Former Open Doors director recounts experiences

In 1955, a Dutchman named Andrew van der Bijl, was led by God to begin smuggling Bibles into countries where Christianity was banned or where Christians were persecuted. More widely known as Brother Andrew, his work took him to many countries in the Soviet-controlled countries and also into Poland. Much of his work was done out of a blue Volkswagon Beetle. 

The daring work of Brother Andrew led to the creation of the organization Open Doors. Open Doors’ mission is to, with the help of brave volunteers and employees, bring God’s Word and love and support into more than 60 countries across the world each year.

One of these workers was Michele Miller, 61-year-old from Grant, Neb., who worked for the company as Director of Ministries from 2004 to 2016.

Michele did not grow up a Christian, but she did attend a Lutheran school. When she was 15, Michele’s older sister insisted that Michele attend a church camp with her. Hesitant at first, Michele did attend, which gave the Holy Spirit a chance to witness to Michele’s heart. After four days at the camp, Michele gave her life to Jesus and from that point on He has been her compass. 

Around the age of 50, Michele was a busy wife, mother of three, and a travel agent for a prestigious high-class travel agency in California. One day she got a phone call from a friend from Open Doors. 

The company was seeking someone to help them send volunteers to the mission fields

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 around the world and Michele’s friend thought Michele fit the profile. 

“I had traveled the world by that point, going to more than 70 different countries, and they knew that I had experience in that so they asked me to help their travelers. So, I agreed,” she said. 

Michele went on to help the organization for free because she felt the ministry was beneficial.

Michele’s first mission trip with the organization was to India after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed nearly 250,000 and caused massive damage to several coastal countries in that region. 

While visiting a hospital in India, which was named after Saint Mother Teresa, Michele knew that this was the work God had been preparing for her all of her life. She left her job as a travel agent and went to work for Open Doors full-time. 

Over the next 11 years, Michele would travel with various volunteer teams from the United States that she had trained, taking them into ? countries to not only deliver Bibles but to also minister to persecuted Christians. 

“Going to the field and meeting with persecuted Christians the one thing you have to remember is you cannot change their lives, but we could listen and support them in their trauma,” she said. 

Michele was the main lead with training the volunteers on how to be fully present for those who were being persecuted, and reassuring those they met that they were not alone. She also taught the teams how to deal with their own trauma from the things and situations they would see on the trips.  

Again and again Michele and the teams she led met with Christians from many parts of the world, and after a while Michele noticed something about the most oppressed that they were serving—they had the greatest joy. 

“We were thinking, ‘oh, we are going to come help them to feel better,’ but you walk away just blown away by how they live and walk God’s Word because they are so oppressed and God’s Word lives inside of them like no other. It is all they have,” she said. 

Michele has learned over the years that God wants all Christians to just be present with His people, not just be busy doing, but busy being. She especially learned this first-hand when she was cleaning beaches in India after the 2004 Tsunami. 

While cleaning, Michele was very focused on the job at hand, which she thought was to clean up the beaches. It was during her time on the beach that she was confronted by three women who were sitting in their thatched hut drinking tea. Each day the women would ask Michele to come and sit with them and have tea, and each day Michele would decline saying that she must continue with her task of cleaning the beaches. It would be a decision that she would later come to regret. 

“It was the biggest mistake I ever made. I didn’t just go and sit with these women. Instead, I was so busy. I promised myself that I would never do that again,” Michele said, describing her focus on developing presence ministries within the organization, which was a concept that she would instill in every team she led. “Presence is everything. A lot of people don’t understand that. They have a mindset of doing instead of just being,” she said

God Is in Control

Over and over again throughout her journeys, Michele has witnessed the power of God, and how He would intervene into what looked like a dire situation so His will would be accomplished. 

One such incident happened on an Open Door’s trip to Uganda, Africa.

There were five women on the mission’s team at that time. As they sat in the back of the small van traveling from one village to another, their driver was stopped by a barricade in the middle of the road. At that moment armed men approached the vehicle. The women all froze, with one clutching her Bible. 

Their local driver and interpreter spoke to the man. The words sounded tense and heated. At one point the man pointed his gun at each of the women and demanded the driver to tell him who they were and what they were doing. The driver explained that the women were missionaries and they were going to a village. Upon hearing this, the man demanded the woman who was holding her Bible to hold it up, which she did. Suddenly, the man asked for the Bible, which was handed to him. He took it and opened it up, leafing through the well-worn, underlined pages of the Bible of the missionary. It was at this point the man turned to the other men standing in the road and told them to let them pass. “We were just praising God. It was just unbelievable,” she said.

Scared and driving quickly, the driver of the women’s van wrecked and Michele hurt her leg, and the van got a flat tire. They hurried to the next town, which they discovered had no hospital. They had to get Michele to the next town that had a hospital, but they had to fix the van first. The driver and the other women left Michele along a side-street by a wall while they went to get the vehicle fixed. 

As she sat waiting, the local villagers began approaching Michele. Unable to speak each other’s languages, Michele used an EvangeCube to start telling them the gospel. One man, who did know English, walked up to her and asked Michele what she had. She told him it told the story of Jesus and asked if he knew about Christ. He said no, so she proceeded to use the cube to tell him the gospel. Once she was finished he said, “again.” So, she showed him a second time. Once she was done he said, “again.” At this time nearly the entire village had crowded around her, she finally told the man who could speak English to take the cube and to tell the villagers about Christ, which he did. 

At that point the van was finished and they went along their way. Reflecting on that whole day and everything that happened, Michele exclaimed that it was just a “phenomenal” day. “Here we were able to leave a Bible with an armed gunman and were able to teach an entire village about Christ in just one afternoon,” she said. “God works, you know, He works in crazy ways you never would expect,” she said.

Between trips Michele would return to California to her husband Brian and three kids, who did not always understand why Michele was doing what she was doing and were scared for her safety. They also had a hard time listening to Michele’s experiences after she came home. The down time and isolation away from like-minded people would cause Michele to get down.  “You feel so in touch with God when you were doing these things, that coming home was sometimes a letdown,” she said. God did provide Michele with some supportive friends who would allow her to talk about her experiences without judging them or being upset by them, and eventually Michele has become better at telling her stories to others. 

Another Direction

Around 2013, Michele could sense God was beginning to lead her and Brian in a different direction. One direction was to downsize. So in 2013, they sold their home and property in California and moved to Nebraska to live near their son Scott who is a deputy for the Perkins County Sheriff’s Office in Grant. 

Michele continued to work remotely for Open Doors for a while, but resigned in 2016 to wait and see what God had planned for her next. 

“I knew God was leading me away from Open Doors, but I didn’t know into what and I am still not sure. I know what he wants me to do now, however, and that is to be still and to just be with Him,” she said, which she is doing. “It has really been the hardest thing I have every had to do because I am a Type A person. I always have to force myself to just be with Him, but I am never disappointed after I do.”

What People Should Know About the Persecuted Church

Michele still supports Open Doors and what they work for, and she encourages others to as well. She wants Christians in America to understand that there is persecution of Christians everywhere and that the greatest weapon to help those being persecuted is prayer. 

“Pray for them that they have strength,” she said, “and, also learn from them, because you never know if or when persecution of Christians will come to the United States.”

Michele said that Open Doors offers prayer materials on its website to help people organize their prayer specifically for the persecuted church. One way is to use the organization’s World Watch List.

Open Doors USA released its World Watch List of Christian persecution in January. The list is one of the main tools that Open Doors uses to track and measure the extent of persecution in the world. Open Doors gives specific instructions on their website of how and what to pray for each country. Learn more at https://www.opendoorsusa.org/