He’s been kicked out China twice and banned for smuggling Bibles. He’s faced rocket fire and bullets in Kabul, Afghanistan, and remembers calling a board member of his ministry from Armenia seeking prayer as he was about to take a suitcase of scriptures into Iran.
The passport Patrick Klein carries is his eighth one, and the mission-minded evangelist recently connected with ministries in El Salvador to get Bibles into prisons there — including the notorious facility housing Venezuelans and other immigrants sent there by the Trump administration.
Those are just a few of the stories that the 63-year-old who runs a worldwide Christian ministry out of Casper can tell.
They are the result of more than 40 years of following the “great commission” he first read about in the Gospel of Matthew following his conversion to the Christian faith.
“My parents divorced when I was about 8 years old. We moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Casper. My dad wanted to get a fresh start, so we moved here,” he said. “When I was 18, I actually understood the Gospel and I really committed my life to Jesus Christ.”
That commitment led to a now $2.5 million nonprofit Vision Without Borders organization he launched in 1994.
During a Cowboy State Daily visit, the ministry’s meeting room included a big global map that filled the wall and a white board with a list of Bible smuggling missions targeting Pakistan, China, Bhutan, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba.
The ministry also has an outreach to orphanages, including one where a friend and 95-year-old woman named “Miss Emerald” in Myanmar recently passed away. She cared for 147 orphans.
Vision Without Borders also is working to help stem trafficking of women in India by creating safe houses, has an ongoing outreach to Cuba, and launches cargo containers of clothing and other needed supplies to specific countries two or three times a year.
The ministry is constructing a new building in Casper and has thrift stores in Mills, Helena, Montana and soon Billings as outreaches to those communities.
Klein just returned from helping lead a pastors’ conference in Columbia. But smuggling Bibles and sharing the message of salvation through Jesus Christ into countries where Christianity is frowned upon remains the ministry’s primary focus.
Patrick Klein points to a spot in northern North Korea where he entered as a tourist from China to see what possibilities existed to minister. (Dale Killingbeck, Cowboy State Daily) 
A Chinese study Bible printed by Vision Without Borders. Thousands of them have been smuggled into China over the years. (Dale Killingbeck, Cowboy State Daily) 
Vision Beyond Borders has printed 5.5 million Bibles since 1994 and given them away free of charge – mostly in closed countries to Christianity. (Dale Killingbeck, Cowboy State Daily) 
A white board in the Vision Beyond Borders conference room shows reveals some of the ministry’s scope of Bible smuggling. (Dale Killingbeck, Cowboy State Daily)
Key Trip
It started with a trip to Southeast Asia during Klein’s time at Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, Texas, in the 1980s.
He went with a group that spent four weeks targeting five countries in Southeast Asia and China.
“One of the things we did was smuggle Bibles into China,” he said. During that time, he met Chinese pastor who spent 22 years in prison for his faith and who was 89 years old at the time. The man pastored a church of 1,500.
Klein said he asked the man how he could help. The pastor told him to pray and bring Bibles into the country.
“They said for every one that we carried in, 40 people came to Christ,” Klein said. “And when I first started carrying them in 30-some years ago they would get a Bible, tear out the pages and everybody would memorize the page, and then switch pages.”
During his estimated 1,000 trips to China smuggling Bibles over the years he said he has witnessed miracles going through customs but also has been stopped and confronted by customs officials several times.
He eventually was banned from entering the country. So, he changed his name and got a new passport. He continued making the trips until six or seven years ago he was banned the second time.
A female customs officer questioned the frequency of his trips into China, saw his backpack and rolling suitcase and sent him into an interrogation room.
There he said at one point eight armed guards were watching him “like I am some drug kingpin or mass murderer.”
“All I have are study Bibles for the pastors,” Klein said. “Which if they could buy one of those Bibles on the black market it could cost six months’ salary.”
Kicked Out
Klein said they then told him that they were canceling his visa and forbidding him from entering the country again.
The officials also confiscated his Bibles and Klein asked them why. They told him the paper was of “inferior quality.”
On that same trip, others who entered with him were able to successfully get past customs with their own bags of Bibles.
China now has facial recognition software and is essentially a “police state,” so Klein said trying to reenter the country that has a big place in his heart would be difficult.
Klein’s adventures also include a time 30-some years ago when he was on a trip into Afghanistan following Russian withdrawal from the country.
A war broke out between rival Islamic factions in Kabul. During a taxi ride a rocket nearly missed his taxi, and then a room where he and a friend were staying was sprayed with shrapnel from a rocket explosion.
A scripture from the book of Revelation that Klein said he believed God made real in his life was one that refers to 10 days of “tribulation.”
As the war intensified, he and his friend who had a visa to Pakistan went to the Pakistani embassy to try and get one for Klein. He was told to come back in five days. Meanwhile the war got worse.
