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Sit down and talk to Gin for an hour. That would lead to betterment of mankind
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Fucking Christian Sinkie spread his religion on airplane!
- Thread starter Cottonmouth
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This Sinkie is God's messenger.
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S’porean Belts Out Worship Songs During Flight, Called Out For Being Inappropriate
FEATURED LATEST NEWS VIRAL
His provision of in-flight entertainment was not very appreciated.
By Sudeshna Dhar - 18 Apr 2022, 6:17 pm
Singaporean Receives Flak For Singing Christian Worship Songs During Flight
Imagine sitting back and enjoying your flight… only to be subjected to an impromptu karaoke session. Not a typical airplane experience, is it?This was what greeted passengers on an easyJet flight when a man took it upon himself to spread joy through worship songs in the middle of the journey.
Despite his good intentions, reactions to his behaviour have been mixed.
Many criticised him for being inconsiderate to other travellers, while others believe that his behaviour was harmless.
Singaporean man sang worship songs during flight
In a 20-second clip posted to Twitter on 16 Apr, a man is seen singing worship songs in the middle of a flight.
Source: Twitter
The man, who has since been identified as Singaporean Jonathan Neo, strums his guitar as he heartily belts out a Christian worship song in the centre of the aisle.
Other passengers are also shown singing along with him.
Source: Twitter
However, not everyone was as enthusiastic — the camera pans to a few folks who look decidedly less thrilled about the free show.
Source: Twitter
The video itself contains the caption, “Worshipping Jesus 30,000 feet in the air!” However, the OP of the short clip does not seem to share the same cheerful sentiment.
Instead, he wrote, “Imagine you get on a plane and you have to listen to this.”
The tweet has since gone viral with over 30 million views and was cross-posted to other platforms like TikTok, with Neo’s actions sparking intense debates about playing worship songs during flights.
Criticised for singing worship songs
Neo may have simply intended to uplift his fellow passengers, but he earned a very different response than what he expected.Many criticised his actions, claiming that it was inconsiderate and disruptive.
Source: TikTok
One TikToker quipped that she would demand to get her money back if she were on that plane. Another pointed out that, religious or not, it wasn’t appropriate for Neo to “disrupt the flight” like that.
Source: TikTok
Others argued that flying is already nerve-wracking enough, so Neo did not need to make it worse for the other passengers.
Source: TikTok
This commenter even had a cheeky suggestion for an alternative song to counter the one Neo was singing.
Source: TikTok
Furthermore, one TikTok user went as far as to doxx Neo, posting his social media accounts in his video.
However, there are those who do not find Neo’s behaviour aggravating. A few users stated that he should be allowed to sing his songs if he so desires to.
Source: TikTok
Some also deemed the hostile reactions to Neo’s behaviour excessive.
Source: TikTok
One said that while it may have been inappropriate, calling what Neo did “scary” would be going too far.
Neo’s social media accounts have been deleted
It looks like the reactions eventually became too much for Neo to bear. According to AsiaOne, most of his social media accounts have been deleted.They also reported that Neo did obtain permission from the easyJet flight crew to perform during the journey.
MS News has tried to reach out to Neo, but all attempts have been unsuccessful thus far.
Source: Twitter
Prior to the incident, Neo was spotted conducting a similar performance with his band for Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
In an interview with Christian media site Thir.st, he said this is something he does often.
Should Neo have performed during the flight?
Both sides of the argument regarding Neo’s form of ‘in-flight entertainment’ have equal merit.On one hand, his performance did inconvenience other passengers. After all, not everyone is willing to listen to live songs – religious or not – in the middle of an exhausting journey by air.
On the other, Neo definitely had good intentions — he merely set out to share his faith with others, perhaps to encourage them during these difficult times.
What do you think about Neo’s behaviour? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
Have news you must share? Get in touch with us via email at [email protected].
Featured image adapted from Twitter.
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This Jonathan Neo fucker will be like the other Christian Taliban John Chau one day.
