When Grace Jin Drexel lost contact with her father in China weeks ago, her worries swiftly turned into fear -- he, alongside more than 20 others, had been detained in a national crackdown on his underground church.

She recalls being consumed by franticness: "I was texting literally everyone in my contacts, like, 'what do I do?'"

Her father is Jin Mingri, who founded the unregistered Zion Church in 2007 in Beijing. It grew to 1,500 members before shuttering in 2018 under pressure from Chinese authorities.

But the church maintained an online presence that flourished during the Covid-19 pandemic, amassing a following across 40 Chinese cities.

On October 10, Jin -- who also goes by Ezra -- was detained on "suspicion of the illegal use of information networks." Around this time, authorities

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