A Beijing pastor and seven members of his church have been held in criminal detention for nearly a month after police broke up preparations for the underground church’s 20th anniversary celebration, according to a letter from the pastor’s wife published this week by the religious-freedom group ChinaAid.
On the evening of Sept. 4, about 50 members of Beijing Jiaquan Church were setting up a hotel conference room for the next day’s celebration when more than 100 officers, some in plainclothes, surrounded the room, the letter says. Everyone was made to hand over their state ID numbers, addresses and phone numbers before being sent home.
Pastor Zhou Zixun and seven church members were held on suspicion of fraud. Two were later released and two more leaders were picked up, so as of this week eight people are still in criminal detention. Their families don’t know where they’re being held, and some were taken without medication for chronic conditions, the letter says.
According to Cui, the fraud accusation is tied to Jiaquan’s status as an unregistered house church and its ministry finances. Jiaquan, founded in 2006, has more than 1,000 members across several cities and runs a music school that trains worship leaders for other house churches. China permits Protestant worship through state-sanctioned organizations, while independent house churches operate outside that system and face government restrictions.
“Despite China’s own constitution warranting religious freedoms, the government will not allow a church to register unless they give authorities full control,” wrote Cui Jinyoung, Zhou’s wife and the church’s co-founder, who is South Korean and has been barred from re-entering China for about three years. “Therefore most churches throughout China remain unregistered and are considered illegal. Jia Quan Church is no exception and this is the basis for their fraud accusations.”
The account comes from Cui and ChinaAid, a U.S.-based Christian human-rights organization. ChinaAid said when it first reported the detentions that it was still working to independently confirm details. The broader crackdown on independent churches, however, is well documented. Last October, police arrested nearly 30 pastors and members of Zion Church across seven cities and charged its founder, Ezra Jin Mingri, with “illegal use of information networks.”
Jin was released in July after President Trump raised his case with Xi Jinping, but eight Zion members are still being held on fraud and “illegal business” charges, with a trial that keeps getting pushed. Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, whose pastor has been in prison since 2019, had more than 30 people detained in a June raid and 11 more, most of them over 60, picked up at a teahouse Bible study three weeks ago.
And since Jan. 1, a revised public-security law has for the first time named “illegal religious activities” as an offense police can punish on the spot with up to 15 days’ detention.
“We are especially concerned by the use of the criminal charge of ‘fraud,’” ChinaAid founder Bob Fu said in a statement Tuesday. “We have seen similar economic-crime accusations increasingly used against house church pastors and coworkers in connection with ordinary religious ministry, church offerings and other church activities.”
Pew’s most recent comparable survey estimate found roughly 20 million Chinese adults formally identified as Christian in 2018, about 90 percent of them Protestant. Pew also cautions that religious identity is unusually difficult to measure in China and that estimates vary widely, in part because many Christians worship in unauthorized house churches.
Cui’s letter closes with a request for prayer for her husband and, she writes, for “the pastors and co-workers of churches across China who are suffering similar persecution.”
Source: RELEVANT
