Peacemaking

Papua Gospel celebration

152 years ago the Gospel came to Papua through Dutch missionaries. They came from a small island to the Texas-sized island of New Guinea. If you look at the island on a map it looks like a large bird sitting on the ground facing west. The west half is Indonesia and the east half is the independent Papua New Guinea. The missionaries came to what is commonly called the Bird’s Head, to what is now the city of Manokwari. Mennonite Central Committee has had a presence there for most of the last fifty years, and I have spent a lot of time there.

Papuans fall into two religious categories, Christian and animist. The Christians, of course, retain many animist ways of understanding their world since many live in stone age conditions.

Each year Manokwari has a celebration of the coming of the Gospel. This requires two white men to row a boat ashore wearing 1855 outfits. For most of the last fifty years Mennonite Central Committee workers have been the only white men available, so they have participated regularly.

The Dutch missionaries row to the shore, debark, and walk to their designated spots. Speeches are made, then a tribal chief in native costume consisting mostly of Bird of Paradise feathers runs toward the Dutch missionaries with traditional weapons of war, a bow and arrows. The island was a cannibalistic culture where every stranger who entered a tribe’s domain was killed. This culture resulted in one sixth of the world’s ethnic diversity occurring on one island. Of the 6,000 languages on earth, 1,000 are on the island of New Guinea.

The tribal chief runs to the missionaries, kneels before them, and breaks his arrows. This demonstrates that the coming of the Gospel ended inter-tribal warfare on the island.

The Prince of Peace is our peace, and has brought peace all over the world. What if Christians made a simple pact not to kill each other? The world would be a very different place. At the name of Jesus, let every knee bow.