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Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri, leader of the influential underground Zion Church, was detained Friday evening at his home in Beihai, located in China’s southeastern Guangxi province, according to his daughter, a fellow church pastor and a religious rights monitoring group, the AP reported.
Dozens of other Zion Church leaders were also reportedly arrested in Beijing and at least five other provinces across the country. Pastor Sean Long of the Chinese Zion Church, currently based in the US, said those detained could face charges related to “illegal dissemination of religious materials via the Internet.”
“This is a very disturbing and upsetting moment,” Long told The Associated Press by phone. “This is a cruel violation of religious freedom, which is written into the Chinese Constitution. We want our clergy to be released immediately.”
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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday condemned China’s detention of several Zionist Church leaders. The US called for his immediate release.
“The United States condemns the Chinese Communist Party’s recent detention of dozens of leaders of the unregistered Zion Church in China, including lead pastor Mingri “Ezra” Jin. We call for their immediate release,” Rubio said in a post on Twitter.
What is Zion Church?
Zion Church is an underground or house church unregistered with Chinese authorities. They disregard Chinese government restrictions that require believers to worship only in registered congregations.
Founded in 2007 by Pastor Jin Mingri (Ezra Jin), an ethnic Korean who became a Christian after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the church has become a major evangelical force with thousands of followers and a focus on reformed theology.
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Under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Beijing has cracked down on independent Christian congregations over the past decade, destroying crosses, burning Bibles, closing churches and ordering followers to sign papers renouncing their faith. Chinese authorities have placed an emphasis on “Sinicizing” the religion by imposing loyalty to the officially atheist Communist Party and seeking to eliminate any challenges to its power over people’s lives.
Zion Church was also targeted during the 2018 widespread crackdown, leading to the closure of its main sanctuary.
According to Pastor Sean Long, church membership has grown from about 1,500 in 2018 to an estimated 5,000 or more today. It now operates more than 100 informal places of worship in 40 cities, including apartments, restaurants and even karaoke bars.
Why does China see ‘underground’ churches as a threat?
Other underground churches in China have also faced increasing pressure in recent months, amid new government efforts to control religious activity outside state-approved channels.
Because it refuses to register under the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the Chinese government views Zion Church as a potential threat to Communist Party control. It has faced repeated crackdowns, most notably in 2018 when authorities shut down its Beijing operations, placed Pastor Jin under surveillance, and temporarily barred his US citizen family members from leaving China.
What is the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM)?
The Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) is a state-sanctioned Protestant Christian organization in China, established in 1954 to regulate and control Protestant churches under the CCP.
Its name is derived from three core principles—self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation, which emphasize independence from foreign missionary influence and alignment with Chinese government policies.
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It operates under the National Committee of TSPM, which is supervised by the State Religious Affairs Administration (SARA) and the United Front Work Department.
Zion Church rejects TSPM oversight in order to maintain its religious freedom, focusing on explicitly reformed theology and uncensored teachings.
‘Zion explodes after Covid’
Jin’s daughter, Grace Jin, who lives in the United States, is not sure what is behind this recent action, but she believes it may be due to the growing influence of the Zion Church and the challenge to Communist Party rule.
“Zion exploded after Covid, which troubled the government,” he said.
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In May, the pastor of the Light of Zion Church in Xi’an, eastern China, was detained. In June, ten members of the Golden Lampstand Church in the western province of Shanxi were sentenced to prison after being arrested four years earlier.
“We are seeing the most widespread and coordinated wave of persecution against urban independent house churches in China in four decades,” said Bob Fu, founder of the US-based religious group China Aid, as reported by the Associated Press.
In 2021, the US government estimated that Buddhists made up 18.2 percent of the country’s total population, Christians 5.1 percent, Muslims 1.8 percent, followers of folk religions 21.9 percent, and atheists or unaffiliated persons 52.2 percent, while Hindus, Jews, and Taoists made up less than 1 percent.
religious freedom in china
China continues to suppress religious freedom through widespread high-tech surveillance of places of worship and beyond. Authorities have also used advanced technologies for international repression and disinformation campaigns aimed at silencing criticism of human rights abuses in the country.
According to a report in the 2025 USCIRF Annual Report, Chinese authorities forced Uyghur and Tibetan migrant communities into silence through surveillance, blackmail, and threats against their families living in China.
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Authorities promoted tourism in Xinjiang to conceal their genocidal violations and deflect international criticism.
Human rights activists continued to express concerns about Hong Kong’s new national security law, Article 23, and its impact on religious freedom. Some activists imprisoned in Hong Kong have alleged that prison officials deny them access to religious materials.
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