Yaxue Cao, November 4, 2025
(Continued from Part One)
The Birth of Zion Church: In the Open, Not Underground
In early 2007, Pastor Jin Mingri, together with his wife and three children, returned to Beijing.
By then, China had already undergone over a decade of rapid economic development. From the street level to its skyline, Beijing — rebuilt by cheap migrant labor from the countryside — had undergone a complete transformation. The 2008 Olympic Games were fast approaching, a spectacle that filled many with immense national pride. “Marching toward the world” was not only a slogan pushed by the authorities, but also a shared aspiration of the Chinese people, especially among the growing urban population.
The first decade of the 21st century was a unique window in China’s more than forty years of reform and opening up. It was a period that gave both Chinese civil society and the communist government cause for optimism, though what they were optimistic about differed sharply. The Communist Party possessed, for the first time, unprecedented institutional confidence in its one-party rule. It believed its leadership to be supremely wise and its system of national governance to be efficient and decisive — far superior to the “chaotic” democracies of the West. China’s GDP had already surpassed that of France, Britain, and Germany. Chairman Mao’s dream of “surpassing England and catching up with America” was in sight. The Party was giddy about being on track to becoming the world’s number one power.
At the same time, the arrival of the internet fostered both online and offline discussions about political reform, constitutional democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Under the Party’s supervision but driven by market forces, a throng of newspapers and magazines emerged that exhibited a creativity and expression rarely seen with official mouthpieces. The new class of private entrepreneurs and urban elites began to take a strong interest in social issues and public welfare. Against all odds, a group of lawyers devoted themselves to the tireless pursuit of justice and fairness in China’s Party-controlled — yet institutionally modernizing — judicial system. As China rapidly urbanized and living standards rose, a huge wave of new migrants flooded into the cities. The vast majority of Chinese were privately employed, outside the direct control of the government.
And in December 2008, 303 Chinese citizens signed and published the “Charter 08,” a manifesto that essentially called for ending one-party rule in China. Unsurprisingly, its publication was followed by a wave of arrests, yet Chinese civil society as a whole retained its optimistic milieu and continued to push forward.
That year, Pastor Jin was 38, in his prime, full of energy and purpose at a time when China was a place of abundant opportunities.
Urbanization and modernization were accompanied by a trend of spiritual discovery. Christianity, one of the religions officially approved and managed by the Communist Party, was growing in popularity. In the new millennium, house churches cropped up in cities throughout China.
In the late 1980s, Jin Mingri had worshiped alongside Jin Tianming, another Korean Chinese Christian. In 1993, Jin Tianming began hosting gatherings in his home with just over a dozen people. By 2007, this had grown into Beijing Shouwang Church (守望教会), which was one of the largest urban house churches in China and boasted nearly a thousand members.
Another congregation in Beijing, the Ark Church (方舟教会), attracted scholars and lawyers. In Shanghai, the Wanbang Evangelical Church (万邦宣教教会), founded in 1999, also reached a similar size of about a thousand members. In Chengdu, Sichuan, the young legal scholar and writer Wang Yi (王怡) had just established the Early Rain Covenant Church, which began with just a few dozen congregants but would grow steadily to become of the most recognizable house churches. Other cities saw new house churches pop up by the year.
In Wenzhou, a coastal city with a long history of Christian faith, house churches were ubiquitous both in the built-up areas and rural outskirts. These believers also went to proselytize in villages and towns further inland. In a sign of China’s greater willingness to open itself to outside cultures, foreign missionary groups were able to enter the country, where they primarily worked with urban house churches.
Back in Beijing, Pastor Jin initially had no intention of founding a church. His wife preferred him to teach theology, and indeed, he soon began teaching theology courses at a house church while also attending worship like an ordinary believer at Beijing Anhua Church (安华教会), pastored by his old friend Wang Desheng (王德生), whom he had known since his days at Yanjing Seminary.
One day, a group of former coworkers who had once served together at the same church invited him out for a meal to catch up. During the five years since Jin had left, many of them had struggled spiritually; without a satisfying church to go to, they spent Sundays wandering from place to place to worship. They begged him to start a new church. Pastor Jin was deeply moved.
They prayed together for two weeks. At the end of it, they went out to look for a place to rent, and found a big room on the 5th floor of the Long Bao Chen Building (隆宝宸) near the Asian Games Village in the northern part of Beijing. It wasn’t cheap: nearly 20,000 yuan monthly rent for 350 square meters (about 3800 square feet), a daunting cost for only twenty people.
