Today, President George W. Bush welcomed former political prisoner Pastor Ezra Jin to the Bush Institute.
Pastor Jin was the founding pastor of the Zion Church in Beijing, which grew into one of China’s largest networks of unregistered Christian churches. In October 2025, Pastor Jin and nearly 30 of his fellow Christian leaders were imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for broadcasting sermons online after officials shut down the church’s physical location in 2018. He was held for nearly nine months before his release in July.
Pastor Jin and President Bush discussed Pastor Jin’s family, his imprisonment, and the house church movement in China. President Bush spoke about his concern for prisoners of conscience in China, including some he painted in his new book, The Call of Freedom: Pastor Wang Yi, Gulshan Abbas, Joshua Wong, and Jimmy Lai.
