By Elizabeth Prata
I wrote about John Allen Chau in 2018 when his apparent death at the hands of an unreached island tribe in the Bay of Bengal was reported. My essay is below.
Meanwhile, this week Stacie, host of her channel “Adventures Gone Wrong” produced a video about Chau. She covered his upbringing and early life, his growing obsession with the Sentinel Island tribe he’d heard was unreached, and explained all his preparations prior to his attempts to reaching them. She included previous attempts in history to meet with and learn about the tribe, from the unwise contact in the 1800s, through to the NatGeo attempts in the 1970s.
The North Sentinel Island is part of a chain of islands in the Bay of Bengal where the unreached tribe living on this small speck has fiercely rejected outside contact- to the point death to those who try. In modern times, two shipwrecked sailors washed up on the shores and were summarily speared and hung as scarecrows to ward off subsequent attempts. It is this island that the young man Chau was drawn to.
Questions remain in my mind. Chau didn’t seem to belong to a church or have oversight of any pastor. He did train for brief period with All Nations International, which says they “train leaders to ignite church planting movements among the neglected peoples of the earth.” Stacie covers other preparations CHau made to reach these people.
Should missionaries operate under jurisdiction and oversight from a church or closely-tied church organization? Or are those men who say they are ‘called’ to certain peoples working under the Bible’s Great Commission in Matthew 28, under the Highest Power there is? Should there be support and oversight? Or was Chau’s willingness to give up his own life something individually but supernaturally instilled? Or was he just an adventurer, unwise but sincere?
Stacie did a good job of being fair in presenting a balanced and complete picture of this extraordinary incident that for a short time, captured the world. My essay is below the Youtube from Adventures Gone Wrong. I encourage you to watch.
The End Time essay:
Finishing my missionary series, we end with a modern day missionary, or as some call Chau, a rogue adventurer. Either way, he did what he did, and his death caused a brief global conversation about unreached peoples and the cause for Christ.
In fact, a few months ago a National Geographic documentary was issued about the life of John Allen Chau, again, depicting Chau as an unmindful adventure seeker, whereupon Voice of the Martyrs’ Tom Nettleton considers him a hero. Nettleton had rebutted this perspective, after having “conducted extensive research for an in-depth backstory. Nettleton found in Chau’s journals and other primary sources that Chau underwent an intentional and intense training process to make first contact in order to obey Jesus’ command to “go into all the world and make disciples.” More here
So, what happened?
John Allen Chau, a 27-year-old American, was killed in November 2018 on Sentinel Island, part of a series of islands owned by India in the middle of the Bay of Bengal. They are restricted islands, due to the natives’ demonstrated hostility and their continued isolation with all the lack of immunity toward modern diseases. There was a buffer zone that even local fisherman were not allowed to penetrate.
An isolated tribe dwells there with whom very few people have made successful contact over the last hundreds of years. Chau, desiring to contact the tribe for the purpose of telling them about Jesus, (as his notes and journal state), was appeared to have been speared on the beach by arrows. The same fate had awaited nearly all of the visitors to the island since written records first mentioned the place. [Photo above source]
It’s interesting to read and watch India news outlets on this story. Some there, believe Chau to have been a rogue adventurer out to get more likes on his social media. Others believe him to have been a passionate missionary desiring to share the name of Jesus. He hadn’t been trained by a missionary organization, or involved in any long-term way with a supporting church. He seemed pretty much a lone guy concerned that this isolated and unreached tribe didn’t know Jesus. Whether this was a black mark against him or a white mark for him, history will tell.
Chau’s arrival wasn’t the first visit to the island by Chau, who had gone to or near the Sentinelese at least 5 times previously. He had brought gifts such as safety pins, a football, and other trinkets in hopes of proving his friendliness. This had been hard to do, as the first recorded contact in 1880 by British Officer Maurice Vidal Portman ended badly and all subsequent contact since has demonstrated only hostility by the natives.
Portman was stationed at Port Blair on nearby South Andaman Island (the port from which Chau had departed on his ill-fated trip). Portman was fascinated with the tribe, who were painfully timid, he wrote, and ate roots and turtles. He absconded with two elderly tribe members and four children, bringing them back to his house on the nearby island for observation, where the elderly members promptly died, having been exposed to diseases against which they had no immunity. Portman returned the children to North Sentinel Island and called the foray a failure.
