In his preaching in China, Ezra Jin used to say he would likely not be jailed as his predecessors were, but the pastor can now talk about a prison experience of sharing a room with 30 people and being forced to sleep next to a violent veteran suffering post-trauma nightmares.
Detained on the pretext of internet-related charges in October 2025 for leading an unofficial church and released in July after U.S. President Trump raised his case with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Pastor Jin told Christian Daily International that prison conditions included the “horrible and terrible” experience of an overcrowded cell.
In bed at night, he said, “between two people, you’re really face to face and you’re squished next to each other when you’re sleeping.”
Some ex-soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome would wake in the middle of the night from nightmares that would leave them fighting each other, he said, and authorities assigned Pastor Jin to sleep beside one who did so regularly.
“Other people were afraid to sleep next to him, so they would put me next to that guy,” he said.
During highly regimented days with all activities pre-scheduled, authorities made Pastor Jin “sit on a hard stool for many, many hours, and so after a couple of weeks, it would even be hard for you to use the bathroom,” he said.
“But even that is not the true difficult situation,” the founder of Zion Church in Beijiing said. “The truly difficult situation for me was that they cut off all communications for me from the outside. None of the letters that I wrote was allowed to leave the prison. None of the outside letters came to me.”
With his daughter Grace interpreting, Pastor Jin told Christian Daily International that the only way he could learn anything outside the prison walls was through attorneys, but authorities revoked the law license of his first lawyer and shut down his firm, he said.
He lost his second attorney when his superiors refused to let him represent the pastor, and officials suspended the law firm of his third attorney while investigating it, Pastor Jin said. His case advanced some under a fourth attorney until officials forbade him to see the pastor.
“So when I heard that, I wrote a will inside the prison in my mind: ‘I will not confess any crimes. I will not commit suicide, and these are some of my financial situations that I wanted to make my family be aware of,’” Pastor Jin said. “And I wrote that thinking that that was the last thing I would write.”
He went on a hunger strike, and after two days his attorney was allowed to see him.
“I think in retrospect, at that point the Trump administration, et cetera, were already putting pressure on China,” Pastor Jin told Christian Daily International. “And so, then that’s exactly how in July, all of a sudden, I was taken out.”
Saying he strongly hopes the international community will continue to highlight the importance of supporting attorneys as Christians increasingly face spurious legal charges, Pastor Jin said he believes he owes his release ultimately to “the many prayers, the answering of many prayers. Of course, I’m so grateful and thankful for all of that.”
For 35 years he has experienced the kinds of struggles that all church leaders face as well as the challenges of pastoring under a communist dictatorship, he said.
“But I’ve never regretted it, and I’m always very joyous,” Pastor Jin said. “My biggest hero in my heart is [Apostle] Paul. Oftentimes when I preached sermons, I said, ‘Oh, the previous generation of church leaders, they’ve all experienced prison sentences – I feel like I won’t have the chance to have that experience.’
“But, to be honest, after this experience, I think that it’s been beneficial to me too. So now when I talk about Paul, I can also say, ‘Oh, I also had that experience like Paul.’”
He was a non-Christian student at Beijing University when he experienced the June 4, 1989 violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square that dismantled the socialist dreams and ideology of his generation, he said. He began exploring Christianity, joining a small gathering of people that initiated his journey. During that time he attended a Christian funeral and realized he was not ready to face death, he said.
“But somehow these Christians, when they looked at their position towards death, they faced God in such a joyous way,” he said. “And shortly after, someone at church personally came and took me to the side of the church and said, ‘Jesus loves you,’ and that this is how you become a Christian. Then I prayed and became a Christian. I had such an amazing experience and journey that evening of just the joy.”
He soon began serving a church in leadership, preaching even before he was baptized, he said. He found a solid job after graduating, but the pastoral call was stronger, and he continued to serve in leadership, he said.
“It’s been 35 years, and I’ve never regretted a single moment,” he said.
Looking Forward to Revival
After the church he founded in 2007 grew to thousands of members in cells around China that mushroomed in part due to due the online services necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, authorities in October arrested 28 of the main leaders of his church in 11 cities, he said.
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders feel threatened when unregistered churches become too successful, and Pastor Jin said Zion had 100 churches meeting online or otherwise across 40 cities before the October 2025 crackdown.
He was told he was arrested for illegal use of information on the internet, which he denied, and authorities later switched the charges to fraud and illegal business operations based on the church’s common practice of collecting offerings.
“And I still said, ‘I don’t agree with this, because the Chinese Constitution, Article 36, says that there is freedom of religion in China, and in fact, Christianity is considered one of the five recognized religions inside even China,’” he said.
Pastor Jin said he challenged officials to show he had done anything illegal, and that otherwise the constitution and Chinese law protected his activities.
“And so they became very angry. They said, ‘You don’t know how powerful and dark or how the Chinese Communist Party is,’” he said. “But I know that God is even stronger than that. So on July 3rd, within 24 hours, I was plucked from prison [and went] all the way to America. So just like Daniel’s friends, I knew that God would save us, [thinking], ‘But even if God doesn’t save us from prison, we don’t think that we’ve done anything wrong.’”
Pastor Jin said he was part of the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) church for 10 years, whose controls he found problematic, before he went to Fuller Seminary in 2002 and obtained a master’s degree, returning to China in 2007.
“China is a place where it is the Chinese Communist Party that controls everything,” he said. “It controls your family, your finances, everything, including your family, education as well as your thoughts. And that’s what it means about a totalitarian ability to control your conscience.”
Germany’s Third Reich under Hitler was not as powerful or totalitarian as the CCP, he said.
“There are only two types of church in China – one is a church that allows the Communist Party to control what it teaches and preaches,” he said. “The Chinese Communist Party wants to formulate its ideology into the doctrine of the church.
[There are] those who say yes and allow for that type of reorganized or state church, the TSPM churches, and those who say no are house churches. But they will be the ones who get persecuted.”
Faith and spiritual freedom are more important than subjecting to CCP ideology, he said.
CCP officials believed they had eliminated Christianity during the era of Mao Zedong from 1949 and 1976, but in the past 30 years the number of Christians has grown to at least 80 million, he said.
“Because the gospel itself shows the power of the Lord – God’s own son died for our sins and died for us, so of course it is only natural, it is okay for us to also suffer for that,” Pastor Jin said. “We think that the persecution under Xi right now will be the last persecution, and then there will be even greater revival.”
He expects that revival to take place during his lifetime.
“So in actuality, I am very much not at all depressed, because I truly believe that the Chinese Communist Party, you will not be able to beat out Christianity,” he said.
You may also be interested in watching the video interview of Rev. Ezra Jin with the Christian Post.
