HE was hailed as God's Smuggler. The story of Brother Andrew is both exhilarating and awe-inspiring. Andrew 'Anne' van der Bijl was known in English-speaking countries simply as Brother Andrew. He was a Dutch Christian missionary and founder of Open Doors, a Christian organization.
He was nicknamed God's Smuggler for smuggling Bibles, Gospel tracts, and other Christian literature into Communist countries during the Cold War.
As a young missionary in 1955, he went to a Communist youth congress in Poland, which was a part of the Soviet bloc at that time. His suitcase contained his Bible, a change of clothes, and hundreds of tracts titled 'The Way of Salvation'.
Little did he know that the trip would change his life. God showed him that hundreds of thousands of people behind the Iron Curtain were desperate to hear the Gospel and were in need of Bibles, counseling, and prayer support. Among them, Andrew also found a group of Christians who felt isolated and shut from the rest of the world.
During his first visit to Poland, he was invited to speak at a Baptist church in Warsaw. In his best-selling book, 'God's Smuggler', he recalled that day: “At the end of my little talk the pastor said the most interesting thing of all, ‘We want to thank you,’ he said, ‘for being here. Even if you had not said a word, just seeing you would have meant so much. We feel at times as if we are all alone in our struggle.”
Towards the end of the trip, Brother Andrew prayed to seek God's will for his life. He felt led to open the Bible and he came across a passage that he took as his life's mission. The passage was from Revelation 3:2. It said: “Wake Up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die.”
In later years, he would travel many times behind the Iron Curtain, courageously putting his life on the line to smuggle Bibles at the height of the Cold War. His work went on to span many decades and geographic locations. In God’s Smuggler, he details dangerous border crossings in his blue VW Beetle – which became known as ‘the miracle car’, for its ability to miraculously keep going. He developed a trademark prayer to say as he snuck Bibles and Christian literature across the border: "“Lord, in my luggage I have Scripture I want to take to Your children. When You were on earth, You made blind eyes see. Now, I pray, make seeing eyes blind. Do not let the guards see those things You do not want them to see.”
Soon, God would send Andrew co-laborers to help him in the work of smuggling Bibles to believers in Communist countries. What began as one man's mission has today become an international ministry spread across over 60 countries. Open Doors still distributes hundreds of thousands of Bibles and Christian books every year. But we also train and support persecuted Christians in other ways.
“When I first discovered a persecuted church behind the Iron Curtain, the need was for Bibles,” says Brother Andrew. “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, 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.”
It was not as if the KGB did not know about him. They knew about him and his work. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he obtained the KGB's reports about him and his work. There were more than 150 pages in the report that detailed his work in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They knew a lot about ‘Brother Andrew’, and yet they were still not able to stop his work.
Van der Bijl was born in Sint Pancras, the Netherlands, on 11 May 1928, as the fourth of six children of a poor blacksmith and an invalid mother. In the 1940s, he enlisted in the colonial army of the Dutch East Indies during the Indonesian National Revolution. After being involved in a massacre of Indonesian villagers while he was serving as a soldier, he endured a period of severe emotional stress, and later was wounded in the ankle during the fighting. During his rehabilitation, he began reading a Bible given to him by his mother. When he returned to the Netherlands, he started attending church and committed himself to Christianity. In 1953, Van der Bijl studied at the WEC Missionary Training College in Glasgow, Scotland.
Brother Andrew age died on 27 September 2022 at the age of 94. He had been married for 59 years to his wife, Corry (1931–2018). They lived in Holland and are survived by five children and 11 grandchildren. #BrotherAndrew #opendoors #persecutedchurch #sovietunion #ChristianMessenger
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