Wife of imprisoned Zion Church pastor sees ‘blessing’ amid CCP persecution: ‘A sacrifice to the Lord’

Geng Pengpeng, wife of Pastor Gao Yingjia, told The Christian Post that the continued imprisonment of her husband and seven other Beijing Zion Church leaders has refined her faith and united Christians in China.

Speaking by phone from Thailand, where she moved with her 6-year-old son after the Chinese Communist Party’s nationwide crackdown last October on unregistered house churches, Geng also expressed hope for revival and urged prayer for the officials persecuting her husband.

Nearly 30 Zion pastors and members were originally detained in what observers called China’s largest coordinated action against an urban house church in more than 40 years. The church, whose network has thousands of members throughout China, drew international attention when the detention of its founding pastor, Jin Mingri, prompted a diplomatic incident between China and the United States.

Jin, some of whose family members are U.S. citizens, was released to the U.S. on July 4 as a goodwill gesture from Chinese President Xi Jinping following intervention by President Donald Trump. Eight leaders remain imprisoned, including Gao, whose wife says God has been using their suffering for good.

‘If God allows this to happen, it must be a blessing’

Geng, who also goes by the English name Cherie, recounted to CP the harrowing early-morning hours of Oct. 11, 2025. Plainclothes police officers banged on the door of a friend’s house where she was hiding with her family in a Beijing suburb. They had escaped there after news spread throughout the church that authorities had surrounded Jin’s home and another one of their pastors had disappeared.

The day before, after speaking with church leaders in Beijing and other cities, Gao learned the Chinese government had initiated sweeping enforcement measures on a scale far greater than they initially realized. He initially intended to remain at home but agreed to leave amid Cherie’s concern for their 5-year-old son.

Cherie remembers how rainy and quiet the night was when she packed their things and tucked her son’s Bible into a bag as they fled to stay with friends. She later learned police broke through their door after they left and terrified her cat, which she found cowering in a closet amid evidence it had tried to claw its way out of the window.

Cherie suspects that authorities were tracking their locations through their cell phones. She remembered that hours before the authorities came to take her husband away, she struggled to sleep, constantly checking messages from fellow church members to see who else had been arrested. Her husband seemed comparatively undisturbed.

“I think my husband looked pretty peaceful. He fell asleep pretty quickly,” she said.

Police announced themselves at around 2 a.m. with “a really harsh knock at the door,” she recounted.

“We were staying in a big house, and we were on the second floor. When we heard the noise, we put on our clothes and came downstairs. They were talking to our friends, and they looked at my husband. They said, ‘This is the guy we’re looking for.'”

Despite her initial fear and panic, Cherie said as they got news that “more and more people’s houses were surrounded,” she “suddenly felt this peace from the Lord and felt like God is working through all this.” She said a Christian friend encouraged and reminded her that God is sovereign and accomplishes His will regardless of evil.

“By the time they took away my husband, I was pretty peaceful. I think the last thing I said to my husband was, ‘If God allows this to happen, it must be a blessing.’ But it was a pity we didn’t have time to hug each other and to talk,” she said.

Living a life for Jesus

Cherie told CP that she grew up with a Christian mother, learned how to pray and memorized many Bible verses, but didn’t feel that she had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ until she came to question the pursuit of fame and fortune as she was completing her doctorate in plant genetics.

“Those things were really not what I was looking for, so I was thinking of something more meaningful. So I got really confused about my future. I think that’s how it started. I started to explore,” she said. She first attended Haidian Christian Church, a large, state-registered Protestant church in Beijing, but found herself falling asleep during sermons she struggled to understand.

As she continued to feel more alienated from her secular life and the relationships she had with non-Christians, many of whom drifted from her as they left China to continue post-doctoral studies in the U.S., Cherie said she felt called to something else, though she remained unsure of what that was.

Following an experience with Seventh-day Adventists in Australia that she also was unable to relate to, a friend invited her to Zion Church in 2008 when she returned to Beijing. There, she heard Pastor Jin Mingri, also known as Ezra Jin, invite his listeners to dedicate their lives to following Christ.

“I just felt really touched by the Holy Spirit. Pastor Ezra, he was preaching and he was calling people: ‘Who wants to give their life to Jesus?’ And I felt that strong calling from Jesus asking, ‘Do you want me to be your Lord?'”

“I just couldn’t help. I just started crying and trembling in my body, so I decided to give my life to Jesus,” she said. “And also, at the same time, I felt this passion that I should live a life for Jesus, even die for Jesus. So that’s how I became a Christian.”

Cherie met her husband at a Zion Church retreat when he was serving as a pastoral intern. Her original vision of serving as a missionary in faraway countries led her to work with American missionaries and become an English teacher, though she came to assume that her ministry would likely not extend beyond being a mother and a local pastor’s wife.