What is it that compels a young Singaporean to hitchhike and travel rough over all the world, and most lately — right into the border of war-torn Ukraine? The voice of God, as JONATHAN NEO would tell you.
I had a chat with the spunky 24-year-old who shared about his life’s journeys and the miraculous ways he’s seen God move, no matter where he is in the world.
Listening to God’s voice has resulted in me spending the past four years doing some wild things with Jesus like walking across Spain, hitchhiking around Europe with just a tent and faith, walking through Scotland and living and working in Palestine.
I don’t know normally where I’m going to sleep for the night. I have my tent with me most of the time.
I often don’t know where I’m going or how I’m going to get there. But every place I go to has been life-changing and incredibly rewarding.
But I felt the Lord saying no to that. The Lord told me quite clearly to take a season of rest and exploration. So that was what I decided to do.
I basically gave most of my stuff away, packed up my life in London (I had just graduated) and said: “Lord, I don’t know what I’m gonna do next, but I trust in You.”
Two days later, I found myself in France.
I flew into France, and went up to the mountains in the Pyrenees in the south of France.
I knew the Lord had called me there for a reason. And that reason, actually, was to walk the Camino de Santiago, which is a 31-day walk across Spain.
And so I have this backpack with the essentials: Two shorts and T-shirts, and a kilo of bakkwa. And I spend the next 31 days walking across Spain from east to west.
I start alone and end up with 20 lifelong friends. We call this the Camino familia. I walked over entire mountain ranges, through scorching deserts where I consistently lacked water, and only went where my feet could take me.
I spent a month talking with God on foot. No cars, no trains, nothing. Just blistered feet everyday and a smile on my face! And I also had the chance to meet hundreds of people and to hear their stories, and to even share the love of Jesus to some of them!
800km and a month later, with a tan and a spiritual renewal like I’ve never had before, I arrived at the end point.
It was then my life began to be set on following what God wanted me to do. After this walk, I checked out Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and the work they did.
My heart has always been for communities, community building and community development. I also wanted to take worship wherever I went, because worship changes the atmosphere.
So, I signed up. And in January 2022, after many more months of travel, I found myself on a flight to South Africa.
When I got to Cape Town, South Africa, I ended up staying at this beautiful YWAM base by the ocean for about three months, with a community of young believers who were on fire about evangelism and worship.
I found myself stretched so much in these three months in South Africa.
I was living in a missionary community for the first time (I’d previously lived across Europe in different homes but never in a fixed location!), worshipping in front of huge crowds and just stepping into identity — these were formative moments.
The base also had a prayer room in which I would spend 6-8 hours a day — a simple space with two sofas and a bunch of guitars — just praying and chatting with the Lord.
The Lord said really clearly: Go. I have never heard something so clear!
It was as if He put His hand on my shoulder and said: “If you go, I will prepare the way before you”.
I said okay, and would end up leaving after two weeks.
After saying yes to God, Jon found his vision coming true in no time at all. Here he is playing with a Ukrainian child in Poland.
So, how God spoke for me to leave was through a vision.
It was during one of those late evenings in the prayer room when I suddenly saw myself playing guitar at the train station at the border with Ukraine.
Again, worship has always been on my heart. I’ve hitchhiked around Asia, Europe, Jerusalem and a lot of different countries — everywhere I go, I just worship in every town square with my guitar.
So when I saw pictures of myself at the train station just worshipping, I knew God wanted me to go.
I saw the faces of refugees around me, and my heart started to burn like it never burned before.
I couldn’t sit down for two weeks without feeling incredibly emotional and moved by the Spirit.
We’d go for lectures and I would just take out my Bible and just pray for Ukraine and the people there.
I’d talk to people but deep inside I would only feel one emotion — a burning for Ukraine.
And this was hard, because I had committed to a six-month Disciple Training School (DTS) programme with YWAM.
I had to confirm with the Lord that this was going to be something He truly wanted me to do.
