God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

  “We have mice,” he said, “but now we do not mind because there is enough for us and them too. It wasn’t like that Before.”

  Before. My great disadvantage, of course, was that I had no mental picture of Before. I was a rank newcomer to this complex land, with no real points of comparison. At another commune, for example, I was shown through a hospital that, had it been in Holland, would have been the last place in the country we would have shown to visitors. The operating room had neither overhead lighting nor sterilizing pan, the pharmacy was a row of empty shelves, and in some of the wards the beds not only lacked sheets but mattresses as well. And yet on a tour clearly intended to impress me, I was being shown this place, as though in their own minds it represented an advance.

  Did this give me a glimpse of Before?

  ———

  My chief objective in Shanghai was to find again the YMCA secretary with whom I had ridden the bus in Moscow. On inquiring at the hotel, I learned to my delight that the “Y” was still open. When I got to the building, though, my delight faded: Inside I saw mostly old ladies playing board games. This center was neither for the Young, nor for Men, nor did it seem very Christian. About all that was left of this YMCA was an Association.

  Through my interpreter I asked for my friend. To my surprise, no one had heard of him. “Would you mind checking?” I said. The receptionist disappeared for a while and came back with the news that no one was familiar with the name. “How can that be!” I insisted. “This man was your secretary here. Surely someone will recognize his name. Would you mind asking just once more?”

  This time the receptionist stayed away for a long while. When she came back she was smiling. “I’m sorry,” she said, and then she used a phrase I was to hear often in China when I was looking for a particular person. “Your friend is not here. He is out of town.”

  And that was all I could discover. I was left to imagine why this Christian leader had simply vanished. “Permanently” out of town was my guess. How many Christians in China today were permanently out of town?

  ———

  Back in Moscow the secretary had told me that there was a Bible shop still open in Shanghai. Sure enough I found it: a small store on an out-of-the-way street, but open for business and well stocked with all sizes of Bibles. Anyone in Shanghai could buy the books—books that had to be smuggled into so much of Eastern Europe!

  I was welcomed in English by the manager, who showed me around the store with pride. On the wall hung a print of Christ surrounded by little children—blond and blue-eyed, every one of them.

  I picked up a Bible from a table. To my surprise, I read in English that the book had been printed in Shanghai.

  “Printed here?” I said. “Not in Hong Kong?”

  The manager drew himself up proudly. “In China,” he said, “we make everything ourselves.”

  Only when I asked him how much business he did, did his face fall a little. I had been in the store an hour, and not a single other person had been in.

  “Not many customer,” he said sadly.

  How many Bibles did he sell in a month?

  “Not many.”

  Not many Bibles. Not many customers. The government allowed this funny little shop to sell its antiques because it represented no danger. No one cared.

  I thought back over my experiences trying to hand out Bibles in China. I had offered the first one to my interpreter in Canton. She handed it back; she had no time for reading. Thinking perhaps it was dangerous to be seen accepting a Bible, I had tried next leaving several behind me “accidentally” in hotel rooms as I checked out. I never succeeded. Always before I got off the floor, the chambermaid would run after me, Bible in hand, “Please, belong you?”

  In desperation I had tried giving Bibles away on the street. My guides made no objection. They seemed in fact to feel sorry for me when person after person stopped to see what I was offering, then handed the book back to me.

  And now this store. “Not many customer.” Strangely enough I left that wide open, well-stocked Bible shop more discouraged than at any time since I had been in China. Persecution is an enemy the Church has met and mastered many times. Indifference could prove to be a far more dangerous foe.

  ———

  I still had one hope. Everywhere people assured me that theological seminaries were still open. At first this seemed unbelievably good news. But after visiting one I was not so sure.

  The school I visited was just outside Nanking. I spent some time with the president and one of the professors in an ideal situation: Both spoke English. Here, I thought, was a chance to visit Christians free from the critical eye of an interpreter.

  However, once we were alone we sat in embarrassed silence, broken only by the noisy sipping of tea. When we had reached the bottom of our cups and still no one had spoken, I decided to begin by explaining that I was a missionary. But at the word “missionary” both men looked as shocked as if I had said a dirty word within those sacred walls.

  “The missionaries we knew,” said the president, “were spies.”

  He turned to the professor and said something to him in Chinese. The professor left the room and scurried back a minute later carrying a huge book, opened to a well-marked page of correspondence between a missionary and some government officials regarding natural resources, food supplies, popular discontent.

  Over the next quarter-hour this little professor in his blue uniform hustled back and forth from the library, each time bringing a new volume always opened to an underlined passage. All the books were from well-known Western publishing houses. And it did appear, indeed, that some missionaries had regularly supplied their embassies with information. We in the West had never seen a conflict between loyalty to Christ and loyalty to homeland. Had we left a confused witness behind us for that reason?

  Whatever the truth, my visit to the Nanking seminary was to be a purely political affair. The president was a member of the local parliament and deeply involved in the international Communist movement. Anti-American posters were plastered on walls—with the inevitable Chinese chasing the inevitable American who was carrying the inevitable atomic bomb.

