WASHINGTON/OTTAWA — In this episode I connect with Grace Jin Drexel in Washington, as she pleads for the release of her father — and, almost in spite of herself, becomes a target of the same regime that imprisoned him.
Her father is Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of Zion Church, once one of the largest underground churches in China. Last October, Chinese authorities arrested him along with dozens of his fellow leaders, in what Grace told the United States Congress was the largest takedown of an independent house church since the Cultural Revolution. His crime, in essence, was refusing to install facial recognition cameras inside his sanctuary — refusing, that is, to let the state mark and monitor those who pray.
The most striking part of our conversation was not only the courage of a man now sitting in a prison cell in Guangxi province, his diabetes untreated, but the reach of the machinery arrayed against his family thousands of miles away.
Pastor Jin comes from a lineage of great Chinese ministers and authors hardly recognized in much of the West — outside of biblical scholars — including Watchman Nee, the early twentieth-century teacher whose devotional writings shaped evangelical Christianity far beyond China, and who was imprisoned by the Communist authorities in 1952 and died in a labor camp two decades later, never released.
Since Grace and her husband began speaking out, her mother near Chicago has had her tires slashed in her own garage and been threatened by callers impersonating American federal agents. Grace says she has been followed here in Washington. Her husband now sleeps with a metal bat beside their bed. There is a clinical term for this — transnational repression — but what it means, in human terms, is that Beijing’s fear of one pastor has crossed an ocean to land on his daughter’s doorstep.
And yet Grace speaks without bitterness. She gave me this interview from a hospital, 38 weeks pregnant, balancing her own coming motherhood against the fight to free her father. She tells me her family has decided not to measure their work by results but by faithfulness — that they are, as she puts it, mere individuals, and the rest is the work of God. It is a posture I found genuinely disarming, and it runs through everything she says.
We talk about her father’s improbable story: a poor farmer’s son who won a place at one of Beijing’s finest universities, watched the tanks roll into Tiananmen Square in 1989, lost classmates who were never spoken of again, and found Christianity in the rubble of that shattered worldview. We talk about the quiet, explosive growth of Christianity across China, the regime’s deepening crackdown, and why an officially atheist Party that seeks to control everything cannot abide a church that worships a higher authority than the state.
This is, in the end, a Father’s Day story. It is about a daughter who has not seen her father in person since 2020, who is about to become a parent herself.
I ask her finally, what message does she think her father would share with Americans, Canadians, and listeners across the free world now, if he could reach them on this podcast?
Her answer applies not only to Pastor Jin, locked in a jail cell, but the cause of that, and every person now living in China, restricted from speaking freely.
“How can you look away from that pain, if that is your own family member?”
