three people are now confirmed to be in detention at Beihai No. 1 Detention Center and Beihai No. 2 Detention Center. Most of those detained are senior pastors, evangelists, and staff members who play leading roles in Zion Church’s various congregations across the country.
The main criminal charge brought against them falls under Article 287-1 of the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China: “illegal use of information networks.”
This provision covers activities such as creating websites or communication groups used for fraud, sharing methods of committing crimes, or producing or selling prohibited or controlled goods; publishing information on the manufacture or sale of drugs, firearms, or pornography; or disseminating messages that facilitate fraud and other criminal activities.
So far, at least thirty-two lawyers have taken on the case. They noted that this might be the first time in China that a church has faced criminal prosecution of this kind.
The lawyer who met with Pastor Jin on October 23 reported that he was doing well. Pastor Jin had a simple message for those outside: “Fear Not!”
A World Turned Upside Down
In 1989, when massive student protests swept through Beijing and across China, Jin Mingri was a junior studying geophysics at Peking University, one of the country’s most prestigious academic institutions. An ethnic Korean from a rural village in Heilongjiang, close to the Korean Peninsula, he had grown up in poverty. Of the eight children in his family, he was one of the four who survived. From childhood on, he was a model student in every respect. In the fall of 1986, his hard work earned him admission to PKU.
China in the 1980s, especially on its university campuses, was entering a period of intellectual awakening. Those who lived through this era can still remember the sensation akin to a frozen river thawing in the first breath of spring, when water can be heard rushing amid the sound of breaking ice.
Jin Mingri witnessed this awakening firsthand in his first semester, when the 1986 student movement erupted. It began at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei in late 1986, spreading quickly to Shanghai and Beijing. In each of these cities, thousands of students marched through the streets demanding action against corrupt officials; freedom of the press, opposition to tyranny, democratic elections, and the release of political prisoners. The protests enraged Deng Xiaoping and the Party elders who blamed them on General Secretary Hu Yaobang’s calls for ideological liberalization. Hu was soon deposed.
Jin Mingri had already been a probationary member of the Chinese Communist Party in high school; he had not taken the oath only because he was under eighteen. After his admission to Peking University, his high school’s Party branch even wrote to the university’s Party committee, recommending him as an outstanding young candidate. Yet a consensus had formed among students that the Communist Party stood as the chief barrier to China’s democratization. Indeed, one of the most famous Big Letter Posters (dazibao) of the 1986 student movement was titled, “One-Party Rule Is the Primary Obstacle to Democracy.”
This gave him pause. He ended up not joining the Communist Party.
In 1987, he began attending Chongwenmen Church (崇文堂), Beijing’s oldest and most prominent church founded in the nineteenth century by American missionaries. It had Korean services. He went, as he put it, to “seek the true meaning of life,” probably also to seek company of his ethnic group. But most of the congregation were elderly with hardly any young people, and he could scarcely understand the pastor’s sermons. He felt out of place and harbored doubts: “If young people all turn to religion, who will take responsibility for the nation’s future?” To him, then, Christianity seemed to be faith for the passive.
On April 15, 1989, Hu Yaobang suddenly passed away. The outpouring of grief on university campuses quickly swelled into a nationwide student movement. Jin Mingri was neither a leader nor one of its most active participants, but like tens of thousands of other students, he supported the cause and joined the marches on more than one occasion.
Coincidentally, his dorm room, No. 431, Building 28, became the headquarters of Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation (北京高等学校自治联合会), the student organizing body of the Tiananmen Movement, bustling with comings and goings, where primitive newsletters and leaflets were made around the clock.
Eventually, fearing that the regime was under threat, Deng Xiaoping ordered the army to suppress the protests. Tanks and armored vehicles rolled into Beijing. In a 2009 interview, Jin Mingri recalled:
“I wasn’t in Beijing on June 3rd and 4th. I had gone to Qingdao to take care of some family matters. I remember it very clearly. At dawn on the 4th, I was watching the sunrise from the summit of Mount Tai. As I descended, I suddenly heard a loudspeaker broadcasting news from Voice of America — only then did I learn that the army had opened fire in Beijing. It was an extraordinary moment: a public loudspeaker playing Voice of America! When I heard the news, it felt as though the sky had collapsed. I decided at once to return to Beijing.”
