Christians Hold Never-Ending Prayer Gathering to Protect Bible Smugglers in North Africa
Volunteers from around the world are risking imprisonment and persecution by smuggling Bibles into a North African country where the scriptures and Christian study materials are banned.
Nonprofit groups that are wokring tirelessley to fulfill the Great Commission say they're being shielded by a never-ending, 13-year prayer session that calls on God to protect them.
Christian Today reports that the global Christian persecution watchdog ministry Open Doors has helped aid the unending prayer gathering in the North African country, which can't be identified for security reasons.
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The prayer gather began in 2003 with the intention of only lasting a week. But after a week, the organizers decided to keep the prayer gathering going. Thirteen years later, the prayer still lives on.
With Bibles hard to come by in the country since it is illegal to print Christian material, the scriptures the ministries in the country have access to is quite minimal.
Ministries and churches in the country, however, have benefited from the sacrifice of Western Christians who've risked arrest and persecution to bring Bibles into the nation.
One British woman, known by the pseudonym Holly, told Christian Today that she smuggled at least 30 Bibles into the country without being caught.
"There are church leaders who only have a few pages of scripture that they own," Holly explained. "The church is growing so rapidly and people are just coming to know Jesus so quickly, they need to get Bibles in as quickly as they can and as many as they can. And not just Bibles, but also training materials for pastors and church leaders."
Holly told CT that at one point she was close to being caught with the Bibles but was saved when airport security checked everyone's bags except hers.
"Maybe God just did what He did with [Open Doors founder] Brother Andrew [van der Bijl] and 'blinded their eyes' to it," Holly guessed. "It was amazing that we were the only ones who didn't get searched."
The price to pay for getting caught smuggling Bibles into the country is at least two years in prison.
Although partners at Open Doors are challenged with the task of taking the Bibles from Holly and other smugglers and delivering them to churches in need throughout the country, they don't worry about the possibility of being caught because they know that the continuous prayer in the church goes a long way to protecting them along their journeys.
"[The Open Doors partners] were telling us that when they take the materials backs to their churches and to whoever needs these books, they have to go through 20 checkpoints, and at every single checkpoint they could be searched," Holly explained. "The whole car can be searched; they might look inside the boot, under the bonnet, even cut open the spare tire if there's one in the back and look inside it to see if there's anything illegal in there."
"But it was amazing because [the Open Doors partners] said, 'We can keep the Bibles on the back seat of the car, they'll just never see them,'" Holly continued. "They said it was because, in 2003, they started a 24/7 prayer meeting. … And so since 2003 there's never been a single moment where there hasn't been someone praying in that church, every second is covered in prayer."
Holly said that it was after the 24/7 prayer session began in 2003 that the organization was able to bring in a greater number of Bibles and other Christian literature.
"That's when they started seeing lots of people coming to know Jesus, and they were able to bring in so many more Bibles and training materials," she said.
