Someone Told Us

In 1970, my father sold our house in Seattle. He packed my mother, four kids, and whatever fit in a station wagon with a small trailer behind it, and we drove across the country to Pennsylvania for missionary training. I was young enough that the adventure outweighed the uncertainty, but our choices to trust God and care for remote people were intentional. My parents were old enough to know exactly what they were leaving behind — and they left it anyway. Less than three years later, we were living in Borneo.

I grew up in the jungle. I learned what it means to live among people who have never heard the name of Jesus — not as a statistic, but as neighbors. Families. Children who played with us and men who paddled us upriver in dugout canoes. In 1978 my father and I took one of those canoes up into the heart of the island to ask permission to live among the Urun Da'an people. Their reputation preceded them: sorcery, headhunting, a habit of feeding unwelcome visitors poison or ground glass. We went anyway, because someone needed to go.

They let us stay. Other families came. Over many years the Da'an people heard about Jesus — in their own language, from the Bible translated into words they could read — and churches were planted among people who had never had any.

I have spent most of my life since then in one form or another of that same work. I flew small aircraft for seventeen years in Papua New Guinea, moving missionaries and supplies into remote places where teams were doing what our family had done in Borneo. I have seen what happens when the Gospel reaches people who have never heard it, and I have seen what happens when it doesn't.

I need to tell you about a man named Kemiya.

Kemiya lived in a remote area near the Hewa people of Papua New Guinea, in a dialect group the missionaries working among the Hewa could not yet fully understand. He had heard that in other villages, things were changing. People who had lived in constant fear — of spirits, of sorcery, of payback killings, of a world that made no sense — were being set free. He wanted to know why.

Every year, Kemiya walked the trail to where the missionaries were. He asked them to come teach the Bible in his dialect. Every year they had to tell him they could not yet — not enough people, not enough training, the language barrier still too wide.

One year, Kemiya didn't come. He had died on the trail. Jonathan Kopf, the missionary who had been learning the Hewa language, wrote: “To this day, whenever I hike past his grave that is near the trail, my heart weeps.”

Kemiya died not knowing what he had been asking about. The thing he had walked toward, year after year, never reached him in time.

I am not writing this to make you feel guilty. Guilt is a poor motivator and a worse foundation for a life. I am writing this because I have been carrying these stories for a long time, and I believe the people who read this book deserve to know what is actually at stake — not in the abstract, not as a theological proposition, but as real human beings whose lives are shaped entirely by whether or not someone tells them.

Someone told us about Jesus. No one told Kemiya. That is the whole difference, and it is an enormous one.

The God who made both of us — who knew Kemiya's name before the world began, who planned good works for us before He laid the foundations of the earth — that same God has committed the message of His grace to people like us. He could have written it in the sky. He chose instead to put it in the mouths and hands and feet of those who already believe it.

Faith comes by hearing the word of God, which is spoken by messengers who are sent. That sentence from Romans 10 is not a suggestion. It is a description of how God has decided this works. Hearing requires a speaker. A speaker requires sending. Sending requires a church that understands what it is sending people to do and why.

This booklet is for that church. And for the people that church might send.

Some of you are church leaders trying to understand how a congregation of ordinary people becomes the sending base for someone who will do for a Kemiya what our family did for the Da'an. Some of you are younger, sensing a pull toward something you can't quite name yet, wondering whether the life you're planning is the life you were made for. Both of you belong in this conversation.

The only step you can take by faith is the next one. So let's start there.