A little after 7 p.m. on January 7, my friend texted: “I saw a fire in the mountains driving home! It looked like a red dragon.”
My phone pinged again. Another friend sent an image, taken by her son out of their car window, of flames and black-plumed smoke barreling down the hill behind a gas station mere yards from them in Pasadena.
At the time, I was driving home to Alhambra, a Los Angeles suburb about seven miles south of the just-igniting Eaton Fire. As I drove, strong winds threatened to push my car to the curb. Broken tree branches littered the streets. Sirens echoed endlessly through the dark.
That night, the community of Altadena, a largely working-class suburb north of us, would burn.
The entire country has been gripped by searing images of the Los Angeles wildfires in the past month. The unprecedented disaster has so far killed 29 people, destroyed close to 17,000 structures, and forced more than 100,000 people out of their homes.
My family survived unscathed, but we are still reeling from the aftermath. Ash floats in the air outside our home, a toxic blend of asbestos and lead paint, as the homes of Altadena now coat my trampoline and orange trees.
Our favorite haunts—creeks and woods and mountains where my family could escape the city—are gone. The cleanup will take years, and thousands of people have lost homes they’ve lived in for decades.
In the face of a disaster like this, the sheer magnitude of collective loss feels so devastating that it’s hard to know how to begin addressing it. In the face of such tragedy, it’s easy to think my prayers are merely a temporary salve on a deep, gaping wound.
But a phone call with a pastor who lives in eastern China—more than 6,000 miles from the LA fires—has shown me the importance of prayer from someone who relies on it daily as he faces persecution.
A few days after the fires began, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. for a prescheduled call with a pastor named Zhang, who ministers to students and young professionals in a bustling city. (He preferred not to disclose his first name for security reasons.)
Although government pressure makes Zhang’s work difficult and dangerous, he presses on. Perhaps because his ministry is so challenging, he relies on a network of praying believers. In an online group of other house church Christians, he regularly shares requests for divine protection or wisdom for the struggles in his students’ lives.
That reliance on prayer is why we were chatting: I wanted to hear more about why it matters to him that the global church remembers and intercedes for Chinese Christians.
I’ve met Zhang in person several times. I felt moved and encouraged whenever he shared about his work in China. But we had never talked about praying for America or my church.
This conversation, however, was different. Zhang knew my home was near the fires. As we greeted each other, he asked how I was doing and how the church my husband pastors was faring. Later in the conversation, he prayed for my family and our country.
Zhang’s thoughtful, empathetic questions surprised me. After all, we were meeting to talk about how he felt to know that Christians outside of China are interceding for his community.
Instead, Zhang was remembering and praying for me.
Believers in China often feel isolated from the larger body of Christ, cut off from their global faith family by a government that views Christianity as a dangerous foreign influence.
“In the latter half of the last century, the Chinese church was like an orphan, separated from the family of the universal church,” Zhang told me.
Christians around the world may not prioritize praying for Chinese believers. Often, this is because they simply don’t know or understand the needs of the Chinese church: the way many people are struggling to make ends meet in the post-COVID-19 economic slump or the stress that Christian families feel in trying to raise their children in the faith. Other times, it is easy to forget that we are part of the global church; we have a myopic fixation on the problems in our own communities and countries.
Prayer, however, is a means of uniting the church, no matter how far away our fellow believers are geographically or culturally. “We pray for all parts of the world,” said Zhang. “We will pray for the California fires, asking God to bless, have mercy and grace, and save the people there.”
No Christian is an orphan, Zhang reminded me. We are not only children of God; we are also loved by a family of Christians across the world. Prayer knits our hearts together, as Colossians 2:2 (ESV) says.
One of the first steps toward becoming knitted together in Christ is recognizing and practicing mutuality in prayer.
For Zhang, the fires were a chance to unite the struggles that his already-beleaguered Chinese church was going through with the suffering that my American community was experiencing.
“When I know you are praying for me or you know I am praying for you, the relationship immediately becomes different [because] we truly see we are brothers and sisters in the Lord,” he said. “We are one family, moved by the same Spirit.”
Recent years have been especially challenging for Chinese Christians as persecution and pressure have grown increasingly severe. Some believers continue to live under surveillance after being released from prison, facing repeat detentions or questioning by local police.
This is why I believe that praying for the church in China is more important than ever. When they suffer, I also suffer. But prayer does not move in only one direction. If I focus only on caring for my Chinese brothers and sisters without allowing them to care for me, we are not in real relationship. Sibling relationships are mutual. We need to pray for one another.
We are to “carry each other’s burdens, and in this way … fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). While it is good to pray for China, we should also welcome Chinese believers to shoulder our sorrows as we form deeper relationships with them. Otherwise, we miss out on their wisdom and experience, formed by years of walking through suffering and bearing the cross of Christ.
What’s more, when we keep our sorrows to ourselves, we rob these other believers of the opportunity to serve us through prayer. Prayer is active, not passive. It is the means by which God builds his kingdom. It is partnership with Christ, and it brings us into community with one another.
Practicing mutuality in prayer, then, allows us to strengthen our collective faith in times of adversity.
When Zhang prayed for me, his words reflected a keen awareness of the dysfunction that churches might experience, which inadvertently hinders cooperation and timely responses to a disaster.
In the Chinese church landscape, many congregations have experienced internal division as a result of persecution. Believers may distance themselves from one another out of fear. Church leaders and their congregations don’t always have the same opinion about how to respond to difficult situations either.
Zhang petitioned God to prevent this from happening in the US, and he prayed that this calamity would help American Christians come together to show Los Angeles a God who cares for them.
“The strength of one church is very limited, but … Lord, may they work together to manifest your love and salvation!” Zhang beseeched God.
I’ve seen many such examples of the people of God coming together in one accord to carry out 1 Peter 3:8: “Be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.” Believers across denominations and state lines have banded together to help with the cleanup and assist fire victims in finding new homes, clothes, and belongings.
In the weeks since our 45-minute call, Zhang and I have stayed in touch. Our conversations have become more vulnerable and reciprocal. He’s asked me to share specific prayer requests and conveys them to his community of believers in China so they can also intercede for Los Angeles.
This is how we can exercise mutuality in prayer. When we implore God to do or say something on another person’s behalf, we erase any inkling of a power differential, where one party simply acts as a beneficiary and the other functions as a benefactor.
We stop treating people as projects to fix and begin to appreciate them as people to learn from and grow alongside with.
We gain a deeper understanding of spiritual friendships like that of Paul and Onesimus in the Bible. Here, the apostle calls the slave his “son” and his “very heart,” entreating Philemon to “welcome him as you would welcome me” (Phm. 10–17).
As I continue to see signs of destruction and distress all around me in the aftermath of these wildfires, I rest on God’s promises in Isaiah 43:2: “When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.”
But it also brings me great comfort to know that Zhang and other believers in China are standing in the gap for my friends, neighbors, and city as we rebuild our lives. We are brought together by prayer for our mutual needs, caring for one another as brothers and sisters. We are part of the kingdom of heaven on earth and around the earth. I know I’m not walking through this disaster alone.
E. F. Gregory is the blog editor at China Partnership, an organization that supports an indigenous gospel movement in China.
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