A man who lived in Amersfoort, Karl de Graaf, claimed that God told him to teach van der Bijl to drive. An older couple, the Whetstras, had given him their new car because they had prayed about it and believed that van der Bijl would need the car. In 1957, van der Bijl travelled to the Soviet Union's capital, Moscow, in a Volkswagen Beetle, which later became the symbol of Open Doors. Open Doors was involved in smuggling Bibles and Christian literature, offering training for Christian leaders, and providing financial and other support for persecuted Christians. Later that year, van der Bijl founded Open Doors, a non-denominational mission supporting persecuted Christians. He signed up on a government-controlled Communist tour to Czechoslovakia, the only legal way to be in the country, during which he left the tour to meet with local Christian groups.

In July 1955, van der Bijl visited Communist Poland to attend the 5th World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw, where a Christian bookstore owner told him about a lack of Bibles in the Soviet Union. In 1953, Van der Bijl studied at the WEC Missionary Training College in Glasgow, Scotland. When he returned to the Netherlands he started attending church and committed himself to Christianity. During his rehabilitation, he began reading a Bible given to him by his mother. After being involved in a massacre of Indonesian villagers while he was serving as a soldier, he endured a period of severe emotional stress, and later was wounded in the ankle during the fighting. In the 1940s he enlisted in the colonial army of the Dutch East Indies during the Indonesian National Revolution. Van der Bijl was born in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, on, the fourth of six children of a poor blacksmith and an invalid mother. He was known for smuggling Bibles and other Christian literature into communist countries during the Cold War and, because of his activities, he was nicknamed ' God's Smuggler'. Andrew 'Anne' van der Bijl ( Dutch: – 27 September 2022), known in English-speaking countries as Brother Andrew, was a Dutch Christian missionary and founder of the Christian organization Open Doors.

God's Smuggler by John Sherrill