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Anne van der Bijl, a Dutch evangelist known to Christians around the world as Brother Andrew, the man who smuggled Bibles into closed communist countries, has died at the age of 94.
Van der Bijl became known as “God’s Smuggler” when the first-person account of his missionary adventures was published in 1967, passing border guards with Bibles hidden in his son’s Volkswagen Beetle. God’s Smuggler was written with evangelical journalists John and Elizabeth Sherrill and published under his code name “Brother Andrew”. It has sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into 35 languages.
The book inspired many other missionary smugglers, provided funding for van der Bij’s Open Doors ministry, and drew evangelical attention to the plight of believers in countries where Christian belief and practice are illegal. However, van der Bijl protests that people have missed the point when they hold him up as heroic and extraordinary.
“I’m not a gospel stuntman,” he said. “I’m just an ordinary person. What I did, anyone can do.
No one knows how many Bibles van der Bijl imported into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Bulgaria and other Soviet bloc countries in the decade before the success of God’s Smuggler forced him to step into the role of extravaganza and fundraiser for Open Doors. Estimates range into the millions. A Dutch joke, popular in the late 1960s, said: “What will the Russians find if they get to the moon first? Brother Andrew with a stack of Bibles.
Image: Open Doors International
Brother Andrew
Van der Bijl, for his part, doesn’t keep track and doesn’t think the exact number is important.
“I don’t care about statistics,” he said in a 2005 interview. “We don’t count. … But God is the perfect accountant. He knows.”
Van der Bijl was born in Holland in 1928, the son of a poor blacksmith and an invalid mother. He was 12 when the German military invaded the neutral country in World War II, and he spent the occupation, he told John and Elizabeth Sherrill, hiding in trenches to avoid being pressed into service by Nazi soldiers. When famine struck the Netherlands in 1944, van der Bijl, like so many Dutch people, ate tulip bulbs to survive.
After the war, van der Bijl joined the Dutch army and was sent to Indonesia as part of the colonial forces trying to quell the Indonesian independence struggle. He was excited about the adventure until the shooting started and he killed people. According to his own accounts, van der Bijl participated in the massacre of an Indonesian village, indiscriminately killing everyone who lived there.
He was then haunted by the sight of a young mother and infant killed by the same bullet. He started wearing a crazy straw hat in the jungle, hoping it would kill him. Van der Bijl adopted the motto: “Get smart – lose your mind”.
He was shot in the ankle and began reading the Bible his mother had given him during his recovery. After returning to the Netherlands, he began going to church forcibly and in the early 1950s he surrendered to God.
“There wasn’t much faith in my prayer,” said van der Beel. “I just said, ‘Lord, if you show me the way, I will follow you.’ Amen.”
Van der Bijl dedicated his life to ministry and went to Scotland to study at the World Evangelization Crusade missionary school in 1953. Speaking to Christianity Today in 2013, he remembered an important lesson from a Salvation Army officer who taught street evangelism. The old man said that most would-be evangelists give up too soon because the Holy Spirit has prepared the heart of only one person in 1,000.
“Immediately my heart revolted. I thought, ‘What a waste,'” van der Bijl recalls. “Why go and waste your energy on a 999 that wouldn’t answer? God knows it and the devil knows it and he laughs because after the first 1,000 people I give up in despair.”
He decided that he would ask God to direct him to the only person who was ready for the gospel. Instead of spending his time calculating and strategizing, he will follow the guidance of the Spirit.
A little later he felt God speak to him through Revelation 3:2: “Awake! Strengthen what remains and is about to die. Van der Biel realized that he had to go to support the church in communist controlled countries. In 1955 he undertook a government-controlled tour of Poland, but broke away from his group to visit underground groups of believers. On his second trip to Czechoslovakia, he saw that churches in communist countries needed Bibles.
“I promised God that as many times as I could lay hands on a Bible, I would take it to these children of his behind the wall that men built,” van der Bijl later recalled, “in any country where God opened the door long enough , to sneak in.
Image: Open Doors International
Brother Andrew in Yugoslavia
In 1957, he made his first smuggling trip across the border of a communist country, entering Yugoslavia with pamphlets, Bibles and parts of Bibles hidden in his son’s Volkswagen. As he watched the guards search the cars in front of him, he prayed what he would later call “God’s Smuggler’s Prayer”:
“Lord, I have a Scripture in my luggage that I want to take to your children across this border. When you were on Earth, you made blind eyes see. Now, I pray, make the seeing eyes blind. Don’t let the guards see the things you don’t want them to see.
Van der Biel followed up his early success in Yugoslavia with more travels and eventually even smuggled Bibles into the Soviet Union. He recruited other Christians to help him, and they developed strategies to avoid the attention of border guards and secret police. Sometimes the smugglers traveled in pairs, disguised as honeymooners. Sometimes they used out-of-town border posts. They would experiment with different ways of hiding Scripture in their small, inconspicuous cars. They always followed the guidance of the Spirit and no one was ever arrested.
Bible smuggling has been criticized by a number of Christian organizations, including the Baptist World Alliance, the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board and the American Bible Society. They considered it dangerous—especially for Christians living in communist countries—and ineffective. Sensational stories were good for raising money, critics argued, but little else.
Historians of the Cold War debate the impact of Bible smuggling on communist regimes. Francis D. Rashka writes that “it was probably considerable” but “the evidence for the exploits is shaky and prone to exaggeration and personal aggrandizement”. There is at least some evidence that the KGB closely monitored van der Beel’s activities and may have had informants in his network, according to Rashka.
Image: Open Doors International
Brother Andrew
After the success of God’s Smugglervan der Biel left the smuggling to other lesser-known Christians. He turned his attention to fundraising for open doors and ministry opportunities in Muslim countries. When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, he became an outspoken critic of American evangelicals’ support for the war on terror. Christians, he said, could trust in military intervention only if they had renounced faith in missions.
When speaking to American audiences in the early 2000s, van der Beel regularly asked Christians if they had prayed for Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda. When US forces killed bin Laden in 2011, he expressed sadness.
“I believe that everyone is accessible. People are never the enemy – only the devil,” van der Bijl said. “Bin Laden was on my prayer list. I wanted to meet him. I wanted to tell him who the real boss of the world is.”
At the time of his death, the ministry Van der Biel founded was helping Christians in more than 60 countries. Open Doors distributes 300,000 Bibles and 1.5 million Christian books, teaching materials and discipleship guides each year. The group also provides relief, assistance, community development and trauma counseling while advocating for persecuted Christians around the world.
Asked if he regretted his life’s work, van der Bijl said: “If I could live my life over again, I would be much more radical.”
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