And so He did, by connecting me to an organisation called Awakening Europe so that I wouldn’t have to go to the border alone.
I was ready to leave alone, but thankfully God always knows best and He wanted me to be in community.
Two weeks after the initial call, I stood before my DTS class and announced that I was heading off to the border.
There were many tears and prayers of encouragement. It was a bittersweet moment but I knew that this was what I was meant to do and that this was what God was seeking in my life!
Have you ever had a surety about something that you couldn’t put your finger on? This was one of those rare moments when I knew it was time to leave to seek out God’s greater calling for me.
Context: I was told to head to the border town and make my way to a house where I’ll be given instructions on which team I’m going with and what I’ll be doing.
All I knew about Awakening Europe was this house address they gave me. I didn’t know what I’d be doing or where I’d be going.
But as I sit on the train and watch the countryside fly past my window, I notice a group of people walk into my cabin.
They take their seats several rows down from me, and I can’t help but notice that they’re all smiling.
Suspiciously Christian looking? Check. All kind of looking at one guy when he talks (like a missions leader)? Check.
I lean back into my seat and just start thanking Jesus for this beautiful day and for the opportunity to get into the m&d with Him. I also ask Jesus to help me meet the right people.
Then, one guy slowly walks towards me. He’s bald and has a toothy grin — the kind you see in people who disarm you easily.
He says hello. I don’t hesitate. “Are you Christian?” I ask. He’s a little stunned. “Yes!”
“I’m joining Awakening Europe at the border!” I tell him.
His mouth gapes open. “WE’RE AWAKENING EUROPE!”
No way. No way at all! I grab my guitar and rush over to give that group a bunch of fist bumps.
It turns out that they’re a bunch of passionate young Christians from a revival school in Füssen, Germany, led by one of the Awakening Europe leaders, Daniel.
It’s eight people with fire and they’re all so excited to meet me — they ask me to play a song, and confess that they hadn’t had a worship leader with them.
In my heart I was like: “Wow, God! You got me to bring my guitar all the way from South Africa to play with a bunch of Christians on this train. How awesome is that!
“And these were the people I was going to do ministry with — and I didn’t even need to go to the house! You led me to them!”
We started worshipping together and the Holy Spirit just came down on the cabin. Filled with fresh fire and laughter, we rocked up into the next cabin and started preaching the Gospel.
Hands raised, hearts received Jesus. And just like that, I joined God’s business of healing here on the Ukrainian border.
Most days since I’ve been here, I grab a guitar and head to the train station to lead a team of evangelists, worshippers, translators and people who love healing!
We rock up, introduce ourselves to a crowd of families who’ve left Ukraine through a translator, and I announce for us:
“Hello everyone! We are SO privileged to meet you. We’d love to sing a song of hope over you today. Because you are worthy of hope. Because hope is something that God wants to give to you. He loves you. This is a song about you not being alone.”
And depending on what the Spirit leads, we sometimes sing a spontaneous song. Or Raise a Hallelujah. Or How Great is Our God. Or Reckless Love.
People start to weep. Literally weep. And then we split up, hold their hands and give them warm embraces.
Jon and his team saw up to 60 people receive Jesus on the trains in a day.
We then begin to share the Gospel of Jesus: How He loves each one of them, how He cares for them, how He cared for me, and how He can transform their hearts and give them peace.
Each of us takes turns to preach the message in the next cabins – learning from each other and how everyone shares the Gospel in their own different way is so eye-opening!
Some people jump straight into the creation story, others begin with the moment they met Jesus, some begin with the parable. But what I’ve learnt here is that the Gospel preaches itself.
In any case, hands go up. People receive the peace of Jesus. Lives are changed!
Jon and his team leading an altar call in a train.
There have other special moments, like when we hold the hands of entire families who have given their lives to Jesus: A big circle of mothers, sons and daughters who just dedicated their lives to God!
