Andrew van der Bijl - Brother Andrew –(11 May 1928 – 27 September 2022) did not set out to start an organization. His original intention was only to give away a single Bible and a suitcase of tracts entitled “The Way of Salvation”.
But God gave Andrew a mission that was larger than life. As he prayed over a Communist youth rally in Poland in 1955, Andrew abandoned all else for a word from the Lord in Revelation chapter 3 verse 2: Strengthen what remains and is about to die. And then he started Open Doors, a non-denominational mission supporting persecuted Christians.
"Our very mission is called 'Open Doors' because we believe that any door is open, anytime and anywhere. I literally believe that. Every door is open to go in and proclaim Christ, as long as you are willing to go and are not worried about coming back."
The most well-known story
This story captured my imagination when I was a fledgling Christian in a youth group many years ago:
Brother Andrew approached the Romanian border in his car—which was packed with illegal Bibles. He could only hope the border guards were moving swiftly and not paying much attention, which might allow him to pass through undetected.
But just as he was hoping this, Brother Andrew saw the guards stop the car at the front of the line. He watched as the vehicle’s owners were forced to take out all of the car’s contents and spread them on the ground for inspection.
Each car that followed received the same treatment, with the fourth car’s inspection lasting the longest.
“Dear Lord,” Brother Andrew remembers praying, “What am I going to do?”
As he prayed, a bold idea came to Brother Andrew. “I know that no amount of cleverness on my part can get me through this border search. Dare I ask for a miracle? Let me take some of the Bibles out and leave them in the open where they will be seen.”
Putting the Bibles out in the open would truly be depending on God, rather than his own intelligence, he thought. So when the guards ushered Andrew forward, he did just this. “I handed him my papers and started to get out. But the guard’s knee was against the door, holding it closed.”
And then, the almost unbelievable happened.
The guard looked at Brother Andrew’s passport and abruptly waved him on. “Surely thirty seconds had not passed,” he remembers.
Brother Andrew started the engine and began pulling away, all the while wondering if he was supposed to pull over so the car could be taken apart and examined. “I coasted forward, my foot poised above the brake. Nothing happened. I looked out the rear mirror. The guard was waving the next car to a stop, indicating to the driver that he had to get out.”
God had cleared the way for Brother Andrew to smuggle the Bible to Christians who had no access to God’s Word.
Life and recognition
Andrew vander Bijl was born in Sint Pancras, the Netherlands, the fourth of six children of a poor blacksmith and an invalid mother. In the 1940s he enlisted in the Dutch East Indies colonial army and was involved in a massacre of Indonesian villagers. He was wounded and went through a period of emotional stress, eventually becoming a Christian.
In 1953 he studied at the WEC Missionary Training College in Glasgow, Scotland.He was married to his wife Corry for 59 years and has five children and 11 grandchildren.
“Whenever, wherever, however You want me, I'll go,” Andrew promised God almost 70 years ago. This promise took him throughout Europe, China, Cuba and the Islamic world.In 1957 Brother Andrew crossed the border into Yugoslavia and other Iron Curtain countries in a bright blue Volkswagen Beetle stuffed with ‘illicit’ Bibles.
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands knighted Brother Andrew in 1993. In 1997, he received the World Evangelical Alliance’s Religious Liberty Award, recognising his lifetime of service to suffering Christians and his passion for spreading the gospel.
In 2003, he received the Heritage of Faithfulness Award from the Christian Association of Senior Adults, in California. However, Brother Andrew says he was proudest of being named a “Blood Brother” of the Apache Indian tribe in 1980s. As part of the ceremony, he was given an Apache name that means, “He who breaks through the lines.”
“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.”
Bible-smuggling reached new heights in June 1981 when a 20-man Open Doors crew navigated a custom-built barge onto the China coastline under cover of darkness. They floated one million Bibles contained in 232 packages, each weighing a ton, to a small, silent army of waiting Chinese Christians, who spirited them into the country.
Focus on the Islamic world
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Brother Andrew turned his attention to the Islamic world, saying that the rapid spread of Islam posed the greatest challenge yet to the Christian church worldwide. His travel shifted mostly to the Middle East and South Asia.
In the face of growing extremist violence toward Christians across the Middle East, Persian Gulf, northern Africa and Southeast Asia, Brother Andrew preached against retaliation.
“When we have an enemy image of any political or religious group or nation, the love of God cannot reach us to call us to do something about it,” he said. He frequently turned the word Islam into an acronym for
‘I Sincerely Love All Muslims’.
“Persecution is an enemy the Church has met and mastered many times,” Brother Andrew often pointed out. “It’s indifference that we must watch for! Indifference is a far more dangerous foe.”
He believed everyone could take a “step of yes” to become a part of God’s work to support the persecuted, just as he had.
Open Doors
The “step of yes” has guided Open Doors since the day Andrew started this work. It’s what has led the our work in more than 60 countries, and to follow God’s leading even when the work seems impossible.
Brother Andrew is our chief adventurer and lead risk taker. He’s best known, in fact, for courageously putting his life on the line to smuggle Bibles behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War.
In addition to distributing Bibles worldwide, Open Doors provides spiritual development, economic relief, literacy and vocational training, trauma counselling and other support services in countries where it is most dangerous to live as a Christian.
‘Well done, good and faithful servant’
Aira Chilcott is a retired secondary school teacher with lots of science andtheology under her belt. Aira is an editor for PSI and indulges inreading, bushwalking and volunteering at a nature reserve. Aira’s husband Bill passed away in 2022 and she is left with three wonderful adult sons and one grandson.
Aira Chilcott's previous articles may be viewed at http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/aira-chilcott.html