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By Jim Coggins
MAO Zedong had recently died, the massive oppression of
the Cultural Revolution had eased and the underground church in China was
starting to emerge from the shadows.
It was 1979, and Open Doors (OD) had just smuggled
30,000 New Testaments to Chinese believers. The church leaders expressed
gratitude, but said the books were not enough. They asked for a million
Bibles.
The story of how OD fulfilled that faith-stretching
request, delivering 232 tons of Bibles to a beach in southern China on a
single night, is nothing short of, well, miraculous.
OD finally decided to make the full story public,
almost 30 years later, in a 2008 book by Paul Estabrooks. Night of a Million Miracles: The inside story of Project
Pearl.
Estabrooks, a Canadian, is now OD’s
minister-at-large; he served as coordinator for Project Pearl.
Estabrooks had served as coordinator of Project
Rainbow, which had delivered the New Testaments. That had taken 20 couriers
10 days, each carrying two 96-pound suitcases through Chinese customs.
Project Pearl required $12 million and the building of
a barge capable of carrying 232 tons of books. All were landed on the
beach on June 18, 1981 and carried away by some 2,000 Chinese
believers.
Estabrooks told BCCN the Bibles arrived at a crucial time for the Chinese
church, but “that is much clearer now, looking back. It was
God’s timing.”
The Chinese church, which had survived the
Communist takeover in 1949, had been driven underground during the Cultural
Revolution – which began in 1966 and lasted almost a decade. It was a
time of great persecution, when churches were closed, leaders arrested and
Bibles destroyed.
After the Cultural Revolution, the government loosened
its control over the economy, and this inadvertently made it easier for the
underground church to function and to grow.
The delivery of the Bibles at this crucial time helped
trigger the mushrooming of the underground church, often called the Chinese
house church movement, which has grown from a persecuted remnant to tens of
millions of believers in three decades.
The smuggling of Bibles into Communist countries was
controversial, even among Christians. “Many other ministries were
upset,” Estabrooks said, because they feared the smuggling might
anger the Chinese government, which would then persecute all Christian
ministries more severely.
While there was some retaliation, a widespread increase
in persecution did not happen, Estabrooks said. Instead, the project
achieved another of its goals: it helped convince the Chinese government to
start making more Bibles available through legal channels. This was done on
a small scale at first, until Amity Press was created in 1987 through a
joint agreement between the Chinese government and Bible societies in the
West. It has now printed millions of Bibles.
Estabrooks pointed out that these Bibles are available
only through the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the official
state-controlled church, and that many of the Bibles are still in
warehouses. Still, he said Bibles are now available for most people in the
cities who want them. However, Bibles are still hard to get in rural areas,
especially for the unofficial church.
OD has never again delivered a million Bibles in a
single night. It took some years for the last of those Bibles to be
distributed. However, OD has continued to deliver millions to house
churches each year, in smaller shipments.
Some Christians have continued to question the ethics
and effectiveness of smuggling Bibles. However, Estabrooks noted that,
since persecution has eased in the former Soviet Union and in China,
churches have been able to report the impact the Bibles have had.
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Estabrooks quoted Brother Andrew – known as
‘God’s Smuggler’ – who responded to Christian
critics thus:
“I like what I do better than what you
don’t do.”
The delivery of the million Bibles, while remarkable,
did not go perfectly.
Local fisherman noticed what was going on and notified
the authorities. Some of the believers receiving the Bibles were arrested.
Estabrooks said it was a price they were willing to
pay. The five leaders who originally asked for the Bibles had already
collectively spent 40 years in prison for their faith, and said they were
willing to die if it meant “a million of our brothers and sisters
will have God’s word.” Those arrested have long since been
released.
Some of the last Bibles to arrive on the beach, perhaps
20 percent, were confiscated by the authorities and thrown into the water.
However, many of these were later retrieved by local fisherman, dried out
and secretly sold to believers. Estabrooks said OD was eventually able to
determine that 98 percent of the Bibles ended up in the hands of believers.
When reports began circulating that most of the Bibles
had been intercepted and destroyed by Chinese authorities, OD released
enough information that Time magazine was able to report the safe delivery of most of the
Bibles in October, 1981.
However, OD received a prophetic warning not to make a
‘golden calf’ of the remarkable project by trumpeting its
success. No pictures were taken on the beach, and the organization said
little about it until Estabrooks’ book.
Of the 20 men who delivered the Bibles to the beach,
three have died; most of the rest are still involved in Christian
ministries, many of them in dangerous places.
One of the notable things about the book is the
continual focus on prayer that marked every step of the project, by Open
Doors and its supporters, and by the church in China.
Estabrooks still speaks of the project with a sense of
awe about what was accomplished.
The ‘million miracles’ of his book’s
title does not refer to the Bibles that were delivered, but to all the
little ways God brought the project together. “We were
amateurs,” he said .
“God accomplished it. He should get the
glory.”
Contact: OpenDoorsCa.org.
February 2009
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