We believe that our particular group has grown as large as it ought to. We have stopped short of being an organization; we are an organism instead, a living and spontaneous association of individuals who know one another intimately, care for each other deeply, and feel the kind of respect one for another that makes rules and bylaws unnecessary. A group is the right size, I would guess, when each member can pray every day for every other member, individually and by name, interceding for his personal needs as well as for the success of a particular mission. But what is to prevent twenty, fifty, one hundred such groups from springing up wherever the call is heard—each obedient to its own particular genius, each working in its different way for the coming of the one Kingdom.
And this is a role the part-timers play. After an indoctrination trip the part-timers go home convinced that such work is possible. “I talked of nothing else for two months after I got back to school,” one student from the Bible Training Institute founded by Dwight L. Moody up in Scotland wrote us after a trip with us behind the Iron Curtain. “Three other students are interested, and we’re planning a trip to Yugoslavia this summer.”
This is the teaching aspect of our work, the training of other missionaries. We insist on only two things from the men and women we accept as part-timers. We insist that each have a personal experience with Christ and learn to work in the full power of His Spirit. And we stress the importance of a positive ministry among the Communists. If a man seems to be harboring personal resentments against a certain government, or if he has more to say about the evils of Communism than the goodness of God, then we suspect that he is a soldier poorly armed for the battle before us.
———
And so the work moves on, always changing, always new.
Today Bibles may be brought into Yugoslavia legally. We no longer smuggle them into that country, because the Bible Shop is open again and doing a thriving business. Instead, last year we gave Jamil a thousand dollars with which to purchase these legal Bibles for churches that have no money. It’s hard to believe that I’ve known Jamil for ten years.
In Bulgaria, Abraham is still seeking his Goliath. Only now he has rocks for his sling: pocket Bibles that we are bringing in by the hundreds. Our goal in the next two years is a pocket-sized edition of the Bible for every country we enter—including one in the new Albanian language. Once we have the Bible, we believe God will show us how to get it into the hands He is choosing.
In East Germany we are now able to hold mass evangelical meetings almost without hindrance. I myself have preached to as many as four thousand people at one time there: two thousand seated in a large conference hall, with two thousand more either standing at the rear or listening to loudspeakers outside.
With the arrival of Klaas and Eduard and their wives, we are achieving our goal of visiting each country at least once every year. I made a return trip to Cuba this spring, and with God’s help will be in two new countries before the end of 1967: North Korea and North Vietnam. Some countries of course we can visit more frequently, a few as often as a dozen times within a single year. Whenever one team becomes too well known, another takes its place.
As God makes it possible to us, we are starting to meet a new need behind the Curtain: automobiles for the local clergy. A car is a set of wings to a clergyman, taking him to villages and towns where there may not have been a religious service in years, helping him knit together Christian communities that didn’t even know about one another.
The first such car went to Wilhelm and Mar, in southern East Germany. When I came back from visiting Wilhelm and mentioned in a talk that this man with the racking cough was traveling thousands of miles each year on a motorbike, several Dutchmen got together and presented me with a large check—the largest I had yet received at one time.
“Andy,” they said, “this money is for a very specific purpose. We believe that Wilhelm should have an automobile. Will you purchase one for him, and give it to him from us?”
Wilhelm could hardly believe it when I drove up to his house in the lovely Saxony hills and handed him the keys to his new automobile. Mar writes us now that the cough has almost entirely disappeared. Wilhelm has used up his first automobile and has been given a second by the same Dutch friends. With it he began a team missionary work of his own, traveling into Poland and Czechoslovakia to hold youth meetings with members of his East German groups.
And this, to me, is the most exciting new development of all: the emergence of a ministry to the Christians of one Iron Curtain country by the Christians of another. Surely this is what God has had in mind all along, that the brave remnant of His church scattered through many lands gain strength through coming together and lose their own fears in reaching out to help one another. These behind-the-Curtain missionaries lack money for travel, and this we can help to supply, but the rest of their task—freedom of travel within the Communist bloc and freedom to hold meetings and exchange letters—is infinitely easier than for us coming in from outside. One church with which we have worked, in Czechoslovakia, has sent missionaries as far as Brazil and Korea, where they are working side by side with missionaries from the West!
———
And so the tide of change moves on. Not all of the change is good. Where there is a loosening of restrictions here, there is usually a tightening there. At about the same time that the Bible shop was opening again in Belgrade, there was a fresh campaign of repression against Christians in Hungary. During the last few months in China, hundreds of thousands of Bibles and hymnbooks have been burned amid great rejoicing by the Red Guard. Whether this marks the end of the period of rather contemptuous laissez-faire by the Chinese government and the start of a new time of persecution for Chinese Christians remains to be seen.
But God is never defeated. Though He may be opposed, attacked, resisted, still the ultimate outcome can never be in doubt. Every day we see fresh proof that indeed all things—even evil ones—work together for those who are called by His name.
