When I was a two-year-old, my family lived in a highland village of Melanesia. We were only there for one year, living in another mission agency’s house while they awaited the arrival of a new family from Australia, and while we waited for an additional missionary house to be built in a small government station town about twenty minutes up the road.
My first memories are from this village missionary house. It perched on a gentle slope overlooking a broad valley of coffee gardens, banana trees, and endless wrinkles of little grassy or wooded ridges interwoven with rivers and streams as far as the eye could see. The sunsets were incredible.
From that house, I remember one of my older brothers showing me how to climb up onto the kitchen counter so we could get a sneak peek at my birthday cake, hidden up high in a cabinet. I remember Christmas morning, and trying to ride my new bike (with training wheels) down the wooden hallway. I remember swaying in the hammock outside, side by side with the kind local man who worked for the mission, maintaining the property. And I remember one day when that hammock broke on us and we suddenly plummeted to the ground.
Like most who served in that country, the missionaries who previously lived there had a dog on the property for security. This dog was a large rottweiler named Yankee. He is the first dog that I remember, and to me, he always seemed like a gentle, if smelly, giant. To this day, the pungent smell on my hand after petting a large dog long very much in need of a bath takes me back to those early years, and to memories of hanging around property with the local workman and Yankee the rottweiler.
While there, we also got a blue heeler puppy that we named Toro, who ended up not nearly as kid-friendly or mentally stable as Yankee was. Perhaps this was because the older and bigger Yankee would steal food from the puppy Toro’s bowl when we weren’t looking. Both of these dogs would eventually come to sad ends. Toro ended up dying later because he was a real punk of a dog who liked to hang by his teeth from the trunks of palm trees and didn’t know when to not pick a fight with stronger dogs. Yankee ended up dying, well, as a sort of sacrifice, which perhaps makes up for his crimes of stealing food from a puppy.
After the new missionary family arrived from Australia and we moved out, our families became fast friends. We lived pretty close to one another, and their kids were around the same ages as my brothers and I were, so we attended one another’s birthday parties and played Legos, pirates, and Star Wars together. These Aussie missionaries tried earnestly but in vain to teach us the proper way to pronounce ‘water.’ “It’s not waaderr, it’s woltuh.” At least we weren’t pronouncing it in the Philly way, like our dad’s side did, which was wooder. At that point, I couldn’t pronounce any of my R’s anyway, so no matter what accent I chose, it tended to just come out as waddle.
In those years, the dad of this family miraculously survived two events. First, he survived being struck by lightning. One day, he was hammering tent pegs out in the yard as rain clouds rolled in, when a lightning bolt struck the corrugated metal roof of the house, shot through the hammer in his raised hand, and plunged into the dirt of the yard. Uncle Phil, as we and the other MKs called him, survived this, shaken but okay. But Poor Yankee was left blind because of his proximity to the strike.
According to the beliefs of the local villagers, anyone whose house was struck by lightning was doomed, cursed by the spirits to die. So, they waited with certainty for Uncle Phil’s death. In their experience, no one was powerful enough to escape this doom once the lightning had struck. They must have seen this happen enough times because by that point, they believed, with deep tribal conviction, that this was simply the way the world worked.
Not long after this, the omen seemed to come true. Uncle Phil, his pickup, and the trailer he was towing for another missionary family slipped off the slick clay road and went rolling down the side of a mountain to certain doom. The road he went over the side of had a steep drop-off on one side, similar to the ones that I used to peer over in fear when my family would drive through the mountains (I still occasionally have dreams about these kinds of highland drop-offs and the car I’m in careening over them).
Anyone who looked down that long, steep slope and saw the pickup smashed at the bottom would have thought that he was a dead man. But amazingly, Uncle Phil crawled out of the crumpled vehicle still alive. He hadn’t had his seatbelt on, so when the truck went over the edge, he had been jostled in between the two front seats, where he had been protected from the metal and glass that had been smashed inward by the car’s long roll down the mountainside. He was quickly medevaced to Australia, and word of the accident was sent back to the village.
The villagers, of course, were certain that he would die and they would never see him again. But Uncle Phil did not die in Australia. He came back, alive and well. They had never seen anything like this. No one, in their long experience and oral memory, no one had survived the death sentence that came about after having their house struck by lightning. There must be something very different about this happy Australian Christian man. His Jesus must be more powerful than even the most powerful laws dispensed by the local spirits of the trees, rivers, and mountains.
This is how a church was born in that village. My parents had led one man to faith in the village during our year there. He, in turn, had led two more to faith. But when Uncle Phil got back, the village demanded multiple Bible classes every week. Even though Phil and his wife hadn’t yet mastered the tribal language, the requests were so strong that they went ahead with the teaching both in the trade language and, with the help of the first believer from the village, the tribal language as well.
As is so often the case in fear-power contexts like Melanesia, a demonstration of Jesus’ superior power is what the Spirit used to shock the locals awake so they would take the gospel message seriously. It’s not so very different from what often happens in Central Asia when Muslims have dreams. It’s not the only way the Spirit vindicates the gospel in these sorts of contexts, but it does seem to be one of his favorite approaches.
Sadly, this story is also how the very good boy, Yankee the rottweiler, met his end. After the lightning strike, blind Yankee was no longer a very useful guard dog, or really able to do very much at all. So, in a village area where locals struggle to get enough protein, and where their kids have large distended bellies from poor nutrition, Yankee was put down and given to the village for sustenance. It must have been a hard call for Uncle Phil and his family, and one I’m not sure I could have made. But I’m sure their hope was to be as good a steward as they could be of everything God had given them to reach the villagers, even their now-blind dog.
And thus a lightning strike led to the birth of a new church and the tragic end of old Yankee at the same time.
There are probably not many dogs in history who played a part in missionary breakthrough. John Paton’s little terrier, Clutha, comes to mind. But perhaps there is some kind of hall of honor in the New Jerusalem for good doggos that played faithful roles in the spread of the gospel. If so, I hope Yankee gets a mention there.
If you have been helped or encouraged by the content on this blog, would you consider supporting this writing and our family while we serve in Central Asia? You can give here through the blog or contact me to find out how to give through our organization.
Two international churches in our region are in need of pastors, one needs a lead pastor and one an associate pastor. Our kids’ TCK school is also in need of a math and a science teacher for middle school and high school. If you have a good lead, shoot me a note here.
Blogs are not set up well for finding older posts, so I’ve added an alphabetized index of all the story and essay posts I’ve written so far. You can peruse that here.
For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.
Photo from Unsplash.com
Entrusted to the Dirt 
One thought on “Why the Villagers Demanded Bible Teaching… and Ate Our Dog”