This is an article from the September 1980 issue: Return to Irian Jaya

Return to Irian Jaya

An interview with Don Richardson

Return to Irian Jaya

Fifteen years ago, the Sawi, a tribe of headhunters whose highest ideal was treachery, began opening up to the Gospel. As Don Richardson recorded in his book Peace Child many of them accepted and began to follow Christ.

Now, on a return visit, Richardson has found that the Sawi have taken a  further step: fifteen have become self supporting missionaries.

Richardson reported that the Sawi, who live on the western side of New Guinea, known as lrian Jaya, began accepting the Gospel when it was presented to them through their own folklore and sacred customs    in their case, through the ceremony of the "peace child".

Now, in turn, the Sawi have sent two teams, one of five men and one of five men and their wives, to the Sumo tribe, 100 miles away.

The team members are trained sawyers, so they work cutting ironwood logs into boards during the daytime and share the Gospel in the evenings and on the Lord's Day.

Some of the men of the tribe were trained as sawyers by John Mills, a Canadian missionary who was one of three men sent by Regions Beyond Missionary Union to take Richardson's place. The newly trained sawyers then trained others. Now, many of the tribe's men are sawyers.

Richardson said there is a great need for lumber. While there are plenty of trees, there are no saw mills, so the Sawi sawyers stay busy.Although the temptation is there, the men have not become caught up in materialism. Richardson said they tithe both their income and their talents. The money they have given, he said, has gone to buy aluminum roofs for the church buildings. Also, when the church is in need, the men drop their paying jobs and devote themselves to building new church buildings.

So far, Richardson said, the missionaries have built two additional churches for the Sawi and one for fellow Christians in the Atohwain and Kayagar tribes. He said the buildings, which take the enthusiastic Sawi only about a week to erect, can each hold 300 to 400 people, shoulder to shoulder.

During his visit, Richardson preached in one of these buildings.

"When I preached before 600 Sawi men and women," he said, "there was a constant rustling of leaves of Sawi New Testaments every time I announced a new text as they looked up every verse and followed word by word."

That the Sawi can read is also a result of Richardson's work.

The literacy rate, he said, has tripled since he last visited Irian Jaya 31 years ago.

When he translated the New Testament into the Sawi language, Richardson used Indonesian characters. The Sawi, who must first learn Indonesian in governmentsupported schools, can thus automatically read Sawi simply by sounding out each word.

Richardson added that not only are they able to read, but are positively enthusiastic about using their newfound skill to read the Bible.

Another encouraging sign in the church is the active role of the youth as well as of the older converts.

For instance, after the service in which Richardson preached, the Sawi pastor invited sharing from the congregation. Several groups of teens rose and sang songs they had prepared on their own.

The "second generation problem," Richardson observed, is much less severe for the Sawi than in many other cultures. But the children of the next generation are often weak Christians because they have not seen the horrors of the old way.

A significant drop in spiritual enthusiasm often occurs in a culture that has been profoundly changed by the Gospel. The first generation is deeply committed to God and thankful for the dramatic change in their lives and culture.

However, in the case of the Sawi, the problem has been minimized by a concentrated effort to present the Gospel to this second generation.

As a result of the work of Don and Carol Richardson and their sucessors, John and Esther Mills, Jim and Joan Yost, and Ken and Mary Studd, the Sawi church has grown from 30% of the 2,800 member tribe when Richardson visited in 1977 to 60% of the tribe today.

Because of their work, the Sawi, unlike some other tribes of lrian Jaya, stand a good chance of resisting the destructive forces of the encroaching outer world.

Richardson said that the tribe has learned to use its economic tools and should be able to maintain its land base and self respect throughout increasing interaction with the secular economy and the Muslim faith of the majority.

Often, he said, those tribes unprepared to face the outer world sink into apathy and degenerate into beggars, prostitutes, thieves, and murderers. That apathy and degeneration combined with the introduction of diseases for which they have no immunity sometimes completely destroys a tribe. More rarely, he said, the tribe is absorbed through intermarriage into the larger culture.

Richardson said his visit has caused him to "appreciate more than ever the value of establishing churches cross culturally and translating the scriptures for those churches so the continuity of the work is assured."

Order Peace Child and Lords of the Earth on the back page.

Comments

Confronting the soul and mind of the Sawi people with the gospel culminated in the traslation of the Bible in their own language. What a thrilling report of Cross-cultural evangelism. Thank God for such mee and women committed to this noble course. How I wish I could have that Book or indeed a DVD of the Peace Child

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