In more recent times, a NatGeo group attempted to land on the island to film the tribe in the 1970s, but they were repelled in a hail of arrows, one of them striking the director in the leg. Sadly, in 2006 two local fishermen were stranded there after their boat engine failed, and were also immediately killed. Their bodies were impaled and erected like scarecrows on the beach, perhaps as a warning to others who might want to venture near.
Chau had stated that he was motivated by a missionary zeal. This is commendable. However, I strongly caution all of us to be discerning about those who go forth to proclaim Jesus to the nations. Just because someone claims to be a missionary, doesn’t mean they have a firm grasp of who Jesus is. Some Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jesuits and other Catholics call themselves missionaries, yet they do not know Jesus. Chau also graduated from Oral Roberts University, which is not known for teaching the most solid of doctrine. We don’t know Chau’s doctrine. We don’t know which Jesus he was proclaiming. One hopes and prays that he was a true believer, laying down his life for his friends.
“The poor Heathen knew not that they had slain their best friends” ~John G. Paton
But moving on from that caution, Chau was motivated by a strong urge to proclaim Jesus to an unreached tribe. His writings demonstrate this.
His joy turned to sorrow as he was killed on the beach. Fishermen observed the natives dragging Chau’s body and burying it in the sand. Some still held out hope that Chau is alive, that the arrows did not slay him. This is not likely, however.
There are many facts and circumstances around the death of John Allen Chau that aren’t known yet. Some may never be known. However, I am satisfied that this death has captured the world’s attention. The lost do not know why Christians are willing to die in order to proclaim Jesus. Though there are Christian missionary deaths every day, sometimes in large groups at once, the fact that this death, a young man, solo, on the beach, with an unknown stone age tribe hostile to outsiders, captured the world’s attention for over a week and is still going strong. A week is a long time in the minute by minute news cycle.
Because of this, people now know of the tribe and are praying. Additionally, it’s sparked a discussion about dying for the Gospel. It has baptized the ground for Jesus and for perhaps an awakening to come.
People made many comparisons of Chau’s death to the 5 Ecuadorean martyrs in 1956 (Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian) but I see the comparison more toward the missionaries to the New Hebrides Islands in the 1800s. This is an excerpt from missionary to the New Hebrides, John Paton’s book, Thirty Years among the South Sea Cannibals-
Glance backwards over the story of the Gospel in the New Hebrides may help to bring my readers into touch with the events that are to follow. The ever-famous names of Williams and Harris are associated with the earliest efforts to introduce Christianity amongst this group of islands in the South Pacific Seas. John Williams and his young Missionary companion Harris, under the auspices of the London Missionary Society, landed on Erromanga on the 30th of November 1839. Alas, within a few minutes of their touching land, both were clubbed to death; and the savages proceeded to cook and feast upon their bodies. Thus were the New Hebrides baptized with the blood of Martyrs; and Christ thereby told the whole Christian world that He claimed these Islands as His own. His cross must yet be lifted up, where the blood of His saints has been poured forth in His name! The poor Heathen knew not that they had slain their best friends; but tears and prayers ascended for them from all Christian souls, wherever the story of the martyrdom on Erromanga was read or heard.
When these Missionaries “came to this Island, there were no Christians there; when they left it, there were no Heathens.”
Time will tell of the results of Chau’s death. I do have a fear that we still do not know his doctrine, thus, ‘which Jesus’ (Acts 1:11) Chau proclaimed, but the Lord will take the global conversations, the worldwide shock, and the questions about these ‘strange Christians’, and open many hearts, I am sure. The slumbering world, immune to knowledge of the wrath to come, was awakened by one man’s lone act, his death ‘for Jesus’ both angering and perplexing it.
Below are some resources regarding the John Allen Chau issue and missions in general.
Denny Burk:
Mission agency clears away some false assumptions about John Chau’s missionary work
Interview via Quick to Listen/Christianity Today with the director of All Nations missionary organization Mary Ho about John Allen Chau
What John Allen Chau’s Missions Agency Wants You to Know
All Nations missionary organization issues letter regarding John Allen Chau
Segment 1: The morality of global missions: How should those in the developed world look at hunter-gatherer tribes?
Segment 2: Motivation vs. methodology: What the modern missions movement has taught us about how to most effectively reach the unreached.
Garrett Kell: Was murdered missionary John Chau and arrogant fool?
End of the Spear: Movie about Operation Auca and the five missionary deaths in 1956
Gladys Aylward: The Little Woman autobiography of first woman missionary to inland China
Rethinking the viability of short term mission trips
Why short term missions is really long-term missions
Incomprehensible Evangelicals and the Death of John Allen Chau
the-end-time.org 