In moments like these, I blink and wonder what my life will look like and what their lives will now look like in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Sometimes we walk up to people and actively seek them out — the Holy Spirit is always showing us people to meet!
I go up to people and ask them if I can sing a song for them. And then the Holy Spirit gives me a spontaneous song — one that has never been sung before, specific for them.
Then they start weeping, and Jesus comes and ministers to them.
Jon always makes sure that after people receive the love of Jesus, a Bible is placed into their hands and they hear how to receive the love of God from the source.
I also remember finding myself next to a young man called Milosh. We start chatting and he soon receives Jesus into his heart!
The Holy Spirit shares with me that Milosh was bullied when he was 11. I ask Milosh this, and he confirms that it’s correct.
I look him in the eye, and share with him: “Milosh, do you want to know what Jesus thinks about you? What He thinks about you is far more important than the lies that others have spoken over you. He wants to heal that hurt today.”
“Yes!” Milosh exclaimed. “Okay,” I tell him. “We’ll just close our eyes and ask Jesus what he thinks about you.”
He closes his eyes and I hold his hands in prayer. After a pause, he speaks up: “I hear Him saying that I am loved, and that I don’t need to care about what anyone else thinks because only what He thinks is important.”
Milosh praying with Jon to receive Jesus into his heart.
We also work at a refugee centre for displaced families.
There, after doing some worship and ministry and seeing people receive Jesus right there and then, I broke out into a spontaneous dance session with an elderly grandmother (babushka in Ukrainian) who taught us some traditional Jewish dances.
I felt led to ask my team mates to take out prayer flags — and we started to dance with them in the main hall with hundreds of people watching.
I passed some flags to these little girls who had gathered around us, and we explained to them what prophetic dancing was and what Jesus wanted to accomplish in Ukraine – how He wants peace over the country and over warfare and over conflict.
The girls started to dance. They danced with freedom over fear – over the hurt and the harm of the bomb shelters and the cratered streets they had come from.
We worshipped and we watched them dance joy into the atmosphere. And I kid you not, one of the most beautiful moments of my life emerged from that experience.
One of the most impactful moments of Jon’s life was watching these children dance with Ukraine’s colours in worship.
As these two little girls danced with the colours of the Ukrainian flag to worship music that filled the hall, the whole hall stopped.
Policemen, medics, volunteers, refugees — people started to cry. For a moment, the hall froze in time and a liberation in the spiritual atmosphere came upon everyone watching.
It was one of the most powerful moments of my entire life to witness this. The Spirit was so heavy in the room.
I’ve never stood in the middle of trains and preached the Gospel before this.
I’ve never led worship to hundreds of people in train stations, concourses, warehouses and planes before this.
I’ve never shared my testimony to a thousand people a day before.
But these two weeks, my life has changed because God has stretched, pulled and used me in ways that I could never imagine or fathom.
Jon praying with a child refugee.
God has changed the way I see my role as a Christian, and I am forever grateful for that.
God has also broken my heart for the conflict here. This war is now personal to me because I bear witness to a hundred personal stories of people that I’ve met, prayed with, laughed with and cried with.
The Ukrainian people have an immense strength that I have never seen before — a unity and bravery that I cannot even begin to describe.
It is not about us. It is about them, their conflict, their war, their country and their survival.
Whether that means donating to the Red Cross, to the World Central Kitchen, to Ukrainian aid organisations or missions organisations in Ukraine.
I’ve seen the soup kitchens here, seen the aid and seen the faces of kids as candy gets passed around with warm bedding and backpacks and other essential items.
There still is a huge need in Ukraine.
Serve if you are called. If God says go, and you have a ready heart and some useful skills — then go!
Get connected to an organisation that needs you, and seek the Lord always.
When I stand in buses, trains and train stations and say to the refugees before me boldly: “Singapore is for Ukraine! And I stand here before you saying that Asia is for Ukraine!” — people start to cry.
You always represent something. You always are an ambassador of something — your country, your continent, your faith, your story.
