Don Richardson

Don Richardson (June 23, 1935 – December 23, 2018) was a Canadian Christian missionary, author, and pioneering missiologist. With his wife Carol and infant son, he went in 1962 to the Sawi tribe of what was then Dutch (later Indonesian) New Guinea — a Stone-Age cannibal-headhunter people who culturally valued treachery as an ideal. The fundamental missiological challenge: in Sawi cultural framework, Judas (not Jesus) was the gospel's hero. Richardson's breakthrough came through discovering the Sawi cultural-religious practice of the "peace child" — where a chief would offer his own infant son to a rival tribe, and as long as that child lived, peace endured between the tribes. Through this culturally-resonant pattern, Richardson articulated Christ as the ultimate Peace Child whose continued life enables eternal peace. The Sawi New Testament was eventually published; most of the tribe became Christian. Richardson developed the "redemptive analogy" missiological framework — the principle that hidden in tribal cultures are practices or understandings that prefigure Gospel realities and can be used to communicate Christ in culturally-resonant terms.