There is a Roman Catholic priest in Rumania whom we have been helping to buy Bibles and other supplies for years. On his last trip home from Vienna, his car loaded with Bibles, he was stopped at his own border and his cargo discovered.
The priest was in anguish. He had already been in jail once on a trumped-up charge of hoarding, but here was a truly serious economic crime, and he was really guilty. A Bible costs a month’s wages in Rumania, and he was carrying nearly two hundred.
Just at this moment another car pulled up to the border. Out stepped a businessman who was well known at the station; he walked breezily into the inspection shed greeting each of the guards by name. At the sight of the counter ten-deep in Bibles he stopped short. “Bibles?” he said. “I don’t suppose you would be willing to sell them to me? They are confiscated, right?”
“Yes, they are confiscated, but we could not possibly sell them to you.”
The businessman winked. “Not even,” he said, “for . . .” and he leaned over and whispered a figure into the ear of the customs man. The official’s eyes grew large.
“Are they really worth that much?”
“More. I shall make a profit.”
The official thought for a moment. “Let me talk with my comrades.” The three guards huddled together, and when they emerged from their little ring, they had apparently decided that the price was high enough to be worth the sacrifice of principle. So the businessman paid them in cash, got the priest’s help in loading his car with his own Bibles, and drove on to Rumania.
In the shed there was an awkward silence. “Am I still charged with smuggling Bibles?” the priest asked at last.
“Bibles?” said the customs official. “What Bibles? There are no Bibles here. You’d better move along while the gate’s open.”
And as for the Bibles, although they went on the black market, at least they too reached Rumania safely, where somehow believers will find enough money to buy them for their own.
———
But o
f all the signs of these times, to us the most encouraging is the ever-increasing freedom of travel into most Communist countries. Thousands more visitors from the West every year—and of these thousands, what if only a few hundred come consciously as Christians seeking their brothers? Even people who have never dreamed of being missionaries could play a role here larger than anything that has yet been done. Just in the matter of Bibles: Smuggling in a carload is risky business, but most border checks would say nothing to a single copy in the local language (obtainable from the Bible societies) among a traveler’s personal effects. China and Albania are the only two countries I know where a Bible left on a table or forgotten in a drawer would not find its way soon into eager hands.
A thousand tourists, a thousand ambassadors of God. Tourists who would not only visit the museums and the factories, but who would find the places—often small and out-of-the way—where Christians meet to worship. Who would stand up in these services and speak just six healing words: “Greetings from your brothers in Holland . . . in England . . . in America. . . .”
“Where would it end?” I asked Corry. “Where could such a flood of caring be stopped?”
“I don’t know,” she said—and then she laughed. “We don’t know what lies ahead. Remember? We don’t know where we’re going but—”
“But we’re glad we’re going there together.”
Together, the two of us. The twelve of us. The thousands of us. None of us knows where the road will lead. We only know it is the most exciting journey of them all.
Epilogue
The Further Adventures of God’s Smuggler
BROTHER ANDREW AND AL JANSSEN
In July 1999, I (Al) had the opportunity with my wife, Jo, to spend a week in Holland with Brother Andrew. We had met four years earlier when I joined the board of Open Doors USA. Having read God’s Smuggler as a college student many years before, I urged him to tell the rest of the story about his ministry in the Islamic world. Andrew insisted at the time, “I’m not writing another book!” I was learning not to be surprised at this sort of direct, very Dutch response. Andrew’s reasoning was simple: After publication of God’s Smuggler, he could not personally return to Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union for many years. While others continued his work in the Soviet Bloc, Andrew explored new frontiers for ministry.
Brother Andrew lives in a town about an hour by train from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. He has lived in the same home for more than forty years and works in a separate office space behind the house and spacious garden. We met in his office, which consists of three rooms where his library, Bible collection and memorabilia from travels to some 125 countries (he has lost count of the actual number) are displayed. In the middle room we sat on well-worn couches around a coffee table that was actually an old bellows, a reminder of his roots. Andrew’s father was a blacksmith so skilled that he forged the skates for members of the Dutch national skating team and became known as the “Rembrandt of blacksmiths.” Andrew admitted that he did not inherit his father’s gift as a smith.
The purpose of my interviews was to capture for Open Doors what Andrew had learned over thirty-plus years of work in the Muslim world so that missionaries and church leaders could glean from and build on his experience. Until the events of September 11, 2001, we had no plan to publish these notes. Nearly twenty years before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Brother Andrew had publicly stated, “If we don’t go to Muslims with the love of Christ, they will come to us with guns and bombs.” Realizing the fulfillment of his prophecy, Andrew softened his stance on writing books: “Maybe God has given me a message for the Church today.” Shortly after that I was invited to join Open Doors and work with Brother Andrew to help him write what became two major books about the Church in the Islamic world, Light Force and Secret Believers, plus several devotionals.
Over a period of fifteen years, I have had the chance to travel with Brother Andrew and to interview him on many occasions. Drawing from those conversations, the following are just a few of the further adventures of “God’s Smuggler.”
Al: Shortly after completion of God’s Smuggler in 1967, you took your first trip to the Middle East. What was the purpose of your trip?