And what you represent is beautifully powerful.
OUTREACH / 11 APRIL 2022
“I’ve learnt more in two weeks than the last 24 years,” says young Singaporean who dropped everything to help Ukrainian refugees
Words by GABRIEL ONG
Illustrated by ANNE NG & NICOLE CHAN
In the lead-up to Good Friday, as we remember Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice, we bring to you stories of people who are inspired to love sacrificially.What is it that compels a young Singaporean to hitchhike and travel rough over all the world, and most lately — right into the border of war-torn Ukraine? The voice of God, as JONATHAN NEO would tell you.
I had a chat with the spunky 24-year-old who shared about his life’s journeys and the miraculous ways he’s seen God move, no matter where he is in the world.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
One of my favourite things in the world is just listening to the voice of God.Listening to God’s voice has resulted in me spending the past four years doing some wild things with Jesus like walking across Spain, hitchhiking around Europe with just a tent and faith, walking through Scotland and living and working in Palestine.
I don’t know normally where I’m going to sleep for the night. I have my tent with me most of the time.
I often don’t know where I’m going or how I’m going to get there. But every place I go to has been life-changing and incredibly rewarding.
What were you doing before heading off to the Ukrainian border?
So about a year ago, last August, I was supposed to work for church for a year over in London. I was supposed to intern with Holy Trinity Brompton.But I felt the Lord saying no to that. The Lord told me quite clearly to take a season of rest and exploration. So that was what I decided to do.
I basically gave most of my stuff away, packed up my life in London (I had just graduated) and said: “Lord, I don’t know what I’m gonna do next, but I trust in You.”
Two days later, I found myself in France.
I flew into France, and went up to the mountains in the Pyrenees in the south of France.
I knew the Lord had called me there for a reason. And that reason, actually, was to walk the Camino de Santiago, which is a 31-day walk across Spain.
And so I have this backpack with the essentials: Two shorts and T-shirts, and a kilo of bakkwa. And I spend the next 31 days walking across Spain from east to west.
I start alone and end up with 20 lifelong friends. We call this the Camino familia. I walked over entire mountain ranges, through scorching deserts where I consistently lacked water, and only went where my feet could take me.
I spent a month talking with God on foot. No cars, no trains, nothing. Just blistered feet everyday and a smile on my face! And I also had the chance to meet hundreds of people and to hear their stories, and to even share the love of Jesus to some of them!
800km and a month later, with a tan and a spiritual renewal like I’ve never had before, I arrived at the end point.
It was then my life began to be set on following what God wanted me to do. After this walk, I checked out Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and the work they did.
My heart has always been for communities, community building and community development. I also wanted to take worship wherever I went, because worship changes the atmosphere.
So, I signed up. And in January 2022, after many more months of travel, I found myself on a flight to South Africa.
When I got to Cape Town, South Africa, I ended up staying at this beautiful YWAM base by the ocean for about three months, with a community of young believers who were on fire about evangelism and worship.
I found myself stretched so much in these three months in South Africa.
I was living in a missionary community for the first time (I’d previously lived across Europe in different homes but never in a fixed location!), worshipping in front of huge crowds and just stepping into identity — these were formative moments.
The base also had a prayer room in which I would spend 6-8 hours a day — a simple space with two sofas and a bunch of guitars — just praying and chatting with the Lord.
It was in this prayer room that God spoke to me when the Ukraine war started.
The Lord said really clearly: Go. I have never heard something so clear!
It was as if He put His hand on my shoulder and said: “If you go, I will prepare the way before you”.
I said okay, and would end up leaving after two weeks.
So, how God spoke for me to leave was through a vision.
It was during one of those late evenings in the prayer room when I suddenly saw myself playing guitar at the train station at the border with Ukraine.
Again, worship has always been on my heart. I’ve hitchhiked around Asia, Europe, Jerusalem and a lot of different countries — everywhere I go, I just worship in every town square with my guitar.
