Another incredible-but-true story from the stone-age hell of Irian Jaya’s jungles

How do you start reviewing such a story as this? Like Through Gates of Splendor, this unbelievable recounting of martyrdom and missions is a flawless modern classic based upon eyewitness, first-person testimony. Don Richardson delivers an un-put-downable story that rivals the best adventure fiction, and after 367 pages, I’m sorry it’s over!

Like the jungles of Ecuador where Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, and their co-workers were murdered in the ’50s, the mountains of Irian Jaya in the ’60s hosted tribes of people untainted by the modern world, people who misunderstood the advent of missionaries to their turf as hostel aliens bent on destruction. And like the Auca Indians, the Yali tribes of the Heluk and Seng valleys responded to the threat with violence, here murdering unarmed missionaries Stan Dale and Phil Masters with their bamboo arrows.

Richardson expertly develops this story by backtracking several years before the events, describing the lives and deaths of children and other tribe members through tribal wars and as demanded by the law of their pagan wene melalek. In a culture where men alone can hear the sacred words of the wene melalek—and where women and children must have their eyes and ears washed in pig’s blood (or worse!) when they mistakenly come in contact with them—entire villages live in perpetual fear of the ominous spirits around them. Into this climate comes Stan Dale and eventually a series of other Christian missionaries from around the world who bring to these valleys the absolute basics of modernity, years of patience, and—most important of all—the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

First by trekking through dangerous mountain passes, and later by landing planes onto a hand-hewn runway, Stan, his comrades, and all their families make their way into the Heluk Valley and set up house in a place they call Ninia. Missionary styles differ as the work progresses, but their goal is the same: to reach this village with Gospel of Christ, and then to use it as a base to reach the mountains and valleys beyond. As armchair compatriots, we readers get to join Stan, Phil, Costas, Don, and others as they befriend and reach the former cannibals with the Good News of God’s salvation.

This book is filled with foreign names and terminology, but Richardson’s methods of introducing and using them renders the strangeness unnoticeable. I found myself chomping off fifty or sixty pages without noticing, rapt as I was by the story. If only other missionary biographers could liven up their boring renditions of what could otherwise be fascinating tales!

Inspiration comes in many forms, I suppose, to those who devour a book like this. For me, it was a challenge to view my own apathetic approach to evangelism when contrasted to the dedication of these front-line soldiers! How humbling! Likewise, I felt pulls against my own impatience in ministry, wanting to witness maturity quickly in a matter of weeks or months, when the Dales and others spent multiple years before the Gospel they came to preach could be shared intelligibly. Then they waited even longer for it to take root in the few, and decades for it to reach the masses! Oh for such patience!

At the same time that I beg God for patience, “if the Lord tarries”, I find myself also praying, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus!” It’s through missionary tales like this where stern reminders come, that God’s patience in waiting and His promise to return are inextricably united—He knows! He will save in His own time. He will come in His own time. Lords of the Earth reminded me of this today.

I highly recommend this book. Perhaps you can call it “a longer version of Through Gates of Splendor.” However you want to look at it, believe me, it’s well worth your time.

©2018 E.T.

Read More Great Missionary Stories:

• Raymond Lull by Samuel Zwemer (1902)
• The Romance of Missionary Heroism by John C. Lambert (1907)
• By My Spirit by Jonathan Goforth (1929)
• Adoniram Judson by Faith Coxe Bailey (1955)
• Green Leaf in Drought-time by Isobel Kuhn (1957)
• By Searching by Isobel Kuhn (1959)
• Among the Savage Redskins of the Amazon by Harold Wildish (1961)
• Arrows of His Bow by Sanna Morrison Barlow (1966)
• Peace Child by Don Richardson (1974)
• Lords of the Earth by Don Richardson (1977)
• From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya by Ruth Tucker (1983)
• John and Betty Stam by Kathleen White (1989)
• Let My People Go by A.W. Tozer (1990)
• Torches of Joy by John Dekker (1992)
• An Ordinary Man—A Great God by Joy Mielke (2011)
• Mountain Rain by Eileen Crossman and M.E. Tewskesbury (2013)
• Beneath the Ancient Dust by Melissa Meyers (2018)
• Daring Dependence by M.R. Conrad (2022)