Andrew’s heart dropped. They did not have a single Ukrainian Bible left to give him. Or did they? With a surge of joy Andrew remembered the pocket-sized Bible he was keeping as a sample. How could he justify keeping it when there was a pastor who preached to thousands without a Bible? Andrew leapt up, ran outside, and retrieved the tiny Bible from under the car seat. He returned and handed it to the pastor. “This is for you to keep,” he said.
The pastor could not at first grasp the idea of owning his own Bible. Then he pulled the Bible to his chest, and tears rolled down his cheeks. Andrew knew that he had done the right thing in giving away the tiny Bible.
During the journey homeward, Andrew replayed the scene over and over again in his mind. He was consumed with the idea of printing small Bibles in the Slavic languages. The only thing holding him back was the cost of such a venture. He and Corrie already had enough financial stress, raising three small boys and supporting the ministry.
Chapter 17
The Bamboo Curtain
Back in Holland Andrew was consumed with the need to print small Bibles in the languages of Eastern Europe. He got quotes from various printers for producing the Bibles, and the best price he could find was three dollars per Bible, provided that he print five thousand copies at a time. This meant that Andrew needed to come up with fifteen thousand dollars. Andrew prayed about the need and asked God to provide the money, but no large sums were donated for the project.
Unwilling to give up on the idea, Andrew and Corrie agreed that they should put their house on the market and use the money they received from the sale of the house to pay for the printing of the Bibles. Corrie was expecting a fourth child, but when she and Andrew weighed the need for Bibles behind the Iron Curtain against their own family needs, they decided they could not keep the house.
Strangely enough, even though there was a housing shortage in Holland, the house did not sell immediately. And while Andrew and Corrie waited for it to sell, the Dutch Bible Society agreed to fund the project, with Andrew paying them back half the cost when he could. Andrew and Corrie were relieved that they would not have to sell the house after all. Soon afterward, their first daughter, whom they named Stephanie, was born.
One day in 1965, as Andrew was speaking in a Dutch church, a man came up to him, speaking English with an American accent. “Brother Andrew, you have so much to share with us in the United States. Have you ever spoken there?”
Andrew shook his head. He had been invited to speak in the United States on several occasions, but he had turned down the invitations, not wanting to leave the impression that he was on a speaking tour just to raise funds from a rich nation.
“You should come. The people in America need to know what is going on in Eastern Europe. They don’t understand the real threat of Communism to us all,” the man said.
For the first time Andrew felt that God wanted him to cross the Atlantic Ocean to America. He allowed the man, who said he was a seminary student, to plan an itinerary for him. Soon everything was planned, and Andrew was on his way to the United States.
When Andrew arrived in the country, a rude shock awaited him. The man who had sponsored the trip belonged to a militant anti-Communist group that believed that killing Communists was the best way to free the world. The members of the group carried rifles with them everywhere, even to class! The group wanted Andrew to preach a message of hate and revenge, but Andrew wanted to preach about love and positive action. Not surprisingly, the sponsor withdrew his support, and Andrew found himself broke and stranded in the United States.
Andrew wired Corrie to send him some money so that he could get home. While he waited for the money to arrive, he was asked to preach at a large church in Los Angeles. Andrew was disappointed that this one speaking engagement was not going to bring the level of awareness to his cause that he had hoped, but he figured that one speaking engagement in the United States was better than none.
Following the service, a tall, slim man introduced himself. His name was John Sherrill, and he was an editor of the well-known Christian magazine Guideposts.
“Would you like to have breakfast with me tomorrow?” John asked. “I really think you have a story that North Americans need to hear.”
At the meeting the following morning, Andrew spent two hours telling John his story. When Andrew had finished, John was even more convinced that he had to write an article about Brother Andrew and his work. In the course of the next two days, Andrew provided John with the information he needed, and then he flew on to Hong Kong.
While in Hong Kong, Andrew decided that he should try to salvage something good from the trip. He applied for a visa to enter Communist China to see what was left of the church there.
China differed from the Communist countries of Eastern Europe in two important ways. It had been under Communist control for only sixteen years, since 1949, and Western missionaries had been working in China for only a little over one hundred years when the Communists expelled them. As a result, only a small percentage of the population had ever been Christians.
Local contacts in Hong Kong told Andrew that it was impossible to get a visa to enter China, especially since he had an entry stamp for the United States in his passport. But much to everyone’s surprise, Andrew was granted the visa he requested. Quickly he gathered up a number of copies of the Bible in Chinese to take behind the Bamboo Curtain, Asia’s equivalent of the Iron Curtain.
At the border a Chinese guard unzipped Andrew’s bag and looked inside, right at the Mandarin Bibles. Andrew waited to see what would happen. Would he be arrested? Or would the Bibles be seized? To Andrew’s surprise the guard did nothing. Instead he asked, “Do you have a camera?”
“No,” Andrew replied.
With that the guard waved him on into China.