When he went to the Pakistani embassy to get his visa, he saw puddles of blood from the dead and dying.
On the eighth day they stayed with a BBC reporter and the house was rocketed. But on the 10th day, he said the Mujahideen showed up with the Afghanistan minister of water and electricity and let them go with their entourage to Pakistan.
There were 1,500 rockets that fell in 10 days and more than 1,000 people died, he said.
“We found so many people open for the truth of the gospel,” he said. “That part of the world really has my heart.”
He said during his 40 years of work in communist and Islamic countries the ministry has distributed about 5.5 million Bibles.
The Bibles are printed in the various languages in Belarus. Klein said a European partner to the ministry pays half the cost of each print run.
A special picture Bible is part of Vision Without Borders efforts to reach children on Native American reservations. (Dale Killingbeck, Cowboy State Daily) 
he Vision Beyond Borders ministry is based in the Casper region and has an international outreach smuggling Bibles, providing clothes, rescuing trafficked children and women and more. (Dale Killingbeck, Cowboy State Daily) 
Flannel graph stories are a way to tell Bible stories to children in villages where videos and more modern techniques are not possible. Vision Without Borders regularly sends materials for the flannel graph teachers into countries where it ministers. (Dale Killingbeck, Cowboy State Daily) 
A sewing machine sits in a Vision Without Borders storeroom waiting to be sent somewhere overseas. (Dale Killingbeck, Cowboy State Daily)
Iran Focus
In the late 1990s, Klein set his sights on going into Iran. When he got there, he found a nation of people wide open to his message — but there were miracles needed get inside the border.
He remembers on his initial trip.
His group flew into Armenia before taking a plane into Iran. In Armenia, custom’s officials saw his three bags that represented 200 pounds worth of Bibles, and he was ordered to put the luggage on the X-ray machine.
The custom’s official asked him what was in the bag, and he explained they were Bibles.
Just then a young woman came over and asked if she could translate and asked him what was in the bags.
He told her he had Bibles. She asked him if he was a Christian. When Klein said yes, she told him she was as well.
“And she starts talking to the guards, within five minutes they are all laughing,” he said. “They gave me my three suitcases back.”
He called a board member of his ministry and asked for prayer as they boarded the plane to Iran and asked him to call others to pray as well.
On arrival in Iran, he was the only one of the group carrying Bibles.
A young Iranian customs agent told him to follow him. He stamped his passport and told him he had to obtain his fingerprints because he was American. The agent told him that he loved Americans.
It was 2:30 a.m. and Klein noticed no one was in the line for the X-ray machines. Then a customs agent showed up out of “nowhere” and told him to put his bags on the machine.
“I put my bags on the machine and my heart was beating so fast and hard I thought it was going to come out of my chest,” Klein said.
Just as the Bibles inside the bags were about to go through the device the official asked him where he was from.
“I said, ‘We’re from America,’” Klein said. “He said, ‘I love America.’ He said, ‘Take your bags off … you can go right through, you’re Americans.’”
During his travels across the country, he found everyone was welcoming to their group. He said the vast majority of people he encountered are not radicalized Muslims, just people who want freedom. They continue to send Bibles into the country.
Other Efforts
Other trips have involved smuggling Bibles into Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. He estimates 200,000 have gone into Laos.
Klein said the ministry’s efforts in Cuba have seen success.
The ministry has purchased two farms in the nation where Cubans are growing crops, sent in seeds, medicines and clothing. He said the people don’t have anything and there is nothing to purchase in its stores.
They recently sent a container of supplies to a nursing home there.
Because of efforts to bring medicines into the country, more than 20 doctors have become Christians.
“They want to work, they are not asking for handout, but a hand up,” he said.
Another outreach of the ministry offers picture Bibles to Native children on reservations and Klein said there are current efforts to build a radio studio at their Mills-area building for a planned podcast.
He already has a 15-minute radio show that is on more than 50 Christian radio stations across the country with plans to expand.
The ministry encourages others who want to join efforts. The ministry website lists potential trips to closed countries in Southeast Asia from June 23 through July 7, several dates to a closed country in Latin America where supplies are taken to underground pastors, and a trip to Europe later this year.
Interested participants fill out an application at the website. Costs for the trips vary depending on the destination but range from $2,000 to $4,000.
Klein, who has many more stories about close encounters with authorities in closed countries, said he has come to the place in life where he is willing to die for his beliefs. He has never married.
“That’s why I’ve been to North Korea twice, Iran twice, Afghanistan, a couple of times in northern Iraq,” he said. “I don’t need to ask my wife if I can go somewhere, can I do this? I just pray, ‘OK Lord, they need Bibles.’ I’ll go and I love what I do.”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
