Open Your Mouth for the Mute

In October 2025, police in China detained Ezra Jin Mingri, founding pastor of Beijing’s Zion Church, one of the country’s largest unregistered house churches, in a sweep that took nearly thirty of the church’s pastors and members. In March 2026, Senators Ted Budd and Tim Kaine led a bipartisan letter asking the president to raise his case with Xi Jinping. On May 13, the House passed H.Res.1259, naming Jin and four other prisoners, by a vote of 414 to 0. During his state visit to Beijing that month, President Trump said he had discussed Jin with Xi personally. On July 4, 2026, after nearly nine months in detention, Jin arrived in Los Angeles.

Nobody can prove which link tipped it. But every link in that chain was someone who decided a name was worth saying out loud, and every one of them was on the public record where a citizen could join it.

This last article in the series is the practical one. The overview on praying for the persecuted covered the honest numbers, Hebrews 13:3, and the family habit of praying for one country by name. The six parts before this one went country by country: Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, China, North Korea, and India. This piece covers what comes next: the levers a citizen can actually pull.

The religious-freedom law a citizen can press on#

The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 built the machinery every later effort runs on. It does four things worth knowing.

It created an ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom at the State Department. That office has been vacant since January 2025, when Rashad Hussain’s tenure ended. In mid-September 2026, President Trump nominated Cissie Graham Lynch, Billy Graham’s granddaughter and a senior adviser to Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, to fill it. As of this writing, the Senate has not confirmed her.

It created the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan advisory body that documents violations and recommends designations. Its authorization was due to run out on September 30, 2026. The House passed H.R.1744 in June to extend it through 2028, and on the eve of the deadline the Senate passed the reauthorization unanimously. Check the bill’s page for its final status.

It requires the government to name the worst offenders. A Country of Particular Concern (CPC) is a government that has “engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom”; the Special Watch List is the tier below. The most recent full set of designations, made December 29, 2023, named twelve CPCs, from Burma and China to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, plus five watch-list countries. As of the Congressional Research Service’s June 2026 summary, no full round had followed, and the one designation since was the president’s redesignation of Nigeria on October 31, 2025.

And, through a 2016 amendment, it charged USCIRF with keeping the Frank R. Wolf Freedom of Religion or Belief Victims List, a public, searchable database of more than 2,300 people imprisoned, detained, disappeared, tortured, or forced to renounce their faith. It covers only countries USCIRF has recommended for CPC status. Anyone can submit a case through its intake form. For a citizen, it’s the most useful page the government publishes, a sourced record you can cite in a letter.

How named-prisoner advocacy works#

Governments that jail believers prefer that nobody outside knows their names. A named prisoner becomes a cost in every meeting with a foreign official, a line in every hearing, and a question reporters ask.

The pattern shows up in the documented releases. Andrew Brunson, an American pastor held in Turkey after the 2016 coup attempt, came home in October 2018 after the Treasury Department sanctioned two Turkish cabinet ministers over his detention and members of Congress kept his case in public view. Rhoda Jatau, a Nigerian Christian mother of five, spent 19 months in jail on blasphemy charges for sharing a video condemning the mob killing of a student; with ADF International running her defense and UN experts writing to Abuja, a Bauchi State judge acquitted her on December 19, 2024. In Eritrea, CSW documented the release of 177 Christians from proscribed churches between November and December 2025, some after nearly five years in Mai Serwa prison. Jin Mingri is the newest case.

Congress has formal machinery for this. Under the Defending Freedoms Project, run by the House’s Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission with USCIRF and Amnesty International USA since 2012, members of Congress “adopt” a prisoner of conscience and commit to letters, floor speeches, and op-eds on that person’s behalf. USCIRF runs a parallel Religious Prisoners of Conscience Project, in which its commissioners adopt prisoners. Both are adoption programs for officials. What you can do is ask your own representative to adopt a prisoner, and hand them a name.

