“God’s Smuggler” Brother Andrew dies at 94

Anne van der Bijl, also known as Brother Andrew, died Tuesday in his home in the Netherlands. He smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain into Communist countries for years. Van der Bijl also founded Open Doors in 1955 for Christians being persecuted around the globe. He became well-known to American evangelicals through his 1964 autobiography, God’s Smuggler. His wife, Corry, died in 2018. They are survived by their five children and 11 grandchildren.

How did van der Bijl become “God’s Smuggler”? Van der Bijl was born in 1928 to a poor family. He evaded joining the German army in World War II but joined the Dutch army after the war. He was sent to Indonesia, where, van der Bijl later said, he participated in atrocities conducted by Dutch troops such as killing civilians. He began reading the Bible while recovering from gunshot wounds. He began attending church after returning to the Netherlands and became a Christian in 1950. He felt called to serve Communist countries and discovered they lacked Bibles. He smuggled his first Bibles into Yugoslavia in 1957. In his autobiography, Bijl wrote that he often prayed to God for miracles—sometimes, when heading through a border checkpoint, he would put the Bibles in plain view of guards. “If I could live my life over again, I would be a lot more radical,” he once told Christianity Today. 

Dig deeper: From the WORLD archives, read Priya Abraham’s report in WORLD magazine on Brother Andrew and how he viewed the Muslim jihad.