This is the story of the one and only exorcism that my parents performed while they were Baptist missionaries in Melanesia – at least the only one that they were aware of. We’ll have to wait til heaven to find out what other spirits may have been driven off unawares as my parents went about their normal missionary work of sharing the gospel and strengthening young churches in the Melanesian highlands. Given how dark and pervasive the worship of the spirits is in that part of the world, I for one would not be surprised to learn in eternity that much more of this kind of warfare was going on than was obvious and visible at the time.
One of the areas my parents worked in was about a half hour’s muddy drive up a mountain from where we lived – when the road was open and clear, that is. At one point, tribal fighting had broken out. In a bid to keep the police from burning down the warring parties’ grass homes, the locals had burned enough of the planks in the one bridge that crossed the river into their area to make it virtually impassable.
For a while, my dad went into the area on his own, to avoid putting our family at risk. He’d ford the river on his motorbike in order to still be able to preach Sunday mornings in the church plant. The river was just shallow enough to do this, although it was full of large river boulders – just as the road itself was shot through with large boulders, rocks, and ruts.
After the fighting settled down, I clearly remember us fording the river as a family in our 1980s Hilux truck and often getting stuck in the orange clay-mud on the far bank. We were regularly dug out by crews of kind villagers who placed large stones and grass clods under our spinning tires and pushed, laughing and knee-deep in mud, until our truck sprang free. This kind of thing could turn a thirty-minute trip into one that took two hours.
At times, my parents would bring their own wooden planks to lay across the bridge’s steel beams so that they could make two temporary tracks for our pickup to drive across. Eventually, the rainy season washed away all the soil on the bank attached to our end of the bridge, and we were back to fording the river.
This area of the highlands was deeply animistic. The people were still largely in bondage to the fear of the spirits of nature and of their deceased relatives, but a veneer of Christianity had been painted over all this by different groups. The Catholics and Seventh-day Adventists had claimed this particular area as their territory. At one point, an aggressive crowd of “Skin Christian” (so-called by the local believers because their Christianity was only skin-deep) Catholics and SDAs surrounded my dad, angry that the Baptists would dare to do ministry on their turf.
One of the regular attendees at the church plant was herself from one of these Catholic families. She went by the Western name of Janet and she was so faithful in her participation that my parents thought she had likely come to faith under their teammates who had begun the church plant.
One day, my parents had stopped to pick up Janet on the way to the church when her family told them she was ill and not able to get out of bed. Janet’s family had requested my parents to come see her on our way back from church. Unalarmed, they continued up the mountain to the church.
Once there, Janet’s friends at church told my parents how scared they were for her. Janet wasn’t just ill. Evil spirits had taken away her ability to speak. For some reason, one evening she had gone down to what was believed to be a dangerously spirit-infested part of the river, at the forbidden time of dusk. This was the same time of day and part of the river where her grandmother had also been attacked by spirits, losing her ability to speak and also to eat. Janet’s grandmother had quickly died afterward. The terrified church folks believed that Janet would suffer the same fate. The Catholic prayers and exorcism with ‘holy water’ had accomplished nothing. The other traditional tribal remedies had also been for naught. Could my parents – the Baptists – do anything to save Janet’s life?
My parents hadn’t been in the country long and had never faced a situation like this. They had thought Janet was a believer. How was this possible? Over the next several hours while the jungle cicadas screamed and my dad tried to preach over them, my mom prayed fervently. Afterward, we all drove part way down the mountain to the hut where Janet was living. My parents, not sure of what they would encounter inside, left us kids in the truck with some other local believers who were getting rides back to the area where we lived.
Going inside, my mom and dad saw Janet and began to try to speak with her. Janet could understand them but confirmed through nods and signs that she was completely unable to speak.
So, my dad got out his Bible. Not completely sure of what was going on, but knowing that evil spirits have no power over those who believe the gospel, my dad turned to one passage after another that proclaimed the good news about Jesus and about those who believe in him. He finished with 1st John 4:4, “Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.”
My dad asked Janet if she truly believed the gospel message that he had been reading to her from the Bible. She nodded yes. So, my dad told her that if that was the case, then according to 1st John 4, the Holy Spirit now in her was more powerful than any evil spirit that had caused her inability to speak. He told her that he was going to pray and that he wanted her to repeat after him. Janet nodded a willingness to try this.
The small group together in the hut bowed in prayer. My dad prayed the first sentence and waited.
Then, Janet repeated it after him.
As my dad continued to pray, Janet was able to repeat every line of the prayer after him. The power that had stopped her from being able to speak was now broken. She belonged to Jesus, so the river spirits no longer had any claim on her. My parents, the Baptist missionaries, had seemingly just cast out a demon.
Later, when Janet shared her testimony in front of the church, she shared that this was when she had truly repented and believed. Previously, she had not yet been a true Christian. If this was the case, then it makes sense that the spirits would have previously had the authority to cause her muteness – and that they would have lost that authority the moment she was indwelt by the Spirit of God.
I’ve always appreciated this story from my parents’ ministry because I believe it’s a good example of the simple power of the gospel over the demonic. My parents didn’t do anything flashy or fancy to try to release this woman from demonic oppression. They showed her Bible verses and prayed with her.
It reminds me of one time in college when I heard pastors John Piper and Tom Steller talking about one of the few times they’d been asked to intervene on behalf of someone who seemed to be demon-oppressed. As I recall, they said it involved a lot of praying, a lot of singing, and a lot of sitting together with her until she was released. These kind of activities seem so, well, normal. Yet in the spiritual realm, in the real world so often hidden from us, they must have remarkable power.
I believe that a straightforward reading of Scripture and church history shows us particular seasons of concentrated miracles and visible battles with the demonic. Corresponding to this, we see other long seasons where these things are much ‘quieter,’ much more subtle, going on in the background as it were.
Christians should trust the sovereignty of God regarding which kind of season and context they find themselves living in. You may find yourself in a setting where demonic oppression is much more prevalent than anything you ever saw back home. Or, it may be, like my parents, that you’re only ever asked once in your life to pray for someone who has been attacked by demons. God is in charge of the particular subtlety or in-your-face-ness of our spiritual battles. Our role is simply to trust his power and to fight faithfully where he has placed us.
Will we be ready if we are faced with a situation like Janet’s? Will we throw up our hands because the spiritual need in front of us doesn’t fit with our experience or theological framework? Hopefully, we won’t fall into the trap of thinking that we need some kind of special methodology or training in order to help someone who is oppressed by demons. We have the Holy Spirit, the one who is greater than the spirit that is in the world. We have the powerful word of God. We have direct access to the throne room of heaven. When we sing, the demons shudder.
I’ve not yet been asked to pray for someone who’s been attacked by a demon. But if I am, I plan to do what my parents did – pray, open up my Bible, and simply do what Christians do.
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Entrusted to the Dirt 