Open Doors at 70: Brother Andrew’s driving mission

As Open Doors turns 70 years old, it’s appropriate to go back to where it all started: a man in a VW Beetle, bringing the book that had changed his life to people who needed God’s Word. And who better to write this reflection than Al Janssen, Brother Andrew’s long-time friend and co-author? For nearly 20 years Al worked closely with Brother Andrew. Together they traveled to many countries, wrote seven books, met with political leaders and spoke to supporters across the world. Here is Al’s reflection on what the Bible—the book that started Open Doors—meant to our founder:

“Al, what did God say to you this morning in His Word?” 

Those were the words Brother Andrew asked me on my first day of work for Open Doors. As I reported to Brother Andrew’s office in the Netherlands to start my new journey, he didn’t ask me if I had a good trip or if I wanted some coffee. His first words were about God’s Word and its impact on my life.

Fortunately I had read the Bible that morning, a passage in Acts 21 about the uproar in Jerusalem that led to the Apostle Paul’s arrest. “Paul tried to defend himself to the crowd by telling his testimony of meeting Christ on the road to Damascus.” Brother Andrew nodded his head and encouraged me to continue. “Paul admits he persecuted Christians. In my journal I wrote that you might say he was a terrorist.”

  That brought a smile to Andrew. “So God can transform a terrorist and make him an evangelist!” In coming months I would learn more about how Brother Andrew believed in the power of the gospel to transform even the most hardened Islamic extremists.

My experience demonstrated how the Scriptures were Brother Andrew’s passion and why he risked his life to smuggle Bibles to Christians who were deprived of access to Scriptures by authoritarian governments. And he would ask me the same question over and over again. Over the years, as we traveled the world together and worked on books together, we began each day by discussing what we heard God saying to us through the Bible. Sometimes our conversation lasted five minutes, sometimes more than an hour. 

When the moment was right, one of us started praying. We never stopped to ask what to pray about … we just prayed. We prayed out of what we heard God saying to us in Scripture. We prayed for the work He had assigned to us that day. Most of all, we prayed for His beloved Bride, the Church of Jesus Christ, particularly the part of the Body suffering persecution.

It is that experience with my Dutch friend and mentor that has stayed with me. Through our many conversations, the notebooks in which he jotted thoughts and sermon outlines, and hundreds of recorded sermons, I can say that Brother Andrew had prophetic messages that are relevant today, even 70 years since he founded Open Doors. I use the word “prophetic” carefully. I do not mean that Brother Andrew foretold the future—though he did have some amazing insights into the direction our world was headed. But Brother Andrew was prophetic in the mold of Old Testament prophets.

Eugene Peterson, best known as the author of The Message, a paraphrase of the Bible that Brother Andrew loved, explained this well in his book Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best. “A prophet is obsessed with God, and a prophet is immersed in the now…” Peterson writes. “The work of the prophet is to call people to live well, to live rightly—to be human. But it is more than a call to say something, it is a call to live out the message. The prophet must be what he or she says.”

  Over the years, I observed Brother Andrew live a prophet’s life. When we met with leaders of Hezbollah or Hamas, he would remind me that we might be the only Bible they ever read—that our lives had to show the Word of God to them, even if they never opened a physical copy of the bible. Together we prayed that they would see Jesus in us.

There is sadness as I write these words. Brother Andrew passed away in 2022. For a few years before his death, we could no longer spend hours reading, debating, and writing about the Scriptures. And yet, I’m still working to capture his prophetic voice, through my journals, his 40 notebooks, 800 digitized sermons, and recordings and transcripts of our conversations. I’m hoping that will result in more books, to help a new generation of Christians become familiar with the gospel mission of Brother Andrew and Open Doors. As I’ve done so, the Spirit of his message has penetrated my soul and stuck with me. 

And I hope it does the same for you. As Open Doors reaches its 70th anniversary, I hope that, above all, you’ll be left with Brother Andrew’s spirit and love for God’s Word—and that you’ll also share that same love, helping bring God’s Word to those who need it for another 70 years. 

Al Janssen is Writer-in-Residence for Open Doors International. He is currently writing a biography of Brother Andrew that is due to be published in 2027.