Open Doors

What Open Doors is

Open Doors is an international Christian ministry that exists to support believers who face persecution, discrimination, or active violence because of their faith. It was founded in 1955 by Andrew van der Bijl — known worldwide as "Brother Andrew" — after he began smuggling Bibles into Soviet-bloc countries where Christian literature was banned. The U.S. arm, opendoorsus.org, is one of roughly two dozen national bases that together make up Open Doors International, headquartered in the Netherlands.

The ministry’s work breaks into four broad streams: delivering Bibles and discipleship materials into countries where they are restricted; providing emergency relief, safehouses, trauma counseling, and legal aid to persecuted Christians; mobilizing prayer and advocacy in free countries through the annual World Watch List and partner campaigns; and training local church leaders to survive and grow under hostile conditions. The website is the front door to all of this — a research library, a giving platform, and a mobilization tool stitched together.

Why pastors, journalists, and policy people keep citing Open Doors

The single biggest practical difference between Open Doors and almost every other persecution-focused ministry is the World Watch List. No one else has been ranking and scoring Christian persecution annually, country-by-country, for three decades using a published methodology — and no one else has the field network to feed that methodology with first-hand data. When the State Department, the U.K. Foreign Office, or a major news organization wants a number to anchor a story about Christian persecution, the number usually comes from Open Doors.

The other half of the differentiator is operational age. Open Doors has been doing this since 1955. Brother Andrew personally drove Bibles past communist border guards before most current evangelical leaders were born. That kind of institutional memory matters — the ministry has working relationships with underground churches that stretch back decades, and it has buried staff in places that newer organizations have only recently learned to spell. The result is a website that feels less like a campaign and more like a slowly-accumulated archive of one of the longest-running mission efforts of the modern era.

The World Watch List: the differentiator everyone else cites

The World Watch List is an annual ranking of the 50 countries where it is most dangerous and difficult to follow Jesus. It was first published in the 1990s and has been refined every year since. Each country gets a score out of 100, built from five "spheres of life" — private, family, community, national, and church — plus a sixth metric for violent incidents. The scores are compiled from field reports, surveys of underground believers, expert consultations, and incident logs, and the entire methodology is audited externally by the International Institute of Religious Freedom. The current top of the list has been dominated for years by North Korea, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Eritrea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, and Afghanistan — with the exact ordering shifting as conditions change.

What makes the Watch List useful beyond the headline ranking is the country-by-country reporting underneath it. Each entry includes a summary of who persecutes Christians in that country and how, the main drivers (Islamic oppression, dictatorial paranoia, ethnic-nationalist religion, organized crime, secular hostility), a snapshot of incidents in the reporting year, and a specific prayer guide. For a pastor preparing a missions Sunday sermon, a student writing a paper, or a believer choosing a country to adopt in prayer, the country profiles do the heavy lifting that no individual reader could replicate. The list is republished every January and the prior year’s edition stays available, so trend lines across years are visible.

Bibles into closed countries — and practical support once they are read

Smuggling Bibles is the work Open Doors was founded to do, and it is still the work that defines a meaningful share of the budget. The mechanics have changed — the blue Volkswagen has been replaced by container ships, micro-SD cards, encrypted apps, and quiet hand-to-hand distribution through local networks — but the goal is the same: get Scripture into the hands of believers in places where owning a Bible can mean prison, exile, or death. The site’s giving pages let donors fund Bibles into specific named countries, and the impact reporting that follows is unusually concrete: number of Bibles delivered, languages, target regions, and (where safe to publish) testimonies from recipients.

The work does not stop at delivery. Open Doors funds safehouses for converts who have been disowned or hunted by their families, micro-loans and small-business grants for widows whose Christian husbands were killed, trauma counseling for survivors of sectarian violence, and legal defense funds for believers facing blasphemy or apostasy charges. In countries where churches have been burned, the ministry helps rebuild — and in countries where churches are illegal, it trains lay leaders to disciple house gatherings without printed materials. This is the unglamorous, post-Bible-delivery layer that most Western Christians do not see, and it is what separates Open Doors from groups that focus only on awareness.

