In September 1975 Andrew decided to convene a conference in Manila, the Philippines. The event was dubbed the “Love China” conference, and its purpose was to express the love of Christians for the people of China. Hundreds of delegates from fifty-five different mission organizations and twenty-three countries attended the conference. A number of speakers educated the attendees on the political and social situation in China. Andrew then challenged those at the conference to focus on the plight of the suffering Christians in China by going there and encouraging them and taking them Bibles, as well as evangelizing among the Chinese people. Andrew grew frustrated when some of the attendees told him that what he suggested was not practical, that the door to China was “closed.”
Brother David was at the conference, and he and Andrew spent much time together talking, planning, and praying. They were both determined to join forces and do more to help the suffering Chinese church.
Chapter 18
The Fight Continues
When Andrew made his first trip into China, he had been discouraged at the state of the officially sanctioned churches he saw and by the fact that the results of the expelled foreign missionaries’ work seemed to have evaporated in the face of persecution. But through his friendship with Brother David, Andrew came to see that his assessment of the situation in China had been wrong. Brother David had made numerous trips into China, and he reported that there were two types of churches operating in China: the officially sanctioned churches and also the house churches. Like the underground churches Andrew had encountered in some of the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, these latter churches met clandestinely in people’s houses and apartments. According to Brother David, the work of the missionaries in China had not withered but had taken root in these churches. He estimated that millions of Chinese Christians were attending house churches across the country.
One of the great needs of these house churches, Andrew learned, was Bibles. Often they were in such short supply that a Bible would be cut apart and sections of it handed around so that people could memorize it. Workers from Open Doors soon began smuggling Bibles into China and distributing them to the house churches, but the need always vastly outstripped the supply. Then one day Andrew and Brother David came up with a bold plan to help the supply side of the equation—Project Pearl.
Project Pearl, which was named for the pearl of great price spoken of by Jesus in Matthew 13, was a plan to smuggle one million Bibles into China in one shipment. This undertaking was massive both financially and logistically. The plan was to carry the Bibles by sea to a deserted beach near Swatow, about one hundred miles north of Hong Kong. From the beach, Chinese contacts would store and then distribute the Bibles to house churches throughout the country. Andrew was kept busy raising money to pay for the project, which would cost over seven million dollars, while Brother David and other Open Doors workers planned the logistics of the delivery.
A tugboat and a barge were purchased for the project. The tugboat was named Michael, and the barge, Gabriella, after the two archangels. The Bibles, packed into 232 one-ton, watertight packages, were loaded onto the barge. Each package was roped to the next one. The plan was to float the packages ashore from the barge, using the rope to haul them ashore onto the beach.
On the night of June 18, 1981, Operation Pearl got under way. Andrew was excited when word reached him that the operation had worked almost flawlessly. Under the cover of dark, at high tide off Swatow, the 232 packages of Bibles were dumped into the water. Two small boats then pulled the packages connected by the rope to shore, where two thousand Chinese Christians were waiting to haul the Bibles in and carry them away. When almost all the Bibles had been pulled ashore, a group of soldiers on patrol happened along. The soldiers seized the remaining Bibles and tossed them back into the ocean. In all, it was estimated that about ten thousand Bibles, one percent of the total delivery, were thrown into the ocean by the soldiers. But Andrew was cheered to hear that the next day, all over Swatow, thousands of copies of black-covered Bibles were seen drying in the sun on the roofs of houses. Andrew was even more delighted with the operation when word reached him several weeks later that all of the Bibles had been successfully delivered to house churches, some of which were thousands of miles away from the beach where the Bibles had been dropped off.
By this time, many of the Communist countries of Eastern Europe were beginning to allow more Christian freedoms. Yugoslavia now let Bibles enter the country legally, and in East Germany Andrew was allowed to preach to crowds of up to four thousand people.
By 1985 the Communist countries of Eastern Europe were becoming more open toward religious freedom. Much of this came about because of the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev, the new leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev instituted a series of reforms known as glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) that sought to undo seventy years of economic stagnation and political repression. Despite this growing openness, Andrew was still surprised when in 1988 Gorbachev allowed Open Doors to donate one million Russian Bibles in celebration of the one thousandth anniversary of the Russian Orthodox Church. The church then distributed the Bibles throughout the country.
This new openness continued to gain momentum, and in November 1989, the Berlin Wall, which had divided East and West Berlin since 1961, was torn down. Now Germans from both sides of the wall could have fellowship together and share their faith freely. The events were astonishing to just about everyone except Brother Andrew, who had prayed and believed for many years that Germany would one day be reunited.
In 1991 Andrew traveled to Albania, the country he had previously found to be the most repressive of all the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. While there he was allowed total freedom, and he preached to crowds totaling eight thousand people and openly distributed tens of thousands of copies of the Gospel of John and seven thousand New Testaments.
That year he also met with twelve Iranian pastors and their wives to find out how best to serve the Iranian Christians living under the grip of a fundamentalist Muslim government. Not long after the meeting, two of the pastors were imprisoned. They were subsequently released from jail and then mysteriously murdered. Andrew was saddened by the news, but he encouraged Christians everywhere to continue reaching out to Muslims. “We are not fighting the Muslims or the Communists; we are fighting the devil,” he reminded people wherever he went.
That fight continues. In 1995, sixty-seven-year-old Brother Andrew stepped down from his role as president of Open Doors. His colleague and fellow Dutchman, Johan Companjen, took his place as president, reaffirming the three aims that Andrew had established for the organization: (1) to deliver Bibles by whatever means possible into countries where they have been banned or restricted, (2) to train church leaders living in countries opposed to the gospel, and (3) to support and encourage individual believers who are suffering for their faith.
Whenever he can, Brother Andrew travels with Corrie to visit and advise the tightly knit group of 350 workers who man the major offices of Open Doors in seventeen countries around the world. These workers, along with an army of volunteers, smuggle one million Bibles a year into China and hundreds of thousands of copies of the Bible into other closed countries.
In 2005 Open Doors celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was hard for Andrew to believe that fifty years had passed since he had sat on the street in Warsaw, Poland, and felt God speak to him from the verse in Revelation, chapter three, “Awake, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death.”
In the fifty years since then, that is what Andrew had endeavored to do each day of his life. The year before, 2004, Open Doors distributed five million Bibles and other Christian material to persecuted Christians. The organization also trained over 138,000 pastors and other church leaders.
Today, the book God’s Smuggler continues to be a strong seller. Over twelve million copies of the book are now in print in over forty languages. Andrew often meets Christians in closed countries who have read a banned copy of the book in their own language.
In his “retirement years,” Andrew concentrates his personal efforts on Muslim countries. He believes that Islam may be the biggest threat ever to Christians and their work around the world. His strategy is the same as it has always been—visiting Christians undergoing persecution, bringing them greetings from other Christians, and finding out what they need most to strengthen them in their faith. “You have to be there,” Andrew says, referring to Matthew 25. “You cannot give a person something to eat unless you are there. You cannot provide drink or clothes or visit the sick and imprisoned unless you are there.”
And “being there” is a message Andrew van der Bijl has lived for over fifty years.
