Activist Urges Americans to Support Imprisoned ‘House Church’ Pastor

A Chinese-American pastor urged Americans on Wednesday to support a petition asking the White House to intervene on behalf of John Cao, an Asian-American pastor who has been jailed in China for religious subversion.

Chinese authorities imprisoned Cao (pictured above), a prominent member of the “house church” movement, in March 2017. Chinese authorities charged him with “organizing others to cross the border illegally.”

Bob Fu, founder and president of China Aid, said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that Cao’s arrest is just one more sign of the growing threat to liberty that China poses. He said predictions of moderation that accompanied China’s entry into the Word Trade Organization (WTO) have not come to pass.

“We are nurturing an evil tiger, really that now is much harder and harder to control, and they are biting our backs right now.”

“We are nurturing an evil tiger, really that now is much harder and harder to control, and they are biting our backs right now,” he said.

Far from moderating China’s repressive polices, Fu said, the country’s integration into the global trading system has only given the government more resources to carry out its campaign of persecution.

“We have seen, you know, really, hundreds of thousands of churches that are being shut down, from small to medium,” he said. “We have seen many, many innocent Christian leaders who were arrested and made to lie. I mean, dozens of church leaders were sentenced to — you know, 13 years’ imprisonment. And their crimes that were listed on their verdict paper, or indictment paper, were reading children’s programs, ‘Streams in the Desert,’ John Calvin’s ‘Institutes of the Christian Religion.'”

Fu said the Chinese have labeled such house churches “evil cults.” He said children have been persecuted.

“We have seen these children and students under 18 years old were totally forbidden from even entering into the church building, even the government-sanctioned church,” he said.

Fu said the Chinese government is aggressively pursuing a policy of “sanitization of Christianity,” which means churches must plead total allegiance to the state.

“It has to totally surrender the church doctrine to the Communist Party’s propaganda,” he said.

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Fu said China’s conduct with respect to religious liberty should make people leery of trusting it in other realms.

“If Communist China cannot even honor their own constitutional guarantee for freedom of religious belief, how can we expect them to honor the business contract?” he said. “So I really want to see a big prayer moment, to really, you know, pray for the Gospel to be spread more widely. Because, after all, this really requires the heart change and transformation.”

As far as Cao, Fu said prayers and letters are needed. The White House petition, which calls on the U.S. government to pressure China to release the pastor, currently has a little more than 1,200 signatures and needs 100,000 by September 1 to draw an official response from the White House.