‘Turning the cursing into a blessing’

Despite an overwhelming sense of being willing to suffer for Jesus during her conversion experience, Cherie said the suffering to which her family has been called has both tested and strengthened her faith while making it more real.

“When I first became a Christian, I loved reading biographies; stories of Hudson Taylor, Mother Teresa and other missionaries were really inspiring to me,” she said. “So I thought I should live this life for Jesus. But by then, I didn’t really go through any trials or difficulties. So being a mother for Jesus, that was the only heroic [thing I had done], so it wasn’t so real. But at the moment, I feel like it’s even more real. So my faith is growing stronger than when I had those feelings.”

Cherie is only able to communicate with her husband and learn of his condition through lawyers and 12 of his handwritten letters, which she said have been “a great comfort” to her. She believes Gao has been called to serve the Lord in prison, and has learned from some who have been released that he’s maintaining a disciplined life while ministering to others in detention.

“In China, it’s impossible to do prison ministry. So I think at the moment they are really doing prison ministry now,” she said of the eight still detained.

For the first few months, Cherie said, Gao and the other church leaders were being closely monitored by prison authorities, who forbade them from communicating with the other inmates in the oppressive detention center in China’s southern Guangxi province. The inmates were also reportedly threatened to avoid speaking with them.

Cherie said she has been told that her husband’s maintenance of hope and physical discipline was a testimony to other prisoners who were feeling despair, and that he has since been permitted to share Christ with them.

“The people inside, they were hopeless, so desperate, but they saw my husband and the other people, how they look so peaceful. So people were really curious and asked, ‘Why don’t you look like you’re in a prison?’ So they’ve been doing really good testimony. After three months, I think they got more freedom. They can share the Gospel with people and they can have more conversations,” she said.

“So I heard my husband is really doing well. Through his letters and the letters through the lawyers, he wrote lots of sermons and poems in prison. So each time when I read them, I had tears, and also I got encouraged. I know God is really working through the trial. He’s turning the cursing into a blessing,” she added.

Cherie’s young son, who was only 5 when authorities came to arrest his father, was at first confused by his father’s disappearance and suffered nightmares that he was being chased by police who had come to take his mother away. Unsure of how to explain his father’s situation to him, her attempts to frame it as a long business trip proved unsuccessful.

After praying for discernment, she read her son the stories of Paul’s imprisonment in the book of Acts, which she said “really helped.”

“So he figured it out. He said, ‘Mom, I think my father is doing prison ministry now, so we should also live a faithful life. We should share the Gospel with people around us,'” she said, adding that her son took to sharing the Gospel with his kindergarten classmates in Thailand.

By late spring, her son’s nightly prayers that they would be reunited with his father and return to China became a single request that God would simply bring back his dad.

“I said, ‘Why didn’t you pray for me and you to go back to Beijing?’ He said, ‘Mom, I’m making friends now. I have a good friend in the kindergarten, and I think Thailand is not bad.’ He also encouraged me to share the Gospel with his friend’s mom. He said, ‘Their whole family, they don’t know Jesus, so you should tell his mom.'”

‘Growing through sufferings’

For Christians in the U.S. and around the world who want to know how best to pray for Zion Church and the larger church in China, she asked them to plead with the Lord to continue the unity that has come amid persecution. She remembered in the immediate wake of the arrests last fall, Christians from all over joined them in solidarity.

“I think we have seen churches more united than ever. I remember when it first happened, every Tuesday our church had a prayer night for the persecuted ones,” she said.

“I remember lots of people from other churches, they joined our prayer meetings and also in the [online chat app]. Lots of people, they were writing, ‘Tonight we are Zion Church. We are all Zion Church. We are with you all.’ So I felt like God is really working and stirring up something much bigger than this,” she continued.

“So pray for the persecuted church and pray for unity; and also pray for the country, for the authorities, for them to be able to have justice and to see the value of Christianity.”

Cherie remembered that when Ezra Jin would baptize new Christians at Zion Church, he would publicly ask them if they were willing to suffer for the sake of Jesus Christ, even if it cost them their lives. She sees her present situation and the wider persecution of Christians in China as a sacrifice out of which she hopes God will bring forth much fruit.

“The DNA for Chinese churches, a very important part is suffering. So we’ve been growing through sufferings,” she said. “My husband is away. I need to be a father and a mother at the same time, and there were difficulties. But spiritually, I feel like we were never so close to the Lord and so strong and mature in faith.”

“Also, I feel this is like a sacrifice to the Lord for the churches, for the faith to be restored, for the revival of Chinese churches. We didn’t expect our church to be getting attention from different countries and the whole world. So we feel like, at the same time, God is using this to bring a bigger revival. He’s working on something much bigger, much greater than we expected,” she added.