One of my church’s missionary told this story (via video) at our missions conference last weekend. I thought it was a wonderful story:
A local Indonesian tribal leader and his wife had become Christians. The wife, Aoki (I may be getting her name wrong), died suddenly, and, in the tradition of the tribe, her body was taken into the forest, where it was to be hoisted into a tree while the people made noises to scare away her spirit. In the midst of this ritual, the husband heard a voice telling him not to proceed because he now was a Christian. He didn’t understand why, but he halted the ritual and brought the body back to the village.
The missionary was summoned to the village to talk about what happens after a person dies. It was a public meeting, packed with people from the surrounding area. It became evident from the crowd’s murmurings that some of the local people who were opposing Christianity were using the woman’s death as evidence against the faith. They had misunderstood the nature of eternal life, and argued that the woman’s death proved Christians do not live forever.
The missionary turned to Rev. 7:9, which speaks of representatives from “every nation, tribe, people and language” worshiping Christ in heaven, and told the crowd that at that very moment, Aoki was in heaven as a representative of their tribe. The crowds grumblings turned to shouts of joy as they realized that Christ had made it possible for their people to live eternally in heaven.
What a great story, on so many levels. The tragedy of Aoki’s death, the traditional exorcism ceremony, the Holy Spirit’s prompting of the husband, the missionary’s presence and wisdom, all worked together so that a culturally and technologically isolated group of people could understand and receive the gospel.