When he returned to campus, the faculty were urging students to leave Beijing as quickly as possible, fearing that the military would soon occupy the campus and begin mass arrests.
“I couldn’t stop crying as I gathered my belongings. A feeling of utter despair had engulfed me. The world as I had known it had shattered.”
Touched at a Funeral
Though Jin Mingri was not among the frontline protesters of the Tiananmen movement, its impact on him was profound, perhaps deeper than most in his generation. In later sermons and interviews, he would often say, “I am someone who has already died once before.”
When classes resumed that fall, he entered his fourth and last year in college. Two of his classmates didn’t come back and never would. At twenty-one, he found himself haunted by the idea of death for the first time. The atmosphere on campus was heavy with sorrow and fear, and Jin probably felt the weight more keenly than most. As one of the few ethnic Koreans on campus, he had long carried a quiet loneliness. Now, everything he had once believed to be true and real had collapsed within him. Years later, he told an interviewer that, after June Fourth, he never again watched Xinwen Lianbo (新闻联播), the Communist Party’s nightly news broadcast at 7pm.
Later that fall, an elderly sister from Chongwen Church passed away. She too was Korean Chinese and had always treated him with tenderness, inviting him to her home for meals, giving him homemade kimchi, and praying for his safety and faith even as she battled with cancer.
At her funeral, the congregation sang in Korean:
When my lifework ended and I cross the swelling tide,
When the bright and glorious morning I shall see;
I shall know my Redeemer when I reach the other side,
And His smile will be the first to welcome me.
They sang with devotion and hope, an unfamiliar and surprising emotion to the young man. He cried, profusely, “not only for that old sister,” he later said, “but also for myself.”
“I am homeless,” as he would repeatedly refer to that time of his life later on.
After that, he began attending Korean-language services and Bible study groups at Gangwashi Church (缸瓦市) where the daughter of the deceased old lady began a small Korean congregation. Serious and diligent by nature, he threw himself into it with hunger and zeal; he took fastidious notes, studied earnestly, and volunteered for all nature of chores that were needed at the church, including cleaning.
Gangwashi Church was another church from another epoch, founded by British missionaries in the nineteenth century. Before the June Fourth Massacre, its Korean-language Christian fellowship had just two Korean-Chinese university students. In the wake of it, its ranks quickly grew to fifty or sixty. Nearly all of those young believers later became pastors, including Kim Tianming (金天明), then a senior at Tsinghua University, who would go on to found Beijing Shouwang Church (北京守望教会).
For Jin Mingri, a student of geophysics, the first chapters of Genesis were almost impossible to reconcile: they seemed to present an unbridgeable gulf between science and faith. What is faith, really?
At the time, the church had a visiting evangelist from the University of California, Berkeley, in China on a short-term mission. He said to Jin one day: “Being a true Christian isn’t simply about attending services, studying the Bible, or helping in church.”
Then am I a false Christian? Jin wondered.
“Jesus loves you. He was crucified for you, rose again on the third day, and lives among us. The question is not, ‘Do you believe in God?’ or ‘Do you believe in the Bible?’ but rather, ‘Are you willing to open your heart to the Lord and let Him enter?’”
The words struck him with tremendous force. Years later, Pastor Jin would often describe their impact with a single word: brutal — for its momentous, non-negotiable force.
He had known for some time that he was in need of salvation. In a corner of the church, he knelt and began to pray. In a 2008 account, he recalled:
“This was my prayer: God, I don’t know You. But if You exist — if what the Bible says is true, that You sent Your Son Jesus into this world; He died for my sins and rose again — then please, save me.”
Tears streamed down his face as he prayed. From deep within, he heard a voice: You are mine. No one will ever be able to take you from Me.
He wept for the entire forty-minute bicycle ride from Gangwashi back to campus. Later, he described his feeling like this: “It was as if a child, after being bullied, returned home to find his father already waiting at the door. The moment the child saw his father’s open arms, he burst into tears, without needing to say a word.”
That evening, when he walked into his dimly lit dormitory, he saw several classmates playing shengji, a popular card game also known as “Tractor.” At the time, Peking University students joked that there were two camps of them: the Tuo pai (托派) and the Tuo pai (拖派). The first, the camp of TOEFL (the Test of English as a Foreign Language) were those studying for the TOEFL exam, with the goal of studying abroad in America. The second, the camp of Tractor, were those who played two decks of cards, 108 in all, night after night in the dorms.
