(Worthy News) - Early Rain Covenant Church Pastor Wang Yi has been deprived of his lawyer by the Chinese government.
Wang, who was arrested in December along with his wife and other members of his church, penned a manifesto on the "disobedience of faith" in September 2018 that he asked his congregation to release should he ever mysteriously disappear, which they faithfully did two days after his arrest.
His lawyer, Zheng Peihong, was hired by Wang's parents to represent him against the "inciting subversion of state power" charges under which he is to be tried, but was notified by authorities in Sichuan province that his services would be no longer needed.
As a precautionary measure, Zheng had even stopped posting on Facebook so as to give the government no leverage against him, but was told his other online writings had incurred the displeasure of the communist government anyway.
In his letter, Wang expatiates at length on the Christian's call to resist tyrannical governments, not as a means of changing society, but as a prophetic act pointing to another world governed by love rather than evil laws.
"In the modern totalitarian state that persecutes the church and resists the gospel, the disobedience of faith is an inevitable part of the gospel movement," Wang writes like a Chinese Martin Luther King.
His wife was released on bail recently, but she and his parents remain under close state surveillance as President Xi Jinping seeks to quash all forms of Christianity not regulated by Chinese communist ideology.