Behind a paywall, a recent Breitbart article argues that “Chinese Pastor Freed on July 4 Weekend Scared Beijing by Popularizing Zoom Worship During the Pandemic.” Maybe Beijing got even more scared of independent religious worship thanks to Zoom and Ezra Jin Mingri. But the Chinese government had been scared of religion for a long time.
After his arrest last October, China Change reported on Pastor Jin’s activities in the People’s Republic of China in some detail. Jin founded his Protestant church in 2007 at the request of fellow worshipers. Within a year, it had acquired 300 congregants, a number dwarfed by later growth. The government paid attention (November 4, 2025).
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.
(A Three-Self church is one supervised by the government in accordance with the alleged principles of “self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation.” What may sound like references to preserving the independence of the church—from, say, government interference—are in fact references to government-mandated “independence” from foreign influence…in order to be better subject to the restrictive oversight of Beijing.)
“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.”
That embarrassed “gee, you’ve misunderstood us completely” attitude didn’t last. By 2018, unregistered Christian churches had been subjected to years of relentless attack. Pastor Jin
hoped that his congregation would display courage, and remain in a faithful state of mind even under such harsh and discouraging circumstances…..
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.
Further harassment ensued, including of many individual congregants, and finally the property owner terminated the church’s lease (five years early). Other Zion Church sites in Beijing would also be shut down.
An administrative committee of the church suggested that the pastor and his family “leave China for a while to see if that might ease the pressure.” It didn’t. The raids and harassment continued, and Pastor Jin felt obliged to return. But he left his family in the United States.
Pastor Jin had already experimented with making church services available on video in 2013. The move to the Internet came six years later.
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.
Now that Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri has been released from prison, has left China, and has been reunited with his family in the United States, does this mean the end of his involvement in the Zion Church? He doesn’t seem to have said anything yet about his plans. But he knows how to use Zoom. And you don’t have to be in the same country with the other people joining a Zoom meeting.