Brother Andrew: After the book was published, I was extremely tired. Not just from book promotion but also from some problems with the ministry at home. I booked a ticket to Tel Aviv and took a bus to Eilat on the southern tip of the Negev and did some snorkeling in the Gulf of Aqaba. Honestly, I was just running away. I spent some time hiking in the Sinai Desert. There is something about the desert that calms you. I was praying, fasting, walking and desperate. One night God said, “You can lay down your privileges but not your responsibilities.” So I went home to deal with my problems.
I had already thought a lot about Islam and Communism. I had seen the mosques in Central Asia, and had met with some dissidents who told me about the oppression by the Russian government toward the Muslims. Of course, I was already aware of Islam from my time in Indonesia with the Dutch army. I read the Qur’an before I read the Bible—that wasn’t in God’s Smuggler! So I was interested. I knew if Communism fell, Islam could quickly rise up as a movement.
So you knew this was to be the next area of ministry?
Not immediately. You need to understand, I never wanted to start a ministry. I simply went on one trip to Poland in 1955, to the Communist Youth Festival. Shortly after that, I had the opportunity to go to Czechoslovakia. I found the Church in both countries, discovered their need and started bringing Bibles. There was no plan, no vision, certainly no thought about leading a worldwide organization. God revealed a need I could meet, and I did what I could. The work grew, and many others joined me, including people in other countries—South Africa was the first in 1970, after the Netherlands, of course, followed by Australia and Switzerland, then the U.S. and the U.K. Deryck Stone, a pastor in South Africa, was the first to suggest the name Open Doors. He was on our international board for many years.
Was the mission of Open Doors just to deliver Bibles to believers who had no access to them?
It was more than that. Everywhere I go I seek my brothers and sisters in Christ. I listen to their stories. I encourage them and pray with them. If Open Doors can help strengthen the Church in the midst of persecution, that is what we do. That is what our ministry is all about. When I first discovered a persecuted Church behind the Iron Curtain, the need was for Bibles. I have always believed that no government or religious authority has the right to prevent people from having and reading the Bible. But as our ministry expanded, other needs emerged. For example, in some countries pastors have little or no seminary training. We provide them with training so they can be more effective leaders of their congregations. In other regions Christians are discriminated against and denied education and quality job opportunities. So we may strengthen the Church by providing small loans to help Christians start businesses. The needs and thus the strategies vary from country to country.
So you started going into Islamic countries. What did you discover?
At first it was more of an adventure, and gradually the ministry opportunities emerged. Sometime in 1970 or 1971, I was invited by Doug Sparks to participate in an archaeological expedition to identify the real location of Mount Sinai. The team flew to Beirut, bought a Land Rover and loaded it with equipment. My contribution, naturally, was a supply of Arabic Bibles. We drove to Damascus, but somewhere in Jordan we had an accident. I was asleep when it happened. At that time, if you had an accident you went to prison until the police sorted things out. I had no desire to go to prison—plus I was scheduled to preach at a church in Amman the next day—so I left my friends and hitchhiked to Amman. Two days later, my friends were released and caught up with me, and we drove to the Saudi border. Our goal was to travel into southern Midian, where Moses lived for forty years before his encounter with God in the burning bush.* But we were detained at the border, and then the car was impounded when they discov
ered the Bibles.
Doug and I managed to escape with a suitcase full of Bibles, and we hitchhiked to Jeddah. After buying a plane ticket to Cairo for the next day, we spent an evening distributing Bibles at the souk. No one stopped us. We still had a few Bibles left the next morning when we went to Jeddah Airport. There I saw empty racks that would soon be filled with Arab newspapers and magazines, so I placed the remaining Scriptures on those empty racks. After we boarded the plane our flight was delayed, and I thought they were going to arrest us for leaving those Bibles. But we took off without incident. That was my first visit to Saudi Arabia. It took six months before the Land Rover was released and I got my luggage back.
Have you gone back to Saudi Arabia?
Several times. Once as I entered the country, the customs officials wanted to confiscate my Bible. I started shouting at them; I wanted the whole airport to know that they were taking my Bible. They got scared and gave it back. Another time I preached the first sermon at a Saudi church started by a Filipino pastor. That was the first and also the last service because the pastor was arrested and the church closed. I have made contact with believers in Saudi Arabia—I know of at least one thousand baptized Saudis. But there is no visible Church in the country. I have not been there for many years now—I don’t want to do anything to endanger the believers.
What is the difference between ministry in Communist countries and ministry in Islamic countries?
Islam is a much stronger movement. Communism lasted barely 70 years in Russia and Eastern Europe. Islam has already been around for 1,400 years. Islam is based on monotheism and a holy book. The challenge of Communism is the stupid proclamation “There is no God.” The challenge of Islam is “Who is God?” We know that many Muslims are motivated to die for their faith. If we don’t come up with an answer, Islam will continue to grow and attract more volunteers willing to blow themselves up as self-proclaimed martyrs.
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