For a private Christian, the closest equivalent is PrisonerAlert.com, run by The Voice of the Martyrs. It keeps profiles of imprisoned Christians by country and a list of released prisoners. Pick one profile. Pray for that person by name, write when the profile says writing is safe, and follow the case until it resolves.

Writing a letter that helps instead of hurts#

Letters to prisoners work on two audiences: the prisoner, who learns they aren’t forgotten, and the guards, who learn someone outside is watching. The Voice of the Martyrs publishes plain rules for writing; follow them exactly. Give your name and country but not your mailing address. Be encouraging and include a verse of Scripture. Don’t name the organization where you learned about the case. Don’t criticize the government or discuss politics, because the censor reads it before the prisoner does and the prisoner pays for your opinions. Don’t send money. And expect silence: authorities sometimes withhold mail to isolate a prisoner, or move them without forwarding it.

A letter to an embassy or a member of Congress is the opposite kind of letter. There, the government is the audience, and the point is to be specific. My recommendation, drawn from how the advocacy groups frame their own appeals: name the prisoner, cite the public record (the USCIRF Victims List entry or the organization’s case page), state the charge and the date of arrest, and make one request, whether release, access to a lawyer, or medical care. Be courteous. An angry letter is easy to file.

Then there are cases where you shouldn’t write at all. Notre Dame’s Under Caesar’s Sword project, seventeen scholars interviewing persecuted Christians across more than twenty-five countries, found that most persecuted communities respond with survival and quiet association rather than confrontation, and that outside help works best when it follows local believers’ judgment about how visible to be. A loud campaign the family didn’t ask for can make a sentence longer. So the rule is simple: if a case is public because the prisoner’s family or church made it public, amplify it. If an organization says a case is sensitive, or the profile says not to write, don’t.

Asking Congress about a named case#

Start at Congress.gov’s find your member page. Enter your address and it returns your representative and both senators with contact information. A call to the district office or a message through the member’s website both work; include your address so the office knows you’re a constituent.

Congress has already put names on the record, which gives you something specific to cite. On May 13, 2026, the same day the House passed H.R.1259, the Senate agreed by unanimous consent to S.Res.728, which asks the president to press China for the release of Pastor Jin, Pastor Gao Quanfu and his wife Pang Yu, Jimmy Lai, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, and Ekpar Asat. Jin is free. The others are not.

Giving to organizations that show their work#

Money is a lever too, and it deserves the same discipline as a statistic. My conviction is that you should give to organizations that publish casework you can check and methodology you can read. Open Doors publishes its World Watch List methodology. Article18 publishes annual casework on Iran that governments use. CSW publishes named case outcomes. ADF International publishes case pages for the people it defends in court. ChinaAid tracks Chinese cases hearing by hearing.

Before you give, ask an organization for four things: the cases it works on and how they ended; its numbers with their definitions attached (not the “388 million persecuted” shortcut the overview warns against); how it works with local churches and follows their lead on visibility; and the share of each gift that reaches the field. One that answers all four plainly has earned the check.

Welcoming persecuted believers who arrive here#

For decades, the most direct help America gave persecuted Christians was a place to live. That channel has narrowed sharply. The number of Christian refugees admitted from the World Watch List countries fell from 32,248 in 2016 to 9,528 in 2022, according to World Relief and Open Doors US. The refugee program was suspended in January 2025. The FY2026 ceiling was set at 7,500, the lowest since the modern program began in 1980, and in May 2026 an emergency determination raised it to 17,500 with the added slots allocated to Afrikaners from South Africa. World Relief, the evangelical resettlement agency, notes that victims of religious persecution, a priority category in the president’s own 2020 determination, go unmentioned in the FY2026 one. The Lautenberg program, which for years brought Iranian Christians and other religious minorities to the United States, was reauthorized by Congress for FY2026 but has been halted along with the rest of the program.

I think a country that just brought a Chinese pastor home should have room for the next one, and the president sets the ceiling each year only after consulting Congress. That’s a fair thing to tell your senators.

