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Brother Andrew said once, "Show me a closed door and I will tell you how you can get in." (He added, "I won't, however, promise you a way to get out.") Erstwhile "God's Smuggler" (and author, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, of the book by that name), Andrew goes to places most of us avoid to interact with people most of us dismiss in order to aid Christians in circumstances most of us know little or nothing about. He founded the (aptly named) Open Doors ministry to champion the cause of the suffering church around the world and to facilitate his enigmatic ventures of goodwill. Both he and the ministry have come a long way since the 1950s when he started smuggling desperately needed Bibles to Christians behind the Iron Curtain, hiding them in the back seat of his beat-up Volkswagen Beetle.

This year Brother Andrew turned 70, celebrated 40 years of marriage to his wife, Corry, and welcomed their first grandchild. He will tell you, looking back on his life, that his dreams have come true. Open Doors has made a significant impact and has grown into a force he never imagined: "The curtains have come down in the communist world. That is what I worked for. I am very happy about that."

God's Smuggler introduced his burden for Christians behind the Iron Curtain to fellow believers all over the world, which created a network of support that multiplied the reach of Open Doors. Today the ministry has offices in 20 countries and 200 full-time workers. (Brother Andrew serves as president emeritus.) Through Open Doors, Brother Andrew has brought Bibles and Christian materials to struggling churches in the one-time communist Eastern bloc, to China, Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, and Latin America. They have sponsored "congresses" (like the Love Africa Congress in the 1970s that brought together leaders from all over the continent for prayer and ministry support), prayer campaigns (such as Seven Years of Prayer for the Soviet Union that began in the early 1980s), and "projects" (Project Pearl delivered clandestinely a million Bibles to China in 1981 and Project Crossfire distributed Christian literature throughout Latin America in 1985).

In this decade, Open Doors has sponsored Project Samuel, which supplied a million schoolchildren in the former Soviet Union with their first Bibles; distributed 20,000 "unofficial" copies of a Chinese Study Bible to church leaders; presented the first complete Albanian Bible to the president there; and initiated Ten Years of Prayer for the Church in the Muslim World.

In 1997 alone, Open Doors distributed 814,041 Bibles; 210,908 New Testaments; 87,606 Gospels; 650,843 "spiritual books"; 387,050 other forms of Christian literature; and trained tens of thousands of pastors and lay leaders in seminars and workshops. (This does not include their visits to imprisoned Christians, emergency help for families of martyrs, church repairs, medical aid, legal support, relocation assistance, vocational training, and just plain being there. A church leader in Lebanon recalls the time when his home was bombed; as he staggered amidst the rubble, he saw Brother Andrew making his way through the wreckage just to be there with him.)

But there is one dream (with two parts) that remains unrealized: The church in the Middle East is dwindling, and the Islamic strongholds are not being penetrated with the gospel. "Communism proclaimed that there is no God, which is stupid and schizophrenic," he says, "because they say there is no God, and then they fight him. The challenge now is not that proclamation; it's the challenge of Who is God?

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October 5 1998, Vol. 42, No. 11