God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

  “By next week,” he said, “these Bibles will be in the hands of pastors all over Russia.”

  As Markov drove off, I looked at Hans. He was still praying, but he was grinning too. This part of our mission was accomplished. Except for that one carton of Ukrainian Bibles, our green-uniformed friend could peer as hard as he liked. The car was empty.

  ———

  We went home by way of the Ukraine, delivering the last Bibles to churches ourselves. And it was at one of these stops that a dream caught hold of me that for the next three years would not let go. For it was there in the Ukraine—when we had just two Bibles left—that one of the parishioners brought something for us to see, a treasure of his family’s: a pocket-sized Ukrainian Bible.

  I held the little volume in my hand, unbelieving. Yes, the man assured me, it was a complete Bible. But it was one quarter the size of the Bibles we had brought! I turned the India-paper pages, marveling at the tiny type, so small and yet so sharp. Each word was clear and well-spaced. I bombarded the man with questions—where had this been printed, who published it, where had they bought it—but he knew the answers to none of them.

  I couldn’t lay the little book down. I hefted it in my hand. I slipped it into my pocket. I brought it out and held it up beside one of the standard Bibles. Why, we could bring in three and four times as many, every trip, if they were this size! And once inside, they’d be so much easier to transfer and conceal. And if it could be done for Ukrainian, Russian could be printed in this format too, and the other East European languages. . . .

  Seeing how the Bible intrigued me, the owner made a suggestion. If he could have the two new ones we had brought, would we like to keep this one? The church would still be one Bible ahead.

  To my delight, the minister and the rest of the congregation agreed, and I left that town with the dream in my pocket. I could hardly wait to show it to our Bible societies in the West.

  ———

  Our last Sunday in Russia we attended a Baptist church in a Ukrainian village not far from the Hungarian border. The singing was stirring, the prayers fervent. But when it came time for the sermon, the pastor did a strange thing. He walked off the platform, borrowed a book from one of the congregation, and took it back to the pulpit. It was the Bible! We had heard that there were ministers in Russia who did not have Bibles of their own. But this was the first time we had seen it with our own eyes.

  After the service the pastor invited us to join him and his elders in his study for a brief visit. The visit began, as it so often did in Russia, with an attack. We had learned that this was a safety device, since all pastors knew that their actions were observed. On this occasion the attack was against my automobile.

  “Tell me,” the pastor said through a German-speaking parishioner, “which industrial complex are you the head of?”

  “But I’m not with any company.”

  Our interpreter translated, but the pastor did not let the subject drop. “I know you’re not telling the truth,” he said, “for you have an automobile parked just outside. Only capitalists own automobiles; laboring people walk.”

  What could I do? It was impossible to convince him that I was a former factory worker, the son of a village blacksmith, with a good deal less guarantee of an income than he himself had. He just could not grasp these facts and left the subject only out of politeness—or perhaps because he felt that he had safely established his antipathy for idle and monied classes!

  At any rate, we got to talking about the Second Coming of Christ—by far the most popular theological topic in Russia—and the tone of our conversation immediately changed. I drew my own Dutch Bible out of my pocket to follow the references he was making and when he was through, laid it on the desk.

  I noticed almost at once that he had lost interest in the conversation. His mind was taken up with the Bible! He picked it up and weighed it in his hand, unzipped it, stared at the Dutch words he could not read, zipped it up again.

  Then he put it back on the desk. Not as I had put it down, but with great precision. He set it down on the corner and slowly ran his finger along the edge so that it was aligned with the desk. And then—his voice distant, talking more to himself than to us—he said, “You know, Brother, I have no Bible.”

  My heart broke. Here was this important man, the spiritual leader of a thousand souls, who did not own a copy of the Bible.

  All of the ones we had brought with us were gone—and then I remembered. The little Ukrainian pocket Bible! “Wait!” I shouted. I jumped up from my chair. The Bible societies would just have to take my word for it. I raced outside to my car, threw open the door, got the little Bible from under the seat, and ran back to the study.

  “Here.” I shoved the Bible into the pastor’s hand. “This is for you. To keep.”

  The translator repeated the words, but still the pastor did not understand.

  “Whose is it?” he said.

  “It’s yours! To keep, to own.”

  When Hans and I left that day, our chests ached from the embraces of that group of elders. For now their pastor had a Bible of his very own. A Bible he did not have to return at the end of the service. A Bible to pick up whenever he wanted. A Bible to read and to love.

  And as we left Russia I knew there was a task ahead of me bigger than any I had yet attempted behind the Iron Curtain. I had to talk some organization into printing Slavic-language Bibles in pocket-sized editions. And I had to bring these books into Russia not by the hundreds, but by the thousands.

  19

  Bibles to the Russian Pastors

  The one thing on my mind now was the need for a Russian pocket Bible. It became an obsession with me. I made the rounds of the Bible societies, but even when a society agreed that such an edition was possible in theory, there were practical problems. The American Bible Society, which had been supplying me with Russian Bibles free of charge, although sympathetic, could not see their way clear to printing a special edition just for this operation. The British and Foreign Bible Society was in the same position, the Dutch Bible Society was committed to work in Africa and Indonesia and did not handle Eastern European languages.

