Brother Andrew once famously asked God to close a guard's eyes so he could slip Bibles illegally over a border. Then he spent decades working to open Christians's eyes to the reality of persecution in the modern world.

CT spoke with Open Doors USA president Ryan Brown about how the ministry that Brother Andrew started in the depths of the global conflict between Communism and capitalism has changed -- and how it has stayed the same.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I grew up with God's Smuggler, the best-selling book about Brother Andrew, and have that vivid image in my mind of him sneaking Bibles through a Cold War checkpoint in a Volkswagen Beetle. That was the 1950s. What does Bible smuggling look like today?

It's hard to believe, but there are places on the globe where the realities that Brother Andrew was facing 70 years ago are very similar to the realities that Christians face today, where owning a Bible is strictly prohibited by law or carries dire, dire consequences. Bible distribution still remains a cornerstone of a lot of our work.

These days, digital files can be very, very small and can also live alongside a lot of other digital files. Just the amount of digital information can be an ally, if you will, to keeping it hidden.

But, you know, in many cases, it's not that different than what Brother Andrew did: a hard copy of a Bible in a suitcase. But there can also be little SD cards that find their ways into suitcases, and devices for listening to Scripture, and things like that.

Are there other ways the ministry of Open Doors has evolved in the last 70 years?

Yeah, the face of persecution continues to evolve, so the response also needs to evolve. Going back to the Cold War, we think of dictatorships surveilling Christians with, you know, guys in trench coats and hats, sitting in cars smoking cigarettes. While that still happens in some places, now you also have digital surveillance. So in China, Christians are worried about tracking mechanisms installed on phones and laptops.

In Central America, the persecution isn't coming from paranoid dictators but the gangs. You have warlords, basically, who see that Jesus changes lives and that's bad for business. The churches recruit young people away from the gangs, and so the gangs attack the churches.

We come alongside persecuted churches and respond to their needs. In relief and development circles, people talk about human-centered design, and, you know, it's so interesting -- that's kind of what Brother Andrew was doing at the very beginning. When he went to Poland that first time, it was the people there who articulated the need for the Word of God. He was responding to what they told him.

Just within the last month or so, in northern Nigeria, there were about 200 individuals who were brutally killed. For those that were in those communities right now, they've experienced deep and profound levels of trauma with some of the things they've seen, the things that have happened to their family members and within their community.

They need help working through the trauma and grief -- that heavy, heavy work to allow people to allow the Holy Spirit to do some healing. Healing is desperately needed for them to step into the life that Christ has called them to, to be witnesses and carry out the Great Commission right there in some of the darkest places on the planet.

More Christians face persecution now than 70 years ago. Big picture, what are the major drivers that cause persecution to increase or decrease over time?

Well one thing is just the growth of the church, the number of Christians. Persecution would end tomorrow if the church would just lie down. If the church would cease, church persecution would stop.

Persecution comes in response to a church growing and moving, you know? The Enemy has no desire to oppose that which is languishing or dead.

There's some element of hope embedded in the growth of persecution, because it's a response to the growth in the church.

Take a place like Syria. It's not clear what the future holds for Christians there. We can work and pray that they will be faithful in the face of any persecution. But are there also things we can do to lessen the likelihood of persecution?

I always want to start with "What are the people who are most impacted asking for?" It blows me away, but by and large, the thing that folks are most asking for is not that we pull them out of persecution, not that we lessen the persecution, but that we let them know that we're standing with them, that we're praying for them, that they are not forgotten but are part of a global body standing in solidarity with them.

But you're right. There is another level -- a justice aspect -- and that can be trickier, but that's important too. In many places where Christians are persecuted, there are laws on their books protecting religious freedom. At times, we can be part of a collective voice that is helping to hold authorities accountable to the very things that are on their books, the laws they need to be upholding.

In Africa, the churches came together there and asked if we could raise awareness, to leverage voices at the UN and in the European Union and with other state actors, and that was the start of the Arise Africa initiative. We're in the process of trying to collect a million signatures globally, people saying, "Hey, what's going on here in Africa is not okay" and "We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Africa," to take that petition to the UN in 2026.

How has Open Doors changed administratively in the last 70 years?

I don't think that there's anybody who would say that Brother Andrew was a great administrator. He had a heart for these things. And God was working. He's not bound by our structures or lack thereof.

But since the 1970s and '80s, there was a lot of work on the organizational structure, and I think that God has utilized that to allow us to scale in ways that would be difficult when it's just, you know, individuals saying, "Hey, I'm going to do this," "I'm going to do that."

I applaud the foresight of those who have gone before us and their intentionality in building an organization that Christ's Spirit was working through. We want to safeguard all those things that keep us focused as followers of Jesus, being obedient to what he's called us to do to serve his church, and specifically the portions that are most persecuted because of their faith.

It's not a one-and-done type thing, you know. We know that the Enemy would love nothing more than to see us driven by our own desires and just slap the name of Jesus on top. Rather than have this ministry be the accumulation of our respective talents and abilities, we want to take all those things, lay them at the feet of Jesus, and see what he may choose to do.

You have been president of Open Doors for about two years. What's the biggest challenge facing the ministry going forward?

As I stepped into Open Doors, the reality of what our brothers and sisters had to offer us slapped me across the face. It got my attention in big, big ways. We need to be walking with the persecuted church not just because they need us, which they do, but because we need them.

If we allow ourselves to live in isolation and the isolations of our own comforts, that's to our own detriment. I pray that in the coming years here in Open Doors that we are able to just to shout this from the rooftops.