![]() ![]() An outreach leader at ORU challenged John not to wait, but to start immediately serving and reaching out in the name of Jesus. John was so focused on preparing to serve on the island - an aerial view of North Sentinel hung on his dorm-room wall - that he needed a reminder to keep serving in the here and now. He was vaccinated against all manner of diseases, knowing their immune systems would be vulnerable to imported Western viruses, and he underwent laser eye surgery so he wouldn’t have to worry about keeping his contact lenses clean. In addition, he undertook medical training and became certified as a wilderness EMT (emergency medical technician) so he could provide the Sentinelese with basic health care. And since little is known about the Sentinelese language, he took a linguistics course through a branch of Wycliffe Bible Translators in hope it would help him communicate with the islanders. Knowing he wouldn’t have hot water on the island, John took cold showers to help his body adapt. “He was one of the most prepared men I’ve ever met.” “He had conditioned his body, his mind, his spirit,” said a former representative from the student missions office at Oral Roberts University, the school John attended in Tulsa, Oklahoma. ![]() I was all in.”Įvery decision John made for the next nine years was in preparation for going to North Sentinel Island, living among the Sentinelese and sharing the gospel with them. “Once I said yes to Jesus,” he said in a video for a church that supported his work, “I was committed. He sensed that God was calling him to go to North Sentinel Island to share God’s love with them. Soon after making that prayerful commitment, John found information online about the Sentinelese people, who live on an isolated island and have never heard the gospel. In his prayers, John asked God where He wanted him to go, echoing Isaiah’s affirmation - “Here I am! Send me.” “I know that God used that time to mark my life,” he said later. His journey began in 2008, the year he turned 17, when he became what he described as “an apprentice to Jesus.”Īfter taking his first missions trip the following year, he began to pray about spending his life serving as a missionary. John spent almost a decade preparing to take the gospel to the Sentinelese, one of the last uncontacted people groups. ![]() What they didn’t know was that John had prepared for years to reach the Sentinelese with the Good News of Jesus Christ. Many news reports and opinion pieces implied that John had been foolish to contact a people group known to be violent toward outsiders. He intended to remain invisible to the world whether he lived or died, caring only to be seen by the one who told His followers to “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.”īut instead, in November 2018, news outlets around the world were running the story of a 26-year-old American man who had been killed trying to make contact with a remote tribe on North Sentinel Island, a tiny speck in the Bay of Bengal between India and Southeast Asia. If all had gone according to John Allen Chau’s plan, we would never have known his name. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |