Born in China in 1973, as Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was ending, Wang Yi rose to become a leading human rights lawyer and public intellectual in his homeland. In 2005, he was converted to Christianity and publicly baptized as he joined one of China’s non-government “house churches.”

Beginning Sunday, December 9, 2018, now a pastor, Wang Yi and over 100 members of Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, China, were arrested. That triggered the public release of a statement he had prepared entitled "My Declaration of Faithful Disobedience" where he states, “As the Lord’s servant John Calvin said, wicked rulers are the judgment of God on a wicked people, the goal being to urge God’s people to repent and turn again toward Him.”

On December 30, 2020, he was convicted in a secret trial and sentenced to 9 years in prison. Like Dr Martin Luther King’s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s "Cost of Discipleship", Wang Yi challenges us to consider the different expressions of serving Christ in circumstances where faithful discipleship may put us at odds with the power structures of our world.