![]() ![]() “I was once like John Allan Chau,” she said. “The history of such work is filled with stories of bravery, martyrdom, and positive change-but also filled with mistakes, colonialism, and cultural errors.” Kaitlin Curtice, a thirty-year-old Christian member of the Native American Potawatomi Nation, told me that she sees this moment as an opportunity to examine the legacy of evangelism here in America. ![]() “Conversionary Protestantism is offensive to many,” Ed Stetzer, the Billy Graham Distinguished Chair of Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College, wrote recently, in Christianity Today. Attempting to convert indigenous people to Christianity has long been associated with the dubious enterprise of empire. In secular circles and among evangelicals, Chau’s death has stirred controversy. “We are driven to be part of finishing the Great Commission,” she told Christianity Today, referring to verses from the Book of Matthew in which Jesus orders his apostles to “go and make disciples of all nations.” Mary Ho, the organization’s leader, has said that the group is saddened by Chau’s death, but that she stands by the group’s core purpose. At one point during a training, he was blindfolded and taken to a remote location where a group of people pretended to be hostile villagers armed with spears. “Pack your bags, come to CPx, and get your world rocked by Jesus!” its Web site reads. In 2017, he joined All Nations, an organization based in Kansas City, Missouri, that trains missionaries to travel to remote locations. He became an accomplished outdoorsman and documented his feats of derring-do-chasing cougars, descending dangerous cliffs, and eating mysterious berries-on a blog called the Rugged Trail. He attended a private Christian high school in Washington State, and then Oral Roberts, a conservative Christian university in Oklahoma. When Chau was in high school, he learned about North Sentinel Island through the Joshua Project, an evangelical organization that focusses on reaching the world’s last “unreached” people he spent most of the next decade preparing to carry the gospel there. It is illegal to visit, and the country’s Navy patrols the surrounding seas to prevent visitors from landing. The Indian government maintains their isolation in order to preserve their culture and protect them from lethal microbes that outsiders might introduce. North Sentinel is home to an indigenous population of between fifty and a hundred hunter-gatherers. ![]() In the last two years, the Trump Administration has won favor with evangelicals by negotiating the release of American pastors who were arrested while proselytizing in Turkey and North Korea. The region is also known as the Resistant Belt, because many countries there make proselytizing illegal and, in some cases, punishable by death. Chau was part of a community of people who do extreme, sometimes undercover missionary work among the five billion people who live within the “10/40 window”-a term coined by a Christian missionary strategist named Luis Bush to describe a rectangular region of Africa and Asia that lies between ten and forty degrees north of the equator and is home to the majority of the world’s Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. ![]() Just more than a dozen people are officially thought to live on the remote island, which about 50 kilometer (31 miles) west of Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, an Indian territory.John Chau, a twenty-six-year-old American missionary, was killed last month on North Sentinel Island, seven hundred miles off the coast of mainland India. The tribe and their home are protected by Indian law to maintain their way of life and protect them from modern illnesses because they lack immunity. The Sentinelese live in complete isolation on the remote island in the Andaman archipelago, and are thought to have done so for tens of thousands of years. “God Himself was hiding us from the Coast Guard and many patrols,” he wrote.Īll seven locals who facilitated the trip have been arrested. His notes indicate that he knew the trip was illegal, describing how the small fishing vessel transported him to the isolated island under cover of darkness, evading patrols. “Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” he wrote. In pages left with the fishermen who facilitated his trip to the island, his musings are a clear indication of his desire to convert the tribe. Shortly after, a young member of the tribe shot at him, according to his account. “I hollered, ‘My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you,’” he wrote in his diary, pages of which were shared by his mother with the Washington Post. Sentinelese tribe thought to have killed American 'world's most isolated.' ![]()
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