One friend of Jin’s said, “You can’t possibly keep it up for three months.” Pastor Jin Tianming from Shouwang Church, however, was optimistic: “Trust me, give it three months and this place will be filled!”
In May 2007, the Zion Church was born. In its first year, it grew to have three hundred congregants, with two or three hundred more joining in the second. Around Christmas 2008, over 100 newcomers came in just one week. Entering the year 2009, the church employed six full-time staff including Pastor Jin, two evangelists, and administrative workers, and had formed Chinese and Korean congregations.
As soon as the church was founded, Pastor Jin wrote a letter to the religious affairs office of Beijing’s Chaoyang District to explain in detail his personal resume as well as Zion church and its background. In his words, he was neither requesting permission from the government to run his church, nor registering as a social organization, but rather “making a self-introduction.”
Jin wasn’t particularly concerned about whether his church was officially registered or not, because house churches in China were essentially unable to register legally as social organizations. He knew that even churches within the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, such as the Gangwashi Church where he had previously served, did not have legal status either. He also knew that what determined whether a religion was “legal” or “illegal” in China was not Article 36 of the Constitution, which clearly states that “citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief,” but rather the edicts issued by the government of the Communist Party stipulating that all religious activities must come under the leadership of the government’s religious affairs offices. If the Party said you were legal, you were legal; if it said you were illegal, you were illegal.
For Pastor Jin Mingri, what mattered more was the spirit of the church. He wanted to build a church that was both open and independent: No hiding or sulking, free from the control of the state-run Three Self Church system.
He wanted to lead his congregation in establishing a church that would serve the Lord — to spread the good news. At the same time, Pastor Jin identified one of the greatest challenges facing China’s urban churches: “What kind of spiritual direction can Christians offer to a morally fallen society?”
He believed that it was impossible for Christians to avoid the “political”: even when everyone else had seemingly abandoned their conscience, it was incumbent upon Christians to take up the cross and make a last stand for China’s conscience.
The “relevant organs” quickly found him and invited him out for dinner. Pastor Jin was a gentle-mannered man and had no objection to meeting and speaking with government officials. They treated him politely; after all, he had spent a decade working in Beijing’s official Three-Self church system. But after some niceties, they made clear the purpose of their meeting: they wanted Jin Mingri to bring Zion Church into the Three-Self framework.
“You know,” Pastor Jin told them, “I’ve brought my wife and children back with me from America. I’ve thought things through.”
At first, the officials didn’t get it. When they realized that Jin was saying — “Do what you may against me, I’m ready for it” — they exclaimed:
“Oh no! Pastor Jin, we’re very sorry! We didn’t mean anything like that! It’s a different era now.”
Meanwhile, on the third floor of the Long Bao Chen building, there was a nightclub. The gangsters who ran the nightclub didn’t like having a church on the fifth floor, and once they smashed up Pastor Jin’s car with wooden sticks. The church didn’t like the nightclub either. When the evening service ended and the elevator passed the third floor, scantily clad young women, noisy and laughing, would crowd in. During one sermon, a furious Pastor Jin told his congregation:
“What kind of country is this? It gives free license to nightclubs that corrupt people’s souls, but treats churches that purify the spirit as illegal gatherings to be suppressed!”
A few years later, the nightclub went out of business. Long Bao Chen’s property manager approached the church, to see if they might be interested in renting the third floor, which was much bigger, instead. The church’s administrative committee met and, after a vote of the entire congregation, decided to go ahead with the rental. Those with money contributed money; those with ability and time did volunteer work.
2018: ‘Do Not Throw Away Your Confidence’
In 2017, for the October 1 National Day holiday week, Pastor Jin took his family for a vacation in the city of Kaifeng. One morning when he got up, he heard a voice: “So do not throw away your confidence.” The line came from Hebrews 10:35.
In the first sermon he gave after New Year 2018, Pastor Jin said to his congregation that he knew why God sent him this passage, and “this is an important guidance that God has given us for the present circumstances.” He made it the theme of that year’s sermons.
God knew they would need it in 2018.
City churches had been under relentless waves of attack. In 2009, when Zion Church was still in its infancy, Wanbang Evangelical Church in Shanghai, perhaps the largest house church in China at the time, was outlawed.
Facing constant obstruction by the authorities, Shouwang Church in Beijing found it impossible to buy or rent a place for worship. Starting in April 2011, its members began to hold church services outdoors. Still, the police harassed them wherever they went. Shouwang’s lead pastor, Jin Mingri’s old friend Jin Tianming, was placed under house arrest along with his family — an ordeal that would end up lasting a decade.
In 2014, the Chinese government launched a campaign to remove crosses atop churches in the city of Wenzhou and elsewhere in Zhejiang province, destroying hundreds of them. In some incidents, the government demolished church buildings amid large-scale protests.
Authorities in Henan and other provinces carried out similar crackdowns on house churches.
In 2015, the Living Stone Church (活石教会) in Guiyang was outlawed and forced to disband. Its property in one of the city’s premier office buildings was confiscated, and its lead pastor arrested on trumped-up charges.
In his first sermon of 2018, Pastor Jin implored his congregation to stay strong:
“Though we are weak and often stumble, that does not mean we are nothing. We are people loved by God. … No matter what challenges we, our families, or our work may face in 2018, no matter how drastically the society we live in may change, we will always come before the throne of God’s grace. There lies the help we need. God’s grace, strong and powerful, will be with us.”
He hoped that his congregation would display courage, and remain in a faithful state of mind even under such harsh and discouraging circumstances. He said, “this is the new state of life we have because we know Jesus Christ.”
The persecution they had feared soon arrived, though perhaps it had been brewing for a long time. From its founding until 2018, Zion Church had, despite the occasional threats and interference, developed steadily for eleven years. By 2018, the church had ten meeting venues across Beijing, with about 1,500 people regularly attending worship and other activities.
Between March and April, under government orders, the property management company suddenly demanded that the church install 24 CCTV surveillance cameras in its third-floor worship space and other rooms in the Long Bao Chen building, citing “fire safety” requirements. The church refused.
Meanwhile, many members of the congregation began facing pressure, harassment, and even intimidation from landlords, neighborhood committees, police stations, and their workplaces. They received eviction notices; their employers gave them threatening phone calls or met with them for in-person warnings; police and state security officers visited their homes, demanding that they promise to stop attending church. They claimed that the church’s worship and fellowship gatherings were illegal assemblies and inconsistent with China’s political system. Some even directly accused their faith of being a cult.
This situation persisted for about two months. That May, even though there were still five years left on the lease, the property company informed the church that it would sever the contract after August.
Tensions escalated. Government officials summoned Pastor Jin for one discussion after another. He listened quietly for the most part, saying as little as possible. Meanwhile, he and the Zion pastoral team urged their congregation to cherish freedom of faith and conscience, not to fear violence or humiliation, to speak truthfully, and to reject lies and false testimony — to not “throw away your confidence.”
The church’s administrative committee met to discuss possible solutions to their predicament. But in truth, apart from perseverance and prayer, there was little that could be done when facing a powerful government hostile to the very concept of faith. The committee suggested that Pastor Jin and his family leave China for a while to see if that might ease the pressure.
On June 4, a symbolic date, Pastor Jin and his family traveled to the United States. But after a month, the persecution had neither stopped nor lessened in his absence. He decided to return, knowing that still greater storms were yet to come.
“Have you made up your mind?” Anna asked.
“Yes, I have,” he replied.
On July 12, he said goodbye to his wife and children and returned to Beijing alone.
August came. Under government pressure, the property company terminated its ten-year lease agreement with the church. To get around the authorities demand, Zion Church established Beijing Jianweitang Cultural Co., Ltd. (北京见微堂文化有限公司), and continued to rent the third floor of the Long Bao Chen building under this company’s name, signing a new five-year lease. By then, the other nine Zion church sites across Beijing had already shut down one after the other.
On Sunday, September 9, 2018, the morning worship proceeded as usual. Hundreds were in attendance. But toward the end of the afternoon service, at around 5:00 p.m., as the churchgoers sang their hymns of praise, more than seventy people suddenly burst into the venue.
Some were uniformed officers, others in plainclothes. Among them were government officials. Using loudspeakers, the intruders shouted: “This is an illegal gathering! Disperse immediately!”
They quickly divided into groups; some officers stood at the exits, others searched the pulpit and storage rooms. Another group, wielding clubs, pushed and drove the worshippers out. Amid the chaotic scene, many believers left in tears.
Pastor Jin tried to explain to them that the church had existed for over a decade and had not broken any laws with their assembly. But they would not listen. They searched his phone and sermon notes and interrogated him, asking whether he had “received foreign funds” and whether he was “anti-government.”
The congregation had been driven out. Now alone, surrounded by dozens police officers and government officials, in the main sanctuary, with rows and rows of empty red seats bathed in soft ceiling lighting, Pastor Jin heard the announcement from the officials of Chaoyang District Civil Affairs Bureau and the district’s Ethnic and Religious Affairs Office: Beijing Zion Church was banned “in accordance with the law.”
At the end of the raid, police sealed the church doors, leaving official notices posted on the outside.
