Last Christmas, Zion — one of China’s biggest and most influential unregistered house churches — held a concert featuring professional dancers, rock bands and a short drama about an elderly Chinese atheist whose suspicion of Christianity transformed into belief while she was visiting her son in the United States.
This year, Christmas will be very different for Zion and its worshipers.
Since October, Chinese authorities have moved aggressively to dismantle Zion and a network of related churches across the country.
In a coordinated sweep, police detained Ezra Jin, Zion’s 56-year-old founding pastor, and nearly 30 other church leaders and members in eight cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Chengdu. At least 18 people have been charged on suspicion of “illegal use of information networks,” fraud and other crimes.
Authorities have continued to harass Zion’s remaining members throughout November and December, according to their families. They broke up a private Thanksgiving gathering and took away the organizer. On Saturday, plainclothes officers barged into the home of one churchgoer to question him about Jin.
On Thursday, many of Zion’s members will be tuning in to the online service from hiding.
Cherie Geng — a longtime member of Zion who fled overseas with her 6-year-old son after her husband, a pastor, was arrested in the initial police raids — plans to watch the service with two other families in the same situation.
“By faith I can say we are expecting another revival [of our church], but at the moment, we just don’t know exactly how,” the 45-year-old English teacher said, requesting that her location not be disclosed for her family’s safety.
Human rights groups, experts on China’s religious policy and members of Zion have said that the crackdown represents a significant escalation of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s campaign to force Christian churches to accept direct control from the atheist Communist Party or disband.
“This is the first time there has been a nationwide hunt targeting an urban house church in many years,” said Bob Fu, founder of ChinaAid, a Texas-based nonprofit that advocates for religious freedom in China.
China’s Ministry of Public Security and State Administration for Religious Affairs did not respond to faxed requests for comment.
While Zion has faced the most pressure, about half a dozen other unregistered churches have been subject to police raids as well. Last week, hundreds of police officers in riot gear descended on a small town in Zhejiang province and arrested two local pastors and dozens of Christians, according to videos and accounts of the incident shared with The Washington Post.
U.S. lawmakers and officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have condemned the arrests and called for Beijing to immediately release Jin and the other detained church members.
But Fu is concerned that President Donald Trump has been unwilling or unable to raise the issue of religious freedom or human rights with Beijing in recent months as he looks to expand a U.S.-China trade truce in meetings with Xi next year.
“Trump’s policy is not consistent on China, and that gives Xi Jinping too much room to maneuver,” Fu said. “I don’t think Xi is afraid anymore.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Sinification’ of religion
Under Xi, the Chinese Communist Party has pushed for the “Sinification” of religion, which human rights groups say is less about aligning with local culture and more about enforcing Beijing’s agenda and ideological control.
“The government is inherently suspicious of religious communities, especially Christian groups,” said Karrie Koesel, an associate professor specializing in Chinese politics and religion at the University of Notre Dame. Beijing views organized religion that promotes an alternative worldview and “answers to a higher power” as potentially an existential threat to its grip on power, Koesel said.
Churches, mosques and other places of worship have faced intense pressure to accept strict government oversight. State-approved religious leaders must submit their sermons and publications for approval to ensure that they teach the “correct understanding” of theology.
While small, unregistered house churches — so called because they traditionally operated from people’s homes — may be tolerated if they keep a low profile, authorities have started putting unprecedented pressure on large urban house churches to either register or disband, said Ying Fuk-tsang, a historian of religion at Academia Sinica, a Taiwanese government-run research center.
Since the 2000s, this highly organized network of Protestant churches has led a religious revival in major Chinese cities. The churches’ appeal was strongest among young and well-educated believers who were left cold by the stuffy sermons of state-approved churches.
In hotel ballrooms and conference centers, charismatic pastors gave TED Talk-style sermons backed up by professional sound systems and modern music. They urged believers not just to build a personal relationship with God but also to support one another and give back to society by organizing charity drives, providing counseling and helping with child care.
“They were seeing these real needs — not just for a spiritual need of a place to go on Sunday,” but also for social connection and a sense of purpose, said Carsten Vala, a professor at Loyola University Maryland who wrote a book about the churches.
Some experts estimate that the growth of Christianity in China has stalled as a result of the crackdowns.
Yang Fenggang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University, said it’s difficult to get accurate data when people are scared to profess their faith. “There are still new people getting baptized, so that indicates there may be continued growth,” he said. “But nobody knows the scale or the rate.”
But despite repeated attempts by Chinese authorities to shut it down, Zion has spent nearly two decades finding ways to keep growing. And, against all odds, it had been winning.
When authorities forced the church out of its main Beijing location in 2018, its pastors fanned out across the country, holding pop-up services at people’s homes, on beaches and in karaoke parlors. During the coronavirus pandemic, Zion’s increasingly elaborate online services attracted thousands — sometimes tens of thousands — of believers.
The rise of Zion
Zion was one of several major urban churches founded in the 2000s as the internet and growing public interest in human rights fueled a sense that the Communist Party was retreating from the everyday lives of Chinese citizens.
After returning from his studies in the United States, Jin — who had previously spent a decade in the state-approved Three-Self church system — decided to found his own congregation.
“His 10 years in the Three-Self church were very painful, because being under its leadership meant real control,” said Anna Liu, Jin’s wife, who has lived in the U.S. with her three children since the 2018 crackdown.
Jin, however, chose to return. The couple decided the risk to his personal safety did not fundamentally alter what was at stake: They believed the house church movement “was not only good for Christianity, but for society as a whole,” Liu said.
A graduate of prestigious Peking University in Beijing, Jin and other founders of new urban house churches wanted to find a new way forward for Christianity in China. “My dad saw himself as part of mainstream society,” said Jin’s daughter, Grace Jin Drexel. “He felt like the church should not hide itself away.”
That approach was especially popular with intellectuals and white-collar businesspeople who were struggling to understand why newfound wealth wasn’t making them happy. “It wasn’t like he was dragging people from the sidewalk or office buildings,” Jin Drexel said. “These people just gravitated [to him].”
Geng was one of those people.
Confusion about her future brought her to Zion in 2008. She felt that her research — a PhD at China Agricultural University, where she studied the genetic transformations of plants — was a waste of time.
The first person she met at the church was her future husband, Gao Yingjia, who had recently graduated from Peking University with a PhD in theoretical physics but had decided to become a pastor. The couple married at Zion two years later.
Tales of finding meaning and support through the church are common among Zion’s members. When Gu Xiaoyu, 37, was growing up in rural China, her only goal in life was to attend college in Beijing. But after she got there, she didn’t know what to do next.
A college classmate brought her to Zion, where she met a friendly trainee pastor with a goofy smile. Sun Cong never stopped talking, but he won her over with his kindheartedness. The couple were married in the church hall and raised their three children among the broader community. Later, when married life got tough, they turned to senior pastors for counseling.
“We didn’t feel that life as beipiao” — people from elsewhere in China who move to Beijing but end up living on the fringes of the capital — “was hard or unstable, because we had each other as one big family,” she said.
That family is now scattered across multiple countries and missing many of its leading pastors, but their spouses are already discussing how to proceed.
“We’ve been doing lots of things we didn’t experience before, like speaking out,” Geng said. “If all of us choose to hide and be quiet, that means we will have less and less space.”
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