International (MNN) — June 8 is the International Day for the Unreached. Christians will rally in prayer and action on behalf of the more than 3 billion people alive today who have never heard of Jesus.
God has already been writing awesome stories to save unreached people groups. One transformation story began 115 years ago among a notorious head-hunting tribe in northeast India, the Hmar.
“We were an unengaged, unreached people group at the time,” says John Pudaite of Bibles For the World, the grandson of one Hmar young man alive in 1910.
(Image courtesy of Bibles for the World)
That was around the time Welsh missionary Watkin Roberts sent a translation of the Gospel of John to the chiefs of the Hmar people.
“There were a few [chiefs] that were semi-literate, and they knew that it was something important. So they scrawled on the back, ‘Please, sir, come and explain the meaning of this book.’”
Roberts flouted British orders not to go and snuck away to the Hmar villages. Five days together changed everything.
“The Holy Spirit just spoke through him, is all I can say. He had found an analogy in how our tribes would come to a peaceful reconciliation,” Pudaite says.
Roberts likened Jesus to the sacrificial animal whose blood brought peace at the boundary line between the Hmar and other groups — or in this case, between God and man.
“Our people, they got it!” Pudaite says. His grandfather Chawnga was one of the first to accept Christ. Chawnga then memorized the gospel of John. That was all the Hmar had access to at that time, but it was enough.
“It just spread from hut to hut and then from village to village. Our entire tribe was evangelized — and almost entirely by its own people — within one generation,” Pudaite says.
Years later, Chawnga and his wife dedicated their son Ro to leave their village and learn how to translate all of God’s Word into the Hmar language. (More on that story and the history of Bibles For the World here.)
The transformation of this one unreached people group has impacted millions around the world. Praise God for what He has done!
Learn more about how to join the International Day for the Unreached here. Listen to more of this conversation with John Pudaite, Ruth Kramer, and several others on the Moody Radio special, Until All Hear.
Header photo courtesy of Bibles For the World.