The Education of a Pastor
When Jin Mingri told his girlfriend — who was his high school sweetheart — that he had started to believe in Jesus, her first reaction was “something’s gone wrong with this guy, has he been brainwashed?” So she decided to go to church with him, “to see what this loophole-filled religion was all about, to debate with him, and bring him back to his senses.”
In the end, rather than her bringing him back, God took her in as well. They were both first-generation Christians, with no previous believers in their family histories.
After graduation, Jin was assigned to work in Beijing. The church he attended was a small congregation of thirty to forty people in the Gangwashi area. It was a Three-Self Church (Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China), officially recognized, permitted, and overseen by the Chinese government. Only those with Beijing household registration were permitted to preach. Since Jin was a university graduate, the church allowed him to do so. However, the government did not relax its surveillance over their group just because the Three-Self Church had official approval. When he preached, police officers from the local station and staff from the security bureau would mingle among the congregation to listen. He treated every sermon as though it might be his last. “I was filled with the Holy Spirit,” he said, “and I preached boldly, crying out to this sinful city to repent and believe in the Lord, lest it perish!”
Fortunately, nothing happened to him.
He wanted to be a pastor. He already knew what he wanted to do with his life — he wanted to live for the sake of the truth and preach the Gospel. But he needed to make money in order for his girlfriend’s parents to allow them to get married. At the time, China had just established diplomatic relations with South Korea. Jin’s mother tongue being Korean, he found a high-paying job with a Korean firm. He and his girlfriend were married.
After two years at the Korean company, he decided to leave his job to pursue theological studies at Yanjing Theological Seminary (燕京神学院). The Seminary was a second incarnation of the School of Religion of Yenching University, founded in 1919 by John Leighton Stuart, an American missionary in China. It was closed several years after the Communist Party seized power in 1949, but was reestablished in 1986 as one of five theological seminaries in China run under the auspices of the Christian Three-Self Patriotic Movement’s national committee.
His wife supported his decision. She found work at a Japanese company and became the family’s financial backbone. When he returned to his hometown in Heilongjiang and told his parents, both farmers, that he was going to pursue further study. His father said, “That’s good, young people should advance their studies.” His mother, however, asked him what he intended to study. Hearing that he was going to study theology, she was so upset that she fainted and lay in bed for several days.
She spoke to him frankly: “How will you support your wife and children? Life is short. You should do something meaningful.” What she meant was that the subject he intended to study was meaningless. But her next words got straight to the point: “China belongs to the Communist Party. The Party is atheist. People who believe in God will never come to a good end in this country.” She added, “If you insist on believing, then go to America and believe there.”
After studying theology at Yanjing Theological Seminary for two years, Ezra Jin began his real pastoral work, serving successively at Chongwenmen and Gangwashi, which were two of Beijing’s oldest churches under the Three-Self system. In 1999, he was ordained by the Three-Self system as a pastor.
From 1992 to 2002, Pastor Jin spent nearly a decade studying and serving within the Three-Self Church system. In one interview, he described the church as a “state-monopolized institution,” a “state-owned enterprise in the religious sector.” Back then, however, Jin had a simple conviction: “The place where God calls me is the place where I must serve.” To believe in the Lord within the Three-Self system, study at a Three-Self seminary, and serve in a Three-Self church all seemed perfectly natural to him.
He was not very aware, nor did he fully grasp the extent, of the nepotism and political connections within the system. In a more recent interview, his wife, Anna, shared some details about those years. Those inside the Three-Self Church viewed Jin Mingri with deep suspicion: “You’re a graduate of Peking University, trained by foreign missionaries — what are your real motives in joining the Three-Self Church?” With such suspicions came discrimination and ostracization. Officials from the Religious Affairs Bureau also stirred up trouble for him. For example, they incited some elderly members of the Korean-language congregation to write up a list of ten accusations against him. He found himself constantly summoned to meetings, forced to explain himself. Over time, the experience wore him out.
In 2002, Pastor Jin left China with his wife and daughter to pursue advanced study at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, though not without going through an obstacle course that opposed his choice at seemingly every turn. Over the next five years, he completed his studies to become a Doctor of Ministry, and added two sons to his family.
Published by arrangement with China Change.
Yaxue Cao
Yaxue Cao is the founder and editor of China Change.
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