Growing up, Grace Jin Drexel did not want to be known as “Ezra Jin’s daughter.” Jin “Ezra” Mingri is the founding pastor of Zion Church in Beijing, one of China’s largest and most public house churches. He is also a leading voice in the house churches’ burgeoning missions movement. Grace loves and respects her father, but like many children of prominent leaders, she desired to forge her own path. She even told her dad, “One day, you will be known as Grace Jin’s father.”
However, Drexel put her personal plans aside in October 2025, when Jin was arrested and jailed, along with much of Zion Church’s leadership. It was the largest attack on an unregistered church in mainland China since 2018, when Early Rain Covenant Church was forcibly closed and its pastor, Wang Yi, was sentenced to nine years in jail.
Since her father’s arrest, Drexel has become a full-time advocate for his release. Working with the Luke Alliance, she seeks to bring international attention to the situation of China’s house churches. That advocacy has reached the highest levels of government; on May 15, President Donald Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping would “strongly consider” Jin’s release. CT talked to Drexel about the state of the Chinese church and the surprising reticence of many Chinese Christians to engage in advocacy on behalf of the persecuted. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What is the situation of your father’s church?
In October 2025, my father was arrested, along with much of the leadership of Zion Church, and has remained in jail since. When it happened, it was like being swallowed by a whale. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I started texting everyone I knew on my phone and asking, “What do I do? How can you help?”
It was shocking to see how every single step that I’ve taken—my job at the Congressional Executive Commission on China, my research job at the Senate, my personal connections, my husband, even the DC neighborhood that I lived in and the random friends that I made—all of these things played such a big part in what became the advocacy work I now do full-time.
I didn’t plan it, but God has opened so many doors in such miraculous ways, so that now I’m able to advocate for my father in ways that many families in the Chinese Christian community have not been able to in the past. Historically, there have not been many family members of detained pastors who understand how DC works. It is a very rare situation that I find myself in.
This is a unique time for the Chinese churches, because there are so many pastors and leaders suddenly facing imprisonment. We have not seen a heightened level of persecution like this in a long time. To be honest, we thought these experiences would remain in the past with the Cultural Revolution.
How do the Chinese house churches view advocacy work?
We now live in a very globalized world. But until recently, that was not the case for Chinese Christians or even Chinese people generally. In postcolonial China, the house churches wanted independence from outsiders. In fact, the forefathers of the house churches were rejecting foreign oversight even before the CCP came to power. During the Cultural Revolution, many people were imprisoned, and at that point in time, who were they going to talk to? Who was there to advocate for them? They were isolated.
In their context of isolation, the Chinese house churches have felt a deep sense of spiritual nourishment through quietly suffering with Christ. This has been an important lesson through generations of the house churches. This theology of suffering with Christ is part of the Chinese bloodstream. It is an important part of the theology of the house churches being Chinese.
So there are absolutely people in the Chinese house churches who say, “Why are you advocating for us?” They believe that we should just quietly suffer like our forefathers have.
I am not saying that suffering with Christ is wrong. But I am saying that this may not be the only proper response.
Are there precedents in Scripture for advocating on behalf of the suffering?
One of the names of Christ is our “advocate” (1 John 2:1). The Book of Acts itself was written to witness what happened in the early church. You cannot be a witness if you don’t tell stories. So much of what I’m doing right now is just to tell the stories of my father and of the people of China to the broader church, the body of Christ. I am asking the global church to know about, to stand with, to suffer with, and ultimately to pray with the Christians in China.
So many Old Testament stories are about God’s people advocating to a foreign king to be able to return to the holy lands, build a temple, or worship. Think of Esther, Nehemiah, and Ezra.
So how would you respond to Chinese Christians who are uncomfortable with your advocacy?
What do we have to lose? Because it’s already pretty bad for even those who keep silent. Right now in China, there’s no sense in saying, “If we don’t talk, then no one will know about this church and shut it down.” That may have been true before 2018. But this is a new era. It doesn’t matter if you’re a big church, a small church, a public church, or a quiet church. They’re coming for us all.
They don’t persecute because you are political. Zion Church was public, but it is not political. They persecute churches because the churches are outside of their control.
And it doesn’t matter how big your impact is. Maybe they came after Zion because of our national impact, but they’re also coming after the small, regional, quiet historic churches. Take Yayang Church in Wenzhou as an example, or the Golden Lampstand Church in Linfen. We don’t know much about them at all. They kept quiet the entire time, and they still received 15- and 9-year jail sentences. So what do we have to lose at this point?
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China is so big that anything can be true and false in any part of China at the same time. Potentially, yes, there might be a small town that has a handful of Christians, and they can quietly pray in their kitchen, and no one will know about it. But I think the general trend is that the CCP is cracking down on all things ideological, all things independent, all things outside of its control. This is not just about churches but includes NGOs, the education system, and the media.
Christianity is just a small portion of this bigger trend because it’s a question of where China is going. It doesn’t matter to the CCP if you are quiet or not. What matters is whether you are with them or not.
So what would you say is the goal of your advocacy?
I want my father out of prison. This is my personal motive. But ultimately, it’s about glorifying God. Because if it is just solely about whether my father is released, it’s too disheartening. There is such a small chance of that happening. I choose to see what I’m doing as a testimony—both within China and outside of China—to what the Chinese Christians are doing and how their story can bring glory to God.
Are there any theological truths that you think would help the house churches in their current reality?
Recently, I was listening to a sermon of Tim Keller’s on 1 Peter 2:13–15. This passage is what people point to for why we should always obey those in authority. But the next verse says to live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.
Keller brought that into the Western context and talked about sin and not being a slave to the negative aspects of freedom. What I want to do is bring this into the Chinese context. We are ultimately called to honor and obey the emperor, but we are called to live as free people and to be servants of God alone. With that freedom, we respect the earthly authorities, but we also say, “I am a free soul, and I cannot bow down to you, come what may.”
As an American culturally steeped in the pursuit of wealth and happiness, I think we could use the house churches’ theology of suffering: that to be a Christian is to sign up to suffer with Jesus. But it sounds like the Chinese churches need to better understand what you’re saying: that they are adopted and free in Christ. How do you hold these two truths together?
It is a beautiful thing to be able to suffer with Christ and to be called to suffer with Christ. You develop a type of relationship with God that you cannot have without experiencing suffering. At the same time, it’s not spiritually healthy to think that it’s all on you or that you are the only one suffering for Christ. There is a risk of bitterness and self-righteousness when you’re suffering in silence and other Christians aren’t able to help and witness.
We must remain firm that God does not take pleasure in seeing people suffer. The beauty of Christianity is that God suffers with us. God is not just sitting high up in his throne room and delighting in watching his people suffer. He had his Son come into this world and suffer with us, and he knows the pain of the church.
If you have a family member in pain, you don’t just say, “Oh, that’s too bad. Enjoy.” You want to alleviate their suffering. You want to help. You want to come alongside and see what you can do for them. Christ the advocate didn’t just say, “Oh, you have sin. Enjoy suffering in hell.” He came alongside us and advocated for us.
When one part of the body is hurting, we are all hurting; therefore, the call is to walk alongside the suffering. Suffering allows us to see the most intimate stories of how God is at work in the church. Staying silent about persecution cuts short our understanding of how God is at work in history and prevents our testimonies from glorifying God. We need people who document, write about, and tell these stories so that they are a part of the spiritual DNA of the church. That is what we are as advocates—those who walk alongside and tell the story of our church family.
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