  About the Christianity taught in this seminary, I learned nothing. Whatever form it takes, one thing is sure: It is dressed in the military anti-Western garb that all education in China wears today.

  ———

  How much can you learn about a country in a single superficial visit hampered by a language barrier and by interpreters who, you know, want you to see only the best? Impressions, perhaps, are all you take away. Many of the impressions were positive. The cleanliness. The absence of beggars and rickshaw pullers. The honesty. Some of the impressions were sad. The enormous fully staffed dining rooms where I would be the only customer. The empty streets where my taxi would be the only motor vehicle in sight and the traffic police would hold up pedestrians blocks ahead in preparation for the rare approach of an automobile.

  And some were terrifying. I remember the morning when I was leaving Nanking on the early flight. I was dressing in my hotel room when I heard shouts from the street. I ran to the window. In the square below, hundreds of men, women, and children were executing a tight-rank military drill. At this hour, before factories and schools opened, the entire population turned out to march, to shout, to lunge, and to perform a whole series of high-precision maneuvers.

  My taxi drove me through the midst of the exercises. As we reached the corner a command was given to “Freeze!”—a maneuver in which each person froze in the position he had happened to be in, legs in mid-stride, arms outstretched. All those arms seemed stretched at me, the fingers pointing, the eyes accusing.

  In the airplane I tried to shake off the impression. But the eyes had followed me. Was I guilty, along with my fellows of the West, for the accusing looks? What kind of representatives of Christ had we been? If our treatment of the Chinese had made them anti-Western, that was tragic—but if it had made them anti-God, that was the everl
asting loss. I kept remembering the words of a commune leader when I asked if I might see his church.

  “In the communes, sir,” he had said proudly, “you will find no churches. You see, religion is for the helpless. Here in China we are not helpless any more.”

  ———

  It was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, and I sat on the bed in my hotel room in Peking, waiting. An hour earlier I had told the guide, “Today I would like to go to church.”

  “Church!” the guide said. He promised to try, but he assured me there were very few churches—especially Protestant churches—still open in Peking. Half an hour went by. If he did not come soon, the time for the morning service—nine o’clock—would have passed. But just before nine he returned, his usually solemn face aglow.

  “Sir!” he said, as if he had discovered something extremely quaint and rare for me. “I have found your church. Come with me.”

  The little church was unkempt and uninviting, and it did not surprise me that my guide refused to go inside. So I walked alone through the rusted iron gate and found myself in a large bare room as dull to the eye as the outside had been. In the whole room there were only two touches of color: One woman wore a red cardigan, and beside the pulpit stood a red Chinese flag.

  I sat down in the back just as a granny tottered over to a little, out-of-tune piano and started to play. The melody was a nineteenth-century English hymn, whose mood and message were in no way appropriate for China. I counted 56 of us in the congregation—and I believe I was the only one under the age of sixty. An ancient man with a thin beard and vague, watery eyes stood up and began to preach. Most of his congregation went to sleep.

  My heart went out to these poor old men and women, holding on to the slim thread of the faith that had been brought to them by missionaries so long ago. But what chance did the Gospel have when it was believed only by the old? What chance did it have when it was associated at every turn with yesterday’s empires? I was glad my guide had stayed outside. I had been trying to convince him that Christianity was a great adventure. But this? As I joined him outdoors after the service, I found myself thinking that if this were a fair example of Chinese Christianity, then the government would have an easy job of snuffing it out. All it needed was one little poof.

  ———

  So I left China deeply distressed. I found one ray of hope in the very disregard with which the government held the Scriptures. They apparently made no effort to prevent them from being brought into the country, sold, and even printed there. Clearly they underestimated the Bible, and this might be God’s opportunity. I knew from personal experience how powerful a tool the Bible could be in the hands of the Holy Spirit. Hadn’t I myself been converted simply by reading this book?

  But in addition, the Holy Spirit needed men in China. Dedicated, impassioned, visionary men. And even a superficial visit had told me that these men, in the second half of the twentieth century, could not be Westerners. To minister to the Chinese today, God needed Chinese hands and voices.

  And so, back in Holland, a new prayer was added to the ones that Corry and Hans and Rolf and Elena and I said daily for our work: that from somewhere Chinese Christians would come to join us, to do in their fatherland the work of encouragement and caring that history had closed to us.

  21

  Twelve Apostles of Hope

  Not only for China but also for everywhere it was clear that we needed more team members. It would do little good to appear in a country with protestations of love and concern and never be heard from again. It was our aim to revisit each Communist land at least once a year and ideally far more often. Ideally, too, we would go in pairs, having found that this was so much better than a single ministry. But where were we to find enough partners to make this schedule possible?

  It wasn’t that we couldn’t find volunteers—almost every time one of us spoke someone offered himself for our work. The problem was to know whether or not these were the people God was sending us. In an effort to weed out the novelty-seekers and the merely curious I often said, “As soon as your own ministry of encouragement is started behind the Curtain, get in touch with us and let’s see if we can work together.”

