Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.  John 15:18

Harold Sala:  Today on Guidelines I’m going to be talking with a special guest, David Curry, president of Open Doors USA.  David, thank you so much for taking time to be with us.  We’re looking forward to what you have to say.

David Curry:  Well, thank you so much for having me.  It’s an honor to be with you.

HS:  An older generation remembers Brother Andrew, primarily because of his book, God’s Smuggler, with more than 10 million copies in print.  But a younger generation says, “Brother who?” because they don’t know Andrew the same way.  Tell us, who is this remarkable hero and man?

DC:  Well, Open Doors started nearly 60 years ago when this gentleman that is known by the name Brother Andrew decided that he wanted to make sure that people behind the Iron Curtain had bibles.  And so he began just as a single individual who was passionate about people having the freedom to read the Bible.  He started to smuggle the Bible into the Soviet Union, into Poland and into this kind of countries.  Now 60 years later you jump forward and what has developed out of that one man’s passion is an organization by the name of Open Doors.  And we are still essentially doing the very same thing, which is making it our purpose and our mission to reach out to people who are in countries that are closed to the Gospel, where it’s difficult or illegal to express your faith in Jesus, to read the Bible, to possess a Bible at all.  And while it’s not the Iron Curtain anymore, there are still Communist-dominated countries like North Korea, like Laos.  You also have a great number of countries around the world which are dominated by regimes, Islamic extremist regimes, or regions of the world that have very totalitarian points of view.  And so Open Doors is trying to support the Church in these regions, in countries around the world.

HS:  Your logo has a fish intertwined with barbed wire.  What’s the message behind that?

DC:  It’s just really the visual image of what it means to be a Christian behind bars, behind the Constantine wire that was the picture all those years ago.  Today in North Korea there’s 70,000 Christians that are in labor camps.  Now most believers, followers of Jesus in the West, don’t even realize that happens.  But it is essentially the physical manifestation of that little logo we have—fish wrapped behind barbed wire.  That’s happening today.

HS: In 1982 your organization pulled a kind of coup fourré. It floated a million Bibles into China.  It was an amazing feat.  Time Magazine carried stories—and others did as well.  But today I think you’ve gone beyond simply getting Bibles into the hands of people.  Am I right?

DC:  If you look at the way this has played out over the last 60 years, we’ve had these notable events of which one you just referred to—Operation Pearl, where we floated a million Bibles into China in one night—it has carried on.  We still are focused around the Bible.  We’re still focused around spiritual transformation and giving the people freedom to read the Bible, to choose for themselves what they believe, of course, but to be exposed to the words of Jesus.  And that’s really the core of what we do.  The kinds of projects we do are different in different contexts now, of course today, with technology, with satellite TV, with all the things that are happening that make the access to the Gospel possible in different ways.  We have different kinds of projects.  But its essence is still the same.  It’s about Jesus.  It’s about exposing people to the Word of God.

HS:  David, it hardly seems possible, but time has flown by and this brings today’s edition of Guidelines to a close.  David will join us again tomorrow as we continue our discussion of the suffering Church.

Resource reading: John 15:18-27.