Grace Jin Drexel says she just wants her father back and is hopeful President Donald Trump might be able to help.
“We believe that it will take a miracle, but we also believe that, as a Christian, crazier things have happened,” Drexel, 31, says.
Pastor Ezra Jin was one of 27 leaders of Zion Church who were arrested by Chinese authorities during a crackdown on the Christian church last year. Several of the church leaders have been released, but 18 remain in Chinese prisons.
Drexel last spoke to her father about a week before his arrest at his home in Beihai, a city in southeast China, last October. Drexel has two children of her own and a third on the way, and recalls her kids “jumping around” during that final call with their grandfather.
“We don’t even know how he’s doing physically. We hear that his health is deteriorating,” Drexel says of her 56-year-old father.
Trump is scheduled to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in April, and Drexel says she is “really hoping that he will mention some of these cases to Xi Jinping directly, because I think that would make a difference in how he is treated, and whether or not my father would be able to be released.”
China’s Independent Church
Jin founded Zion Church, one of China’s largest church networks, in 2007. He had served in China’s state-run church for a decade, ultimately becoming a pastor, but began to see the state-sanctioned institution as “a church in captivity, and … not a church that is glorifying to God.”
Jin moved his family to the United States for a time to earn his doctorate from Fuller Seminary before returning to China and founding Zion Church. In 2018, the Chinese Communist Party officially shut down Zion Church, which was based in Beijing at the time, during what Jin describes as a “crackdown on Christians and religious freedom in general.”
Despite the CCP formally closing the church, the congregation continued to meet and “instead of it dying, it grew,” Jin says.
Zion Church became a form of a megachurch in China, the daughter explains, with 100 church plants across the nation and meetings taking place in person and online, but the Chinese government prohibited the pastor from leaving China.
The church, which reaches about 10,000 people weekly according to Drexel, continues to meet even with its leaders in prison.
While Zion Church was never approved by the government and has always been independent of the state, it has operated in the open.
“They were not against the government,” Drexel says of Zion Church. “We didn’t have a political agenda. We just said we want the sacred to stay sacred, and we want the political to stay political.”
Pastor Ezra Jin
The daughter describes her father as “very warm” and “not a confrontational person at all, and that really showed in his church leadership as well.”
“We were not confrontational with the government. He just wanted to spread the gospel to as many people as possible and did not want politics to be in the way of faith.”
Growing up, Drexel spent about half her childhood in China and half in the U.S., and now lives in Maryland. She has not visited her father since 2020 for fear she would be detained in China.
Drexel has been talking to lawmakers in D.C. about her father’s imprisonment in advocacy of his release.
Her goal is to see her father released and permitted to move to the U.S. “to join us as a family,” Drexel says, adding, “I just want my dad out.”