So when I saw pictures of myself at the train station just worshipping, I knew God wanted me to go.
I saw the faces of refugees around me, and my heart started to burn like it never burned before.
I couldn’t sit down for two weeks without feeling incredibly emotional and moved by the Spirit.
We’d go for lectures and I would just take out my Bible and just pray for Ukraine and the people there.
I’d talk to people but deep inside I would only feel one emotion — a burning for Ukraine.
And this was hard, because I had committed to a six-month Disciple Training School (DTS) programme with YWAM.
I had to confirm with the Lord that this was going to be something He truly wanted me to do.
And so He did, by connecting me to an organisation called Awakening Europe so that I wouldn’t have to go to the border alone.
I was ready to leave alone, but thankfully God always knows best and He wanted me to be in community.
Two weeks after the initial call, I stood before my DTS class and announced that I was heading off to the border.
There were many tears and prayers of encouragement. It was a bittersweet moment but I knew that this was what I was meant to do and that this was what God was seeking in my life!
Have you ever had a surety about something that you couldn’t put your finger on? This was one of those rare moments when I knew it was time to leave to seek out God’s greater calling for me.
What has the journey been like so far?
At 2:50pm on 23 March 2022, I was in Krakow, Poland, boarding a train to Przemyśl. It’s the Polish border town closest to Lviv (in Ukraine), and the town where most of the refugees coming into Poland arrive in.Context: I was told to head to the border town and make my way to a house where I’ll be given instructions on which team I’m going with and what I’ll be doing.
All I knew about Awakening Europe was this house address they gave me. I didn’t know what I’d be doing or where I’d be going.
But as I sit on the train and watch the countryside fly past my window, I notice a group of people walk into my cabin.
They take their seats several rows down from me, and I can’t help but notice that they’re all smiling.
Suspiciously Christian looking? Check. All kind of looking at one guy when he talks (like a missions leader)? Check.
I lean back into my seat and just start thanking Jesus for this beautiful day and for the opportunity to get into the m&d with Him. I also ask Jesus to help me meet the right people.
Then, one guy slowly walks towards me. He’s bald and has a toothy grin — the kind you see in people who disarm you easily.
He says hello. I don’t hesitate. “Are you Christian?” I ask. He’s a little stunned. “Yes!”
“I’m joining Awakening Europe at the border!” I tell him.
His mouth gapes open. “WE’RE AWAKENING EUROPE!”
No way. No way at all! I grab my guitar and rush over to give that group a bunch of fist bumps.
It turns out that they’re a bunch of passionate young Christians from a revival school in Füssen, Germany, led by one of the Awakening Europe leaders, Daniel.
It’s eight people with fire and they’re all so excited to meet me — they ask me to play a song, and confess that they hadn’t had a worship leader with them.
In my heart I was like: “Wow, God! You got me to bring my guitar all the way from South Africa to play with a bunch of Christians on this train. How awesome is that!
“And these were the people I was going to do ministry with — and I didn’t even need to go to the house! You led me to them!”
We started worshipping together and the Holy Spirit just came down on the cabin. Filled with fresh fire and laughter, we rocked up into the next cabin and started preaching the Gospel.
Hands raised, hearts received Jesus. And just like that, I joined God’s business of healing here on the Ukrainian border.
What are some highlights?
In the last two weeks, there have been so many more similar highlights than I can count. So, I think I’ll just share a few general ones:Most days since I’ve been here, I grab a guitar and head to the train station to lead a team of evangelists, worshippers, translators and people who love healing!
We rock up, introduce ourselves to a crowd of families who’ve left Ukraine through a translator, and I announce for us:
“Hello everyone! We are SO privileged to meet you. We’d love to sing a song of hope over you today. Because you are worthy of hope. Because hope is something that God wants to give to you. He loves you. This is a song about you not being alone.”
And depending on what the Spirit leads, we sometimes sing a spontaneous song. Or Raise a Hallelujah. Or How Great is Our God. Or Reckless Love.