  “Why don’t you print your own pocket Bible?” said Philip Whetstra one evening when I was talking over my problem with him.

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m serious. You know exactly what it is you want. Print it yourself.”

  “You must be dreaming, Mr. Whetstra. That would cost at least five thousand dollars. Wherever would I get five thousand dollars?”

  Mr. Whetstra looked at me sadly. “After all this time, you ask that?” he said.

  Of course he was right. It would not be I who supplied the funds for such a project; it would be the Lord. Before I left the Whetstras’ that night, I knew that I was launched onto another grand experiment—the grandest yet. This time, though, it took longer than usual for the dream to unfold. And in the meanwhile there was the usual work to be done. Having Hans as part of this work was even better than I had imagined. We formed a team, one strong where the other was weak. It was while we were in Bulgaria one hot summer night in 1962 that Hans suddenly said, “Andrew, it is time we prayed for a new team member.”

  I was sitting up in bed with the perspiration drying on me, trying to write a letter home. “Yup. That’s right,” I said absently.

  “You remember when the visa finally came through to go to Czechoslovakia, only you were in East Germany and I was in Russia? If there were more of us, we wouldn’t have to make these choices.”

  “Yup. That’s right.”

  “You’re not listening.”

  I put the notepaper down. It stuck to the heel of my hand. “Of course I’m listening.” I tried to remember what he had said. “We have more opportunity than we can satisfy. That’s true, Hans. But you know how it is if you expand too rapidly—”

  Hans interrupted. “I’d hardly call one new member in seven years expanding too rapidly, let us pray.”

 
I looked at Hans closely. He had run the “let-us-pray” onto the end of his sentence so closely, I wasn’t sure I had heard correctly. But he was well into the prayer. I bowed my head too, and as Hans spoke I began to get his sense of urgency about finding another man who would give himself with us—full time, without salary, without reservation.

  Almost simultaneously, Hans and I thought of the same person.

  “What about Rolf?” we said together, and then laughed.

  “It could be guidance,” Hans said.

  “It could indeed.”

  Rolf was a young Dutch seminary student finishing his post-graduate work in systematic theology. A brilliant theologian, Rolf was still a man of action. That same night I composed a letter asking him if he would consider joining us. And sure enough, on our return to Holland there was a reply waiting for us. He had read my letter with annoyance, Rolf wrote. Becoming a sticky-voiced, Bible-waving missionary was the last thing on earth he wanted to do. What did I think he had gone to school all these years for, if all he needed to know was “Onward Christian Soldiers”?

  But since my letter had come, he went on, he hadn’t had a night’s sleep. God had thrust it under his nose night and day, eating or working, sitting or walking, until at last he’d given in, and when could he start?

  And so, kicking and protesting, a third member came to join us. Hans took him right away on an orientation trip into Rumania. They had a fantastic time there, seeing a real break in the reserve of the Church in that beautiful land. They were spied upon by two men who hardly ever left their sight, but in spite of this managed to get rid of their Bibles and even to do some preaching in private homes.

  Rolf came back open-mouthed and utterly convinced.

  ———

  We shared with Rolf our longing for a small-format Russian Bible. Hardly had we finished our tale of difficulties before Rolf echoed Philip Whetstra’s thought that we should print the Bibles ourselves.

  “How much would it cost to print five thousand Bibles?” Rolf asked.

  And I had to admit that I had never asked for a bid. Rolf would not let me get away with that. Together, he and I contacted printing houses in Holland, Germany, and England. The best quotation we got was from an English printer who said that with a press run of five thousand he would print the Bibles for three dollars each.

  “You see?” I said to Rolf, Hans, and Corry the day we received this bid in the mail. “Why, that comes to fifteen thousand dollars!”

  Rolf and Hans were amused at me. “You sit there immobilized by such a little matter as money!”

  And of course again they were right. I had learned to count on the Lord for toothpaste and shaving cream. But when it came to such a staggering sum as fifteen thousand dollars, I had trouble believing that the same principle held.

  That night I sat down at the kitchen table with a bankbook open in front of me. It was labeled “Russian Bibles.” The entries, starting in 1961 just after our return from Russia, were now well into 1963. With all our hoarding, the total still came to less than two thousand dollars.

  Corry sat down. “What are you thinking, Andy?”

  I shoved the account book toward her. “In two years that’s all the money we’ve saved.” I took a deep breath, hating to say what I had to next. “How much do you think our house is worth?”

  Corry did not answer me. She just stared.

  “We got it at a bargain, and with the work we’ve put into it, it’s gone up in value many times. What do you think it’s worth? Ten thousand dollars? Twelve thousand? We need that much.”

  “Our house, Andy? Right when we’re expecting a new baby?”

  “We need to do something to get us off dead center.”