Brother Andrew’s legacy and 70 years of institutional memory

Andrew van der Bijl — Brother Andrew — died in 2022 at age 94, but the operating culture he built remains the spine of the ministry. He was a Dutch Reformed missionary who, beginning in 1955, made dozens of solo trips behind the Iron Curtain in a VW Beetle, praying the famous "Lord, in my luggage I have Scripture I want to take to Your children. When You were on earth, You made blind eyes see. Now, I pray, make seeing eyes blind." His 1967 memoir "God’s Smuggler," co-written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, has sold more than ten million copies in dozens of languages and is still the standard text for explaining what closed-country ministry actually looks like.

The site honors that legacy without leaning on it as a brand. There is a dedicated archive of Brother Andrew’s writings, interviews, and prayers; an explanation of how the smuggling work evolved as the Soviet bloc gave way to new hostile regions (the Middle East, parts of Asia, sub-Saharan Africa); and a quiet through-line that connects the 1955 mission to the current World Watch List. For readers new to the persecuted-church space, reading the Brother Andrew material first gives the rest of the site its weight — it stops being a charity website and starts being the seven-decade continuation of one of the more remarkable missionary stories of the twentieth century.

Pricing

Where Open Doors falls behind

No first-party app. In a category where Voice of the Martyrs and a half-dozen prayer apps now ship native iOS and Android experiences, Open Doors is still web-and-email. There is a mobile-responsive site and an email program, but no Open Doors app for daily prayer cards, push notifications when a country’s score changes, or offline access to the Watch List. For a ministry whose audience increasingly lives on a phone, that gap is real.

Limited investigative reporting. The country profiles are excellent summaries, but they are summaries. The shuttering of the World Watch Monitor news service (an Open Doors-affiliated outlet that closed in 2020) left a real hole in field journalism on persecution, and the main Open Doors site has not fully replaced it. Researchers needing primary-source incident reporting often have to triangulate Open Doors with International Christian Concern, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, and academic outlets.

Methodology opacity. The Watch List methodology is published in outline and audited externally, but the underlying source data is intentionally not public — it cannot be, without endangering informants in closed countries. That is the right call ethically, but it does mean academic users sometimes have to take certain scores on trust, and skeptical readers occasionally push back on individual rankings (the relative position of, say, India versus Nigeria) without much way for Open Doors to publicly defend the math.

Donate-first design pressure. The site clearly works hard to convert visitors into givers or email subscribers, and the modals, banners, and inline asks can feel relentless if you came purely to read. This is a legitimate trade-off — the ministry runs on gifts — but it is worth flagging that the reading experience is not as clean as a pure research site like the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom reports.

Confusion across national sites. Open Doors operates as a federation of national bases (US, UK, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Germany, and so on). Most of the data is shared, but stories, giving amounts, and even some Watch List framing differ slightly between national sites. A reader who Googles "Open Doors Nigeria" can land on three different pages and get three slightly different presentations. It is not wrong, just lightly confusing.

Open Doors vs. Voice of the Martyrs vs. Christian Solidarity Worldwide

These three organizations occupy the same general space — supporting persecuted Christians worldwide — but they do it in noticeably different ways. Open Doors is the data-and-Bible-delivery shop. Voice of the Martyrs (founded 1967 by Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand) is the storytelling-and-direct-aid shop. Christian Solidarity Worldwide is the advocacy-and-research shop. Most serious researchers and donors end up engaging with all three.

Different strengths. Open Doors is better at annual country-by-country ranking, Bible smuggling at scale, and 70 years of operational continuity. Voice of the Martyrs is broader on individual prisoner stories, action packs, and direct relationship between U.S. supporters and named persecuted believers. Christian Solidarity Worldwide is the strongest of the three on UN-level advocacy, parliamentary briefings, and policy-grade legal analysis — particularly in the U.K., E.U., and U.N. systems.

In practice, if you want one go-to citation for "where is it hardest to be a Christian this year," use Open Doors. If you want to write a letter to a specific imprisoned believer or fund a specific family, lean toward Voice of the Martyrs. If you want to brief a member of Congress or a parliamentarian, pull the Christian Solidarity Worldwide reports. The fact that all three coexist and rarely duplicate each other is one of the healthier features of the modern persecuted-church landscape.

Alternatives to Open Doors