While it had been easy to get the Bibles across the border into China, Andrew soon found that distributing them was a different matter. In the years since the Communists had taken over China, they had not only expelled all the foreign missionaries but also succeeded in almost totally destroying the Christian church. They had replaced the Christian church with a state-sanctioned church called the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. Every pastor and member of this church had to be registered with the state. Pastors also were forbidden to evangelize or teach religion to children, and they were not to preach on tithing, keeping Sunday as a day of rest, healing, and the Second Coming of Christ. As a result, the church was small and powerless.
As he made his way back to Holland, Andrew thought about his experience in China. There was enough work there to keep one hundred workers—or more like a thousand—busy behind the Bamboo Curtain. On top of that, Andrew dreamed of visiting every Communist country in Eastern Europe once a year. The sheer enormity of the task was overwhelming, and Andrew knew that he would have to recruit more workers.
When he was out speaking, people would often ask Andrew if they could join his ministry. He always gave them the same answer: “Make a trip or two behind the Iron Curtain on your own, see if you are a good fit for what we do, and then come back and talk to me.” This was the only way of recruiting that he thought was a fair test of a person’s commitment. The only problem was that no one had ever actually done what he suggested—that is, until he got home and found a young Dutchman named Marcus waiting for him.
“I’ve been to Yugoslavia like you said, and I passed out tracts there. Now here I am, sir, reporting for my next assignment,” Marcus said.
Andrew was delighted. Right when he felt that the work needed to grow, God had sent him a determined worker. Andrew put Marcus to work right away, smuggling Bibles into Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.
Meanwhile Andrew planned a trip for himself and Hans Gruber into another Communist country—Cuba. They left for Cuba late in 1965, having been able to get visas to enter the country because they were Dutch citizens and not Americans.
In Cuba Andrew found no shortage of Bibles as he had in other Communist countries, and he was able to speak reasonably freely in churches. However, the church was under attack by Communist dictator Fidel Castro. Pastors had been classified as “nonproductive.” As a result, they were not issued coupons that allowed them to buy food or clothing. And because they were classified as nonproductive, many pastors were rounded up and forced to work on labor gangs, often in the sugarcane fields. In this way the Cuban government believed that over time the Christian church in the country would wither and die. Despite this pressure from the government, Andrew encountered a great deal of spiritual hunger among the people of Cuba.
On his way back to Holland, Andrew stopped off in the United States, where he visited John Sherrill. John had news for Andrew. The article he had written for Guideposts magazine had produced a tremendous response, and people wanted to know more about Andrew’s experiences in Communist countries. Because of this, John and his wife, Elizabeth, wanted to write a full-length book on Andrew’s life and experiences.
Andrew did not quite know what to do. Publishing a book would mean a lot of exposure for his ministry, which he hoped would lead to more prayer and financial support and possibly more workers. But, and it was a huge but, through the book, Communist governments could also learn of his work and ban him from ever entering their countries again.
It was a difficult decision, but as he prayed about it, Andrew felt that the Sherrills should go ahead and write the book. He asked them to do all they could to disguise his identity, referring to him only as Brother Andrew and changing some names, including the name of Sint Pancras to Witte, in the book. Even so, Andrew knew that anyone who really wanted to find out who he was would not have much difficulty doing so.
A year later, in 1966, China was in the headlines day after day. Mao Tse-tung, China’s Communist leader, led his Red Guards into what was being called a Cultural Revolution. Anyone who had an education or enjoyed reading or learning about the outside world was targeted, and many thousands of people were killed or arrested. From the information Andrew was able to gather, the Cultural Revolution was decimating the few Christian churches still active in China. Andrew’s heart ached for the Christians in China, and he prayed fervently for funds to help the situation there.
The answer to his prayers came in the form of royalties from the Sherrills’ book, God’s Smuggler, published the following year. The book about Andrew’s life and ministry was an instant best-seller. For the first time Andrew had enough money to outfit a fleet of cars, hire a mechanic to keep them all in top working order, and print the small Bibles he needed to take into Communist countries.
As his organization in Holland grew, Andrew did not forget about China. He decided that something had to be done there—something big! Andrew soon learned about an American ex-marine living in the Philippines. The man worked for a Christian radio station that broadcast into China in the Mandarin language. The man went by the name Brother David, and he was passionate about finding a way to get Bibles into China. He had even compiled a list of Chinese Christians who were ready to receive and distribute them.
Andrew felt sure that he would join forces with Brother David before too long. In the meantime he kept busy seeking out Christians who were being persecuted or suppressed. He spent time in Vietnam raising awareness of the plight of the war orphans and traveled to Africa to see for himself how Communists were infiltrating the governments of countries there.
The ministry organization kept growing. As well as having an office in Holland, Andrew had opened offices in the United States, England, and Asia. With four offices, the time seemed right to give the ministry an official name. Andrew chose “Open Doors with Brother Andrew.” Open doors referred to a verse in Revelation 3:8 that says, “I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut.”
