The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Don Richardson
1935–2018Evangelical
Found inside a cannibal tribe's own custom of the peace child a doorway straight to the gospel.
Pictured: the era he stood in — Dietrich Bonhoeffer with his students, 1932 — Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Summary
- Lived 1935–2018.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
- Hangs on The Missionaries.
- Read first: Peace Child (1974).
- Tradition: Evangelical / Independent missionary / Indigenous-Christianity / "Redemptive analogy" missiology / Sawi tribe / Western New Guinea (Indonesian Papua).
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · 1930–today
- May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
- October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
- 1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
- 1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
- 1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
- July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
- Autumn 1989Candles in Leipzig, and the wall comes downMonday peace prayers had gathered for years at the Nikolaikirche under pastor Christian Führer. On October 9 about seventy thousand people, the figure the city's own contemporary reports give, walked out of that neighborhood carrying candles past armed police, and not a shot was fired. The Berlin Wall opened a month later, on November 9.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
- Peace Child1974
Richardson's foundational autobiography and missiological articulation through the Sawi case study. Standard text in evangelical-missions formation.
- Lords of the Earth1977
Documents the parallel trials of his colleagues among the Yali, a mountain tribe in the same Indonesian province.
- Eternity in Their Hearts: Startling Evidence of Belief in the One True God in Hundreds of Cultures Throughout the World1981
Richardson's systematic articulation of the redemptive-analogy framework with documented case studies across many cultures.
Search Don Richardson at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Hangs on The Missionaries: The ones who looked at a map and could not stay home.
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.