  Corry’s face had gone white. “Maybe God doesn’t want us to have those pocket Bibles,” she said in a small voice. “Maybe the very slowness is guidance.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  ———

  That was all we said that night about selling the house. But Corry told me the next week that she had begun to pray that she could think of the house not as our own but as belonging to God.

  “It should be Yours to do with as You will,” we started praying together every evening. “And yet we know we really don’t feel this way, Lord. If You want us to sell the house for the Bibles, You will have to work a small miracle in our hearts to make us willing.”

  The new baby came—the child we had been waiting for so long, a little girl. We named her Stephanie. Every cash present that came in for her went into the Bible fund. But twenty years of this kind of saving would never be enough. We stopped asking for willingness and just asked God to make us willing to be willing to sell the house.

  And at last He answered our prayer. One morning Corry and I suddenly knew that we didn’t need that house or anything else on earth to make us happy.

  “I don’t know just where we’ll live,” Corry began, and then she laughed. “Remember, Andy? ‘We don’t know where we’re going—’”

  And I supplied the end of the sentence we had spoken so often, “‘—but we’re going there together.’”

  That very day we got an appraisal on the house and land. The total, coupled with our savings account, came to just over fifteen thousand dollars!

  It was the confirmation we needed. We put the house on the market, and I wrote to the printer in England asking him to start making the plates as we had discussed them. That night Corry and I slept in a happier, more positive frame of mind than we had enjoyed for months.

  How faithful God is, how utterly trustworthy, how good beyond imagining! He asks for so little in order to give us so much. For although the housing shortage in Witte was still acute, not a single person came to look at our house all that week. And on Friday, Corry called, “Telephone, Andy!”

  With Hans and Rolf traveling so much of the time, we had been forced to install a phone in the house. I often resented the interruptions it caused. But not this day. For it was from the Dutch Bible Society, asking me if I could see them that same afternoon.

  Within a few hours I was seated across the table from the board of directors. They were committed, they explained again, to their own work. But they had not been able to get my need out of their minds. If I could make arrangements to have the printing done somewhere else . . .

  I had? In England? Well, here was what they proposed. They would pay half the cost. If the Bibles cost $3 each to print, I could purchase them for $1.50. And although the Society would pay for the entire printing as soon as it was ready, I would need to pay for my supplies only as I used them. If this was satisfactory—

  If it was satisfactory! I could scarcely believe what I had heard. I would be able to buy over six hundred Bibles—all we could carry at one time—right away out of our “Russian Bible” fund. And we wouldn’t have to leave our home, and Corry could go on sewing the pink curtains for Steffie’s room, and I could set out my lettuce flats and—I could hardly wait to tell Corry what God had done with the thimbleful of willingness we had offered Him.

  The pocket Bibles were a reality at last. As I left the offices of the Dutch Bible Society, I knew that within six months, by early 1964, we would be able to begin supplying Russian pastors with the Bibles they so desperately needed.

  ———

  Rolf was getting married.

  Corry and I had dutifully recited to him the disadvantages and separations that went with this type of work. But, as Rolf pointed out, our own happiness was the world’s best argument against bachelorhood. Elena could go with him on his trips. She would be just as effective a team member as the men.

  So we stood up for them at their wedding and gave them a honeymoon assignment dear to our hearts. The first print order of Bibles was ready. Rolf and Elena were to go pick them up in England.

  We had a second vehicle now, a van especially built for long distance travel. It had a windowless rear section and could carry more than the Opel. Rolf and his bride ferried the van acr
oss to England and picked up our first order of pocket Bibles. What a red-letter day it was when Rolf and Elena burst into the house carrying one of the new Bibles, our own edition! I held it in my left hand, and in my right hand a standard copy. What a difference! I knew that we must be on our way as quickly as possible.

  May 16, 1964, was our departure date. I knew I would need all the partnership support I could get for this venture, and Hans was in Hungary; so newlywed Rolf was tapped.

  ———

  It was Sunday morning in Moscow, time to go downtown to church. Rolf and I left the van with considerable uneasiness. How much was our undeclared merchandise worth? A Bible could buy a cow now in the country districts. Six hundred and fifty cows—this cargo represented a sizable smuggling operation in cash value alone. We were planning to give the Bibles away, but that would make no difference if we were caught with them in our possession. A man was on trial right now for an “economic crime” against the people’s State. A man convicted of the same charge had recently been executed by firing squad. If we were caught . . . well this was not the time to think of that.

  Ivanhoff was on the platform at church that morning. As he glanced at the visitors’ balcony, I was sure he recognized me, although he gave no sign. A few minutes later he got up and left the sanctuary. He did not return, nor was he in the vestibule after the service. But suddenly a hearty voice behind me said, “Welcome to Russia!”

  It was Markov. I introduced him to Rolf. “We brought gifts,” I said.

  “Wonderful!” he cried. “That’s grand news!” His voice was louder than necessary, and I knew it was a defense. No one would bother to listen if we were speaking openly.

  “I wonder where we might go to visit a spell.”