Artist Documents Faith and Exile in China's House Churches

A Chinese-American oil painter is bringing the stories of China's persecuted house church believers to American audiences through an unusual combination of documentary writing and visual art that centers on a single recurring symbol: a red leather suitcase. Sarah Lin Lu, born in Chengdu and now based in Pennsylvania, has spent years building relationships with Chinese house church families—many of whom have faced surveillance, harassment, detention, or exile for their faith. Her work pairs carefully edited testimonies from these believers with oil paintings drawn from memory, silence, and prayer, creating what she calls a "visual diary" that dignifies ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. The red suitcase appears throughout her paintings as a symbol of identity carried through displacement, embodying questions of passports, visas, leaving, returning, and the fundamental search for belonging. Her imagery—suitcases, jars, trains, bridges, moons—avoids sensationalizing suffering in favor of tender, detailed witness to refugee families and believers under pressure. The project has resulted in three full-color documentary books designed for American readers: "Voices Through the Rain," "A Modern-Day Mayflower Pilgrimage," and "Early Rain Chinese House Church and the Imprisonment of Pastor Wang Yi" (秋雨麦粒：中国家庭教会与王怡牧师的监禁), which explores the house church movement, religious freedom, and untold testimonies of faith under fire. The third title is also available in a black-and-white edition, published by Trilogy Christian Publishing/TBN. All three volumes combine Lin Lu's paintings with testimonies from Chinese Christians, offering what she describes as a bridge between the free church and the persecuted church. "I paint not to explain, but to remember. To remember is to return—to the body, to the story, to God," Lin Lu has said of her approach. The work has attracted significant institutional support. Sam Brownback, former U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, wrote the foreword to her books. "Through art, testimony, and courageous storytelling, she brings to life the faith of persecuted Chinese Christians—men and women who stand firm under pressure and whose quiet strength carries a message the whole world needs to hear," Brownback wrote. Lin Lu's credibility draws on decades of experience in both Chinese and American art worlds. Between 2003 and 2005, she held major exhibitions and publications in China, including shows at Nankai University and Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, and published two art books. She was featured on CCTV in 2005 and interviewed on U.S. television in Nevada two years later. From 2006 to 2007, she served as Visiting Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she taught Asian Art History and China & Its Culture. Her nonfiction autobiography, also titled "Red Leather Suitcase," won third prize in the Yage Prize for Christian Literature & Arts at Duke University Divinity School's Center for Christianity and the Arts in 2020 and was published the following year. In 2023, she curated an exhibition in Queens, New York, titled "Mayflower's Journey Out of Egypt: Lin Lu Paintings Exhibition." The families whose stories Lin Lu documents have expressed gratitude for her approach. A couple in the Mayflower Church wrote, "We thank God for bringing Lin Lu and your husband David into our lives… By carefully organizing and recording each family's testimony, you have poured so much love and time into us." Unlike distant reporting or secondhand accounts, Lin Lu's work emerges from direct relationships built over time with the communities she documents. This trust-based approach allows her to handle sensitive stories with what observers describe as trauma-informed care—acknowledging the cost of faith while protecting the humanity of those who pay it. Red Leather Suitcase is the story-driven art-and-book project of Sarah Lin Lu, offering both books and exhibitions to churches, universities, museums, and conferences exploring the intersection of art, faith, trauma-informed storytelling, and religious freedom. The project also makes available original paintings and curated collections from the Red Leather Suitcase series, along with print and licensing options for publishers and institutions. The work addresses multiple audiences: American Christians seeking to understand and pray for China's persecuted house churches, religious freedom advocates in the international human rights community, Christian counselors interested in stories of resilience and healing, and Chinese American communities exploring questions of identity and displacement. University programs in religious studies, sociology, Asian studies, and human rights have also shown interest, along with curators and collectors drawn to contemporary narrative painting that engages memory, migration, and faith. For Lin Lu, the project represents more than documentation. It is an act of remembrance that invites American readers into informed prayer and deeper unity with believers facing persecution across borders. Her visual diary paintings and documentary books create a format that helps audiences not just understand the facts of religious persecution, but feel the human stories behind them—making distant suffering real without stripping it of dignity. The combination of art and testimony offers what Lin Lu presents as a rare format that allows stories to stick with readers. While news cycles move quickly and policy debates can feel abstract, her approach grounds religious freedom issues in specific faces, specific journeys, and the quiet strength of people who stand firm under pressure. Through careful organization and what the Mayflower families describe as "so much love and time," Lin Lu has created a body of work that serves as witness, bridge, and invitation to a more informed American understanding of faith under persecution.

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