A few days after the raid, Pastor Jin told Hong Kong Cable Television that “In the future, the space for religious practice to survive will grow smaller and smaller. … Especially since the 19th Party Congress [held October 2017], when religious affairs were transferred from the State Council to the Party’s United Front Work Department, that was a key turning point.”
“The Party now regards religious communities as competitors, threats, or even as hostile groups,” he continued. “Following this logic, it will tighten control over all religions. Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Protestants, and Catholics alike will all face tremendous pressure. This is only the first wave.”
On the same day, September 9, 2018, upon hearing the news of the raid on Zion Church in Beijing, Wang Yi (王怡), the founding pastor of the Early Rain Covenant Church (秋雨圣约教会) in Chengdu, Sichuan province, delivered an impassioned sermon:
“We have a duty to tell Xi Jinping that he is a sinner, and that the government he leads has gravely offended God by persecuting the Church of the Lord Jesus. Unless he repents, he will perish. We must tell such an evil man that there is still a way out, the only way, through the cross of our Lord Jesus.”
“We long for them to change their ways; that is why we call them to repent!”
On Sunday, December 9, Early Rain Church was raided. The congregation was dispersed, the church doors were sealed, and Pastor Wang Yi along with several church staff members were arrested. In December 2019, Wang was convicted of “inciting subversion state power” and “illegal business operations.” He received a nine-year prison sentence.
A Church on the Move
In the early years of Zion Church, Pastor Jin Mingri often said, “Should the sky fall, Tianming will hold it up.” Indeed, Jin Tianming, the founding pastor of Beijing Shouwang Church, was a leading figure in China’s urban house church community. But by the time Zion Church came under attack in late 2018, Jin Tianming had already been under house arrest for more than seven years. Police stationed outside his door in three shifts around the clock, watching him and his family 24/7.
Since 2011, when Shouwang Church was compelled to worship outdoors, Pastor Jin Mingri had begun to think, “If the same thing were to happen to Zion Church, what should we do?”
By happenstance, in 2012, he learned about a method employed by a young pastor in the United States: every week, that pastor pre-recorded his sermons and played them simultaneously at multiple locations on Sunday, allowing the church to reach more people and grow rapidly. Later that year, Pastor Jin and Pastor Cui Quan from Shanghai even traveled to the U.S. to observe the remote method for a few days. Beginning in 2013, Zion Church adopted a similar approach. Over the following years, through video preaching, Zion Church had established nine additional worship sites across Beijing.
“More importantly,” Pastor Jin said, “when harsher times come, the church can be large or small, mobile and flexible.”
Those harsher times did come. After the church was broken up, its members returned to the era of home gatherings. Each week, more than a hundred people would come to Pastor Jin’s home in Beijing’s Shunyi district. On Sundays, sometimes a small group would arrange to meet at a park, taking a walk together while listening through earphones to pre-recorded sermons and worship sessions on their phones. They called it “walking worship.” Afterward, they would share a meal at a restaurant or meet over tea.
For those unable to join a physical gathering or the park walks, they could participate anytime and anywhere in worship and prayer through a mobile app. “Attending church” no longer depended on having a physical space.
As the Chinese New Year of 2019 approached, many members of the congregation, who came from all corners of the country, returned to their hometowns for the holidays. One of the church’s tech staff suggested running an online service for the scattered congregation. That was how Zion Church held its first worship via the internet.
Soon after that came the novel coronavirus pandemic, spreading out of Wuhan. In January 2020, as Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei province went under lockdown and an atmosphere of fear and unease set in nationwide, Zion became the first church in China to hold online services open to the public. During the first Zoom service, the 300-person meeting room was instantly full. By the second week, attendance reached 500; by the third week, more than 1,000… at the peak, over 3,000 people joined a single service.
As the pandemic spread, so did the lockdowns. With people confined to their homes, over a thousand pastors and church leaders across China began joining Zion’s online services to observe and learn about online worship.
Pastor Jin was bewildered. It felt to him as though God had been preparing Zion Church for this moment ever since 2013.
What astonished him even more was how, suddenly, like a handful of seeds were being thrown into the air and falling on the ground far and wide, there were now people across the cities of China who had become “members of the Zion family.”
He began traveling with young evangelists from the church to visit these new communities. He knew that online worship alone was not enough; believers still needed in-person fellowship. In 2021, Pastor Jin left Beijing and moved to Guangzhou. Fellow Zion Church pastor Wang Lin (王林), formerly a lawyer, relocated to Shanghai; Pastor Gao Yingjia (高颖佳), a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, remained in Beijing.
