CHENGDU, China — Communist authorities deployed roughly 30 SWAT officers and 60 police to raid Early Rain Covenant Church during Sunday worship in Chengdu, Sichuan province, detaining 33 members and injuring three believers, the church and the U.S.-based monitoring group International Christian Concern reported.
Officers entered the hotel conference room where the congregation had gathered around 11 a.m., recorded the names of those in attendance, and forcibly removed numerous believers from the building. Three buses and three vans were used to transport church elders, members, and children to local police stations.
The church issued an urgent prayer request naming six detainees whose whereabouts remain unknown: Elder Yan Hong, Elder Wu Qing, Brother Liu Yingxu, Brother Nie Bo, Brother Li Benli, and Brother Axin. According to the church, most of the 33 detained members were questioned for several hours, and some were pressured to sign a letter guaranteeing they would no longer gather as part of Early Rain. Most church members refused to sign the document.
The church asked other congregations to pray that those in police custody would experience God’s peace, that their most basic needs would be met, and “that the violence against them would stop, and that the church in China would become more united because of the raid.”
Early Rain Covenant Church has been a persistent target of the Chinese communist regime’s campaign against unregistered Protestant house churches. Authorities have raided the congregation several times in recent years, most notably in December 2018, when Pastor Wang Yi, the church’s founder, was arrested and beaten. In late 2019, a court sentenced Wang to nine years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power and illegal business operations.”
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has designated China a “country of particular concern” every year since 1999. The latest raid in Chengdu adds to a pattern of intensifying enforcement against underground Christian communities across Sichuan province, with the detained believers still unaccounted for as of this week.