  And once this actually happened. One day I received a letter from a young Dutchman named Marcus. “I wonder if you remember the speech you gave to Swansea Bible College in Wales,” he wrote. “You said, ‘When you start working behind the Iron Curtain, we can talk about working together.’ Well here I am. So let’s have that talk.” The letter was postmarked Yugoslavia.

  “Look at this!” I said to Corry. She read the letter too. Could it be that this man was supposed to join us? If he got in touch with us again, we decided, we should take his suggestion seriously.

  And several months later we did hear from Marcus again. He was back in Yugoslavia on a second trip. When he wrote a third time from Yugoslavia, he said that he had fulfilled the conditions. Now he wanted to see us.

  One day Joppie ran into the study where I was struggling with the perpetual problem of correspondence.

  “Marcus is here, Papa.”

  I leaped up from my desk and ran downstairs. I liked Marcus the moment I saw him. Over coffee, he told us about his experiences in Yugoslavia. He had gone in with a supply of literature, which he had put on store counters or on park benches. Then he stood nearby while people came up and helped themselves. It was pretty tame evangelism, he admitted, but he was learning.

  “I think I’ll let you take a trip with Rolf,” I said. “He’ll introduce you to some pastors and church members. Get them to talking, Marcus. Then come back and tell me whether you still want to work with us.”

  For three weeks Rolf and Marcus traveled around Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. When they returned, I did not need to ask Marcus whether or not he wanted to be part of this ministry. I could see the answer in his face.

  “I had no idea,” was all he said.

  And so Marcus joined our little band.

  ———

  But with his arrival it seemed as though the work almost exploded, so fast was it expanding, and soon all of us were traveling more than ever.

  Two months after Marcus joined us, Hans and I left Europe to visit the only Communist country in the New World. We were working in Czechoslovakia when the visas for Cuba came through, and we flew directly from there. It was Hans’s first trip to America, and except for the brief speaking tour of the United States, mine too. What a contrast to cold gray Prague! In Havana the warm sun shone from white buildings and sparkled on the waves below the Malecon. The people were happy and well dressed. On the bus trip from the airport total strangers were singing together after half a dozen blocks.

  Hans went directly to Oriente Province in the east of the island while I stayed in and around the capital. My hotel was the Havana Libre, the former Hilton. I was not surprised when the usual order came to report to police headquarters. Nor was I surprised at the long wait in an outer office. Bureaucratic countries are the same in the sun and out of it.

  The police officer who finally saw me fairly bristled with suspicion. “How are you here?” he asked in very halting English.

  “I’ve come to preach the Gospel,” I said. He was holding my passport showing my visits to Russia, the United States, and other nations. Clearly he suspected a more complicated motive. He asked me a lot more questions, took many notes, and finally let me return to the hotel. There were four other days of interrogation, but meanwhile, as I had told him, I began to preach. The church where I held my meetings was a relatively large one, an attractive building with an organ, a pastor, and exactly two members in its official congregation. Once it had had a large membership, but that was before the antireligious campaign began: the mobs outside, the shouting and blaring of loudspeakers during services, the tearing up of the street pavement, the infiltrating police.

  Yet, 35 Cubans came to the church to hear me the first night. On the second night, the 35 returned; on the third and fourth nights 60 came, an
d then over a hundred. Undoubtedly some of these “believers” were policemen, but I was glad to have them hear me. I was careful to concentrate on the Gospel and stay away from politics. But within these limits, which are the same for any police state, I was struck with the freedoms—of assembly, of travel, of self-expression—that exist in Cuba as compared with the older Communist countries.

  During the following weeks I traveled in the area immediately surrounding Havana, speaking in various churches many times a day to ever increasing numbers of people—sometimes as many as six hundred together. I spoke in English, for which I never had trouble finding an interpreter. Hans and I kept in touch regularly by telephone; he reported that police control was tighter, people more fearful in Oriente, where the United States military base is, than in Havana.

  Both Hans and I learned to announce first thing that we were Dutch. This made a difference. The hate-U.S. campaign is a total offensive in Cuba, and emotions, even in the churches, are confused. The government has made much of the fact that most Protestant churches in Cuba were originally U.S. missions.

  However, all churches, Catholic as well as Protestant, have suffered alike under the new regime, and the group that has suffered most is the clergy. Priests and ministers are classed as nonproductive members of society. They are given no food or clothing coupons and are frequently forced into labor battalions made up of men deemed unsuitable for service in the army. Drug addicts, homosexuals, convicts, and clerics are all lumped together and sent into the fields to cut sugar cane.

  And yet most of these brave men stay on at their posts. The churches remain open; spiritual hunger is enormous. Wherever Hans or I spoke, word would circulate and people would gather, often poking their heads in at windows and doors to listen, at first, from outside. Sometimes it seemed wise not to use a church building at all. I remember sitting one afternoon on a cliff high over an ocean bay talking with a group of about fifty university students, while a jeep filled with armed soldiers drove back and forth on the road behind us.