Refugees and asylees who arrived before 2025 are still here, and many are believers from exactly the countries this series covered. World Relief lists its US offices, and its Churches of Welcome program trains congregations to walk with newcomers. Call the nearest office and ask what the families near you need.

Why Christians are obligated to speak#

Scripture treats speaking for the silenced as a duty of the powerful. “Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute,” the mother of King Lemuel tells her son. “Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:8–9). An American citizen holds a share of exactly that power: a vote, a representative, a free press, a mailbox no censor opens.

Hebrews 11 keeps us honest about outcomes. Some of the faithful “were tortured, refusing to accept release,” and others endured “chains and imprisonment,” men and women “of whom the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:35–38). Release is not the only good ending, and the prisoner’s faithfulness belongs to the prisoner. Our part is the open mouth.

And Paul removes the distance. “If one member suffers, all suffer together” (1 Corinthians 12:26). Pastor Gao’s cell in Xi’an is, in Paul’s terms, a wound in the same body you belong to.

What is established, and what is not#

The case for named-prisoner advocacy rests on a pattern, not a controlled experiment. Brunson, Jatau, the Eritrean 177, and Jin all followed sustained, named, outside pressure. Nobody can rerun those cases without the pressure, and governments rarely say why they release anyone. Treat the claim as practitioner consensus with strong case support, which is how the organizations doing the work describe it.

Releases are also not always freedom. The Eritreans were required to sign a document that CSW says strips them of their right to worship. Jin was released into exile, and at least eight members of his church remain in prison.

CPC designation carries sanctions that are routinely waived, as The Conversation’s explainer on the Nigeria redesignation lays out. Its power is naming and bargaining, not automatic penalties. And the persecutors in this article are governments and courts in China, Eritrea, Nigeria, and Turkey, not whole peoples. USCIRF adopts Uyghur Muslim prisoners alongside Christian ones.

Pray#

• For Pastor Gao Quanfu and his wife Pang Yu of Xi’an’s Light of Zion Church, held since mid-2025 while prosecutors seek 12 to 13 years on fraud charges; for Pang Yu’s untreated health problems; and for their son, Gao Pu, who is pleading their case in public.
• For the eight members of Beijing’s Zion Church still in prison after Pastor Jin’s release, and for Jin himself as he speaks for them from Los Angeles.
• For the 177 Eritrean Christians released on condition in late 2025, that they would keep faith under a signed promise not to worship, and for the believers still among the prisoners of conscience Eritrea holds in more than 300 sites.
• For Rhoda Jatau, acquitted and living in an undisclosed location in Nigeria, and for others in Bauchi and Sokoto accused under blasphemy laws.
• For Cissie Graham Lynch and the senators who will weigh her nomination, that the office would be filled with someone who presses named cases.

Stand up this week#

USCIRF’s Victims List entries for Gao Quanfu and Pang Yu list both as not released; check them the day you write. Then look up your two senators and your representative at congress.gov/members/find-your-member. Send each one the same four sentences: I’m a constituent. Pastor Gao Quanfu and his wife Pang Yu of Xi’an’s Light of Zion Church are detained in China on fraud charges that treat their unregistered church’s offerings as crime, and prosecutors are seeking more than a decade. Congress already named them in H.Res.1259, which passed the House 414 to 0, and in S.Res.728, which the Senate agreed to unanimously. Please ask the administration to press for their release, and please adopt them through the Defending Freedoms Project.

Go deeper#

• USCIRF Frank R. Wolf Freedom of Religion or Belief Victims List. The government’s own searchable record of named prisoners; the best citation to put in a letter.
• PrisonerAlert.com, The Voice of the Martyrs. Profiles of imprisoned Christians, a released list, and the writing guidelines to read before you pick up a pen.
• Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, Defending Freedoms Project. How members of Congress adopt prisoners, and which ones already have.
• Under Caesar’s Sword (Notre Dame, Cambridge UP 2018). The research on how persecuted Christians respond, and on when outside help helps.
• ChinaAid on Gao Quanfu. Hearing-by-hearing coverage of the case this article asks you to raise.