After over 10 years of ministering to prisoners in China, the family of American pastor David Lin is finally raising awareness and calling on the Chinese government to end his unjust imprisonment as they fear that his health may have taken a turn for the worse.
Lin, who became a believer in Christ after coming to the United States, began making trips back to China in 1999 to share the Gospel with the unchurched in the secular communist nation. He became active in the house church movement.
Months after he applied for a ministry license in 2006, Lin was detained under unclear circumstances, placed under house arrest and prevented from leaving Beijing. Three years later, he was charged with contract fraud and sentenced to life in prison.
Although Lin has staunchly maintained his innocence, he has not wanted to raise the attention of his case because he felt as if his imprisonment was a God-ordained mission field, according to his daughter, Alice Lin. Inside the prison, Lin could minister to prisoners from over 30 nations.
But after a decade in prison and having missed his son’s graduation, daughter’s wedding and the birth of his grandson, the family now fears that something could be seriously wrong.
“In December, we had this huge scare. He reached out to me urgently asking me to have his Bible translations removed [from prison],” Alice Lin told evangelical conservative activist and pastor Tony Perkins on his Washington Watch radio program on Tuesday. “We were so grateful that the embassy was able to oblige and go and remove his Bible translations. So that embassy sent his Bible translations to us.”
When the family received the box of translations, Alice Lin said they were disturbed by what was found.
“In that box with his Bible translations, we not only got the Bible translations. So we also found his Bible and all the cards and pictures and letters we sent him over the years,” she told Perkins, who also heads up the Washington-based advocacy organization Family Research Council and is a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
“That Bible has sustained him for the last 10 years. It’s like a man in the desert sending home his only bottle of water,” she continued. “When my mom opened that box, she was hysterical. She knew was something wrong. We don’t know what’s happening. We know that something serious is happening in that dark place.”
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Samuel Smith
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