SouthernWorldwide.com – With her third child due in five weeks, Grace Drexel sat in Washington, speaking about her father, a grandfather to her children whom they barely know, and her hope that President Donald Trump might help bring him home.
Her father, Pastor Ezra Jin, has been detained in China for the past seven months, along with dozens of other Christian leaders. Advocates describe this as one of the most significant crackdowns on underground Protestant churches in recent years.
Now, as Trump visits Beijing for meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Drexel states her family is clinging to a rare moment of hope. This comes after Trump publicly pledged to raise Pastor Jin’s imprisonment directly with Xi.
“I’ll bring it up,” Trump told a reporter when asked if he planned to discuss the detained pastor during the trip.
For Drexel, this could signal an end to years of suffering. Her family has been separated for nearly a decade. Her mother and younger brothers fled China in 2018 after authorities shut down Zion Church’s physical sanctuary in Beijing, fearing they could become collateral targets in the escalating crackdown on Christians.
Pastor Jin, however, chose to remain behind with his community.
“My father actually had many opportunities to apply for a green card,” Drexel said. “He felt the calling for China.”
Drexel herself has not seen her father in person since 2020.
Now pregnant with her third child, she expresses that all she desires is for her father to finally reunite with his family.
“We would really, really love for our children to also experience and learn from their Grandpa,” she said.
Drexel described her father not as a political dissident, but as a pastor whose sole mission was to remain faithful to Christianity outside the control of the Communist Party.
She characterized Zion Church as independent from government oversight and deeply rooted in Scripture and community service.
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“We helped with the society and the community around us, love our neighbors, and to love God,” she said.
Beyond his role as a pastor, Drexel says she knew her father as a gentle man devoted to those around him.
“Ultimately, I know my father as just a very gentle and kind man,” she said. “He is not very confrontational generally. He just loved everyone around him.”
“He never even criticized anyone, including his children, much as we were growing up,” she added.
Drexel tearfully shared that relatives learned her father had been handcuffed, his head shaved, and that he was struggling to receive medication while in detention.
“And this kind and gentle man is now in prison,” she said. “All because he was just leading a church.”
The crackdown against Zion Church began years before Pastor Jin’s arrest.
According to Drexel, the pressure intensified around 2016 and 2017 after Xi Jinping rewrote China’s religious regulations. This formally advanced the policy known as the “Sinicization” of religion, an effort critics say forces religious groups to align with Communist Party ideology.
Around that time, Zion Church became one of many churches targeted by the authorities.
Initially, Drexel states, government officials demanded the church install facial-recognition cameras inside the sanctuary to monitor worshipers.
“We told them all our services are public. You can come and view anytime,” she said. “But we didn’t feel that we wanted to put an extra amount of surveillance or control on our congregation.”
After the church refused, Drexel says authorities installed surveillance cameras in the building’s lobby instead and began systematically targeting church members.
“Each and every member who came on Sunday [was] being harassed,” she said. Some worshipers lost their jobs, others were forced out of apartments, while some families faced threats concerning their children’s education and even their parents’ retirement benefits.
“It was all possible under the Chinese Communist Party if they wanted you to stop doing something,” she said.
Authorities eventually confiscated the church’s property and shut down its physical worship space. Pastor Jin then moved services online and into smaller home gatherings. This led authorities to later accuse church leaders of the “illegal use of information networks” due to these online and decentralized worship activities.
However, she emphasizes that her father’s case is only one part of a much larger crackdown unfolding across China.
“There are so many pastors and church leaders and churches being persecuted in China actively today,” she added. “We know that there are hundreds of pastors that are currently in prison or are in detention.”
“This is a very critical period in China,” Drexel stated. “And it’s very disheartening and very scary for many Christians in China.”
The broader persecution campaign against Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners is also documented in “China’s War on Faith.” This is a recently released book by former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback.
Brownback profiles believers who have been imprisoned, tortured, and surveilled for practicing religion outside state-approved institutions. He argues that the Chinese Communist Party increasingly views independent faith itself as a threat to Party authority.
For Drexel, Trump’s decision to publicly mention her father’s name signifies more than just diplomacy.
“We hope that as the two leaders are meeting together that they will both have a softening of the hearts and will release my father and allow him to come to the U.S.,” she said.
Liu stated that Beijing regulates religious affairs involving “national interests and the public interest” while opposing what it describes as illegal or criminal activities carried out under the guise of religion. He also accused foreign countries and media outlets of interfering in China’s internal affairs under the pretext of religious freedom. He urged journalists to “respect the facts” and cease what he termed “attacking and smearing” China’s religious policies and religious freedom record.
