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By Jim Coggins
 "WE NEED a million Bibles."
It was 1979. Mao Zedong had recently died, the massive oppression of the Cultural Revolution had eased, and the underground Christian church in China was starting to emerge from the shadows. Open Doors International had just smuggled 30,000 New Testaments to the underground church. The church leaders expressed gratitude for the New Testaments but said they were not enough. They asked for a million Bibles.
The story of how Open Doors 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.
 It is also a story that has never been told -- until now. Open Doors has finally decided to make the full story public, almost 30 years later, in a book by Paul Estabrooks. Night of a Million Miracles: The inside story of Project Pearl was published earlier this year.
Estabrooks, a Canadian, is now minister-at-large and former Canadian director of ODI Canada. He served as coordinator for Project Pearl.
The size of the project was impressive. Estabrooks had served as coordinator of Project Rainbow, which had delivered the 30,000 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 Bibles. All were landed on a beach on the night of June 18, 1981 and carried away by a couple of thousand Chinese believers.
Open Doors was started in 1955 by a Dutch missionary named 'Brother Andrew' to smuggle Bibles into Communist countries in Eastern Europe. His work was popularized through the book God's Smuggler, which inspired many ordinary Christians to smuggle Bibles into Communist countries.
By the late 1970s, the work had expanded to include China.
 Estabrooks told CC.com 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 Christian 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, their leaders arrested and their Bibles destroyed. After the Cultural Revolution, the government loosened its control over the economy (people were allowed to travel and change jobs, for instance), and this inadvertently made it easier for the underground Chinese 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," fearing that the smuggling might anger the Chinese government, which would then persecute all Christian ministries more severely, says Estabrooks.
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While there was some retaliation, a widespread increase in persecution did not happen, says Estabrooks. 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.
These Bibles are available only through the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the official state-controlled church, and many of the Bibles are still in warehouses, notes Estabrooks. Still, he says 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.
Open Doors 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, the Chinese house churches have continued to ask for Bibles, and Open Doors has continued to deliver millions of Bibles each year, although in smaller shipments.
Some Christians have continued to question the ethics and effectiveness of smuggling Bibles. However, persecution has eased somewhat in the former Soviet Union and in China, the churches there have been able to report the impact the Bibles have had. Estabrooks quotes Brother Andrew's response to the Christian critics: "I like what I do better than what you don't do."
The delivery of the million Bibles, while remarkable, did not go perfectly. Some local fisherman noticed what was going on and notified the authorities. Some of the Chinese believers receiving the Bibles were arrested. It was a price they were willing to pay, says Estabrooks. The five church leaders who originally asked for the Bibles had already collectively spent 40 years in prison for their faith, and they 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 Chinese authorities and thrown back into the water. However, many of these were later retrieved by local fisherman, dried out and secretly sold to believers. Open Doors was eventually able to determine that 98 percent of the Bibles ended up in the hands of Chinese believers, says Estabrooks. Open Doors later replaced the other 20,000.
When reports began circulating that most of the Bibles had been intercepted and destroyed by Chinese authorities, Open Doors released enough information that Time magazine was able to report the safe delivery of most of the Bibles in its October 19, 1981 issue.
However, Open Doors 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 has not said much publicly about the event in the intervening years.
One of the other impacts of the project was on the people involved in it. Of the 20 men who delivered the Bibles to the beach, only two are still with Open Doors and three have died, but almost all the rest are still involved in Christian ministries, many of them in pioneering work in dangerous places.
One of the notable things about the book is the continual focus on prayer that marked every step of the project, both 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. God accomplished it. He should get the glory."
October 9/2007
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