In the Pearl River Delta cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai, Pastor Jin and the young evangelists began forming small groups. As their numbers grew, these groups started renting venues in the areas where they were active, establishing local congregations.
However, a few months later, the authorities in Guangzhou informed him that he could no longer reside in the city, saying that his presence was putting them under great pressure. He began to move from city to city, staying for a while in one place before moving on to another.
In no small measure, he felt he and his missionary team was following the example of Paul, the peripatetic apostle, and “went from place to place, proclaiming the word” (Acts 8:4) in many parts of China, in the southwest, along the eastern coastline, and everywhere in between. Wherever he was, he and the team met with believers, and looked for Lydias, or “seed workers,” who had grown strong enough in faith to lead groups, or possibly plant churches.
This fulfilled what Jin Mingri and the pastoral team of Zion Church had written to their congregation in a letter on September 15, 2018, a week after the raid: “The powers of this world may be able to shut down Long Bao Chen, but they cannot destroy the Church. … Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit; wherever we are, there the Church is also.”
Despite the challenges, the seven years that followed turned out to be seven fat years for the growth of Zion Church.
In a speech given in September of this year, not long before his detention, Pastor Jin described this new model — a hybrid of online and offline worship and multi-city church planting — as the “3.0 era of China’s urban churches.”
He explained: the “1.0 era” was the period of house churches, which arose in the early years of the economic reform; “2.0” was the wave of urban churches during the first two decades of the new millennium, when congregations moved out of homes and into office buildings, drew believers from all walks of life, and grew rapidly, until they came under the government’s repression.
Zion Church, without a doubt, is the pioneer and representative of the “3.0 era” of China’s urban church movement, even though the authorities have never let up their pressure since 2018. In Beijing, multiple Zion meeting venues have been raided by police and the believers taken away; in Suzhou, Shanghai, and other cities, Zion’s churchgoers have met with similar treatment.
In late 2020, the “Unified Prayer Gathering of Beijing Pastors” (北京教牧联合祷告会) initiated by Jin Tianming in 2004 and later joined by Jin Mingri upon his return to Beijing from America, came under government investigation. Pastors from Beijing’s house churches were interrogated and threatened by the authorities.
Since 2018, China’s religious affairs authorities have introduced a series of new regulations aimed at tightening control: restricting places of worship; investigating contact between foreign Christians and Chinese churches; further regulating religious groups, clergy, church finances, and seminaries; and imposing stricter censorship of online religious content.
For Christianity, the Communist Party has launched a “Sinicization” campaign of which the central aim is to force house churches independent of the Three-Self system to adopt Party ideology and submit to its indoctrination.
By mid-2022, Pastor Jin had settled in Beihai, Guangxi province. It was a small and beautiful city on the South China Sea. Life there was inexpensive and peaceful, far from Beijing’s watchful eye. Indeed, the local police never once visited him or his gatherings, which started with only ten people, then to twenty, then to a big enough congregation that the church rented a large and welcoming space for worshiping.
At the same time, he and Pastor Yin Huibin (尹会彬) continued to travel to different locations of Zion Church across China.
But early this year, police began to raid locations in other provinces. Entering June, the pace quickened: every Sunday, at least two, three, or four Zion locations were raided. In Shandong, Zhejiang, Guizhou, Yunnan, Henan, Guangdong provinces, then Guangxi, too. All these raids followed the same pattern: scores of police would barge in during worship, take away pastors and workers, and gave them 15 days of administrative detention. During the interrogations, police would show them a picture of Pastor Jin Mingri, asking if they knew him, whether he had visited, and so on. The police would ask them: Do you not know that the church has been outlawed? It’s fraud to receive contributions from people……
A lawyer involved in some of these cases told China Change that, since June, it became clear to him and other lawyers that a campaign against Zion Church had been well underway, and that such an action could only have been coordinated by the Ministry of Public Security.
In a letter delivered through his lawyer on October 19, Pastor Jin Mingri noted how much suffering so many pastors, evangelists, elders, and deacons had gone through before him, and that going through the same himself, “suffering a little for the Gospel” gives him great comfort.
He called upon the Zion congregation, his brothers and sisters in Christ, to keep in mind the theme of their church from 2018: “Do not throw away your confidence.”
For 2025, the theme Pastor Jin decided on was: “Freedom is on high.”
(The author wishes to thank Pastor Jin Mingri’s wife Anna for her help.)
Yaxue Cao editor this website.
Sources:
龙降恩代理主任牧师，目前在美国学习, 介绍锡安教会近况, 2025.10.18
[…] (Continue on to Part Two) […]