People start to weep. Literally weep. And then we split up, hold their hands and give them warm embraces.
We then begin to share the Gospel of Jesus: How He loves each one of them, how He cares for them, how He cared for me, and how He can transform their hearts and give them peace.
Each of us takes turns to preach the message in the next cabins – learning from each other and how everyone shares the Gospel in their own different way is so eye-opening!
Some people jump straight into the creation story, others begin with the moment they met Jesus, some begin with the parable. But what I’ve learnt here is that the Gospel preaches itself.
In any case, hands go up. People receive the peace of Jesus. Lives are changed!
There have other special moments, like when we hold the hands of entire families who have given their lives to Jesus: A big circle of mothers, sons and daughters who just dedicated their lives to God!
In moments like these, I blink and wonder what my life will look like and what their lives will now look like in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Sometimes we walk up to people and actively seek them out — the Holy Spirit is always showing us people to meet!
I go up to people and ask them if I can sing a song for them. And then the Holy Spirit gives me a spontaneous song — one that has never been sung before, specific for them.
Then they start weeping, and Jesus comes and ministers to them.
I also remember finding myself next to a young man called Milosh. We start chatting and he soon receives Jesus into his heart!
The Holy Spirit shares with me that Milosh was bullied when he was 11. I ask Milosh this, and he confirms that it’s correct.
I look him in the eye, and share with him: “Milosh, do you want to know what Jesus thinks about you? What He thinks about you is far more important than the lies that others have spoken over you. He wants to heal that hurt today.”
“Yes!” Milosh exclaimed. “Okay,” I tell him. “We’ll just close our eyes and ask Jesus what he thinks about you.”
He closes his eyes and I hold his hands in prayer. After a pause, he speaks up: “I hear Him saying that I am loved, and that I don’t need to care about what anyone else thinks because only what He thinks is important.”
We also work at a refugee centre for displaced families.
There, after doing some worship and ministry and seeing people receive Jesus right there and then, I broke out into a spontaneous dance session with an elderly grandmother (babushka in Ukrainian) who taught us some traditional Jewish dances.
I felt led to ask my team mates to take out prayer flags — and we started to dance with them in the main hall with hundreds of people watching.
I passed some flags to these little girls who had gathered around us, and we explained to them what prophetic dancing was and what Jesus wanted to accomplish in Ukraine – how He wants peace over the country and over warfare and over conflict.
The girls started to dance. They danced with freedom over fear – over the hurt and the harm of the bomb shelters and the cratered streets they had come from.
We worshipped and we watched them dance joy into the atmosphere. And I kid you not, one of the most beautiful moments of my life emerged from that experience.
As these two little girls danced with the colours of the Ukrainian flag to worship music that filled the hall, the whole hall stopped.
Policemen, medics, volunteers, refugees — people started to cry. For a moment, the hall froze in time and a liberation in the spiritual atmosphere came upon everyone watching.
It was one of the most powerful moments of my entire life to witness this. The Spirit was so heavy in the room.
What have you learnt?
I have learnt that evangelism is a lifestyle. I’ve learnt more in two weeks than I have in 24 years of living about my relationship with God.I’ve never stood in the middle of trains and preached the Gospel before this.
I’ve never led worship to hundreds of people in train stations, concourses, warehouses and planes before this.
I’ve never shared my testimony to a thousand people a day before.
But these two weeks, my life has changed because God has stretched, pulled and used me in ways that I could never imagine or fathom.
God has changed the way I see my role as a Christian, and I am forever grateful for that.
God has also broken my heart for the conflict here. This war is now personal to me because I bear witness to a hundred personal stories of people that I’ve met, prayed with, laughed with and cried with.
The Ukrainian people have an immense strength that I have never seen before — a unity and bravery that I cannot even begin to describe.
It is not about us. It is about them, their conflict, their war, their country and their survival.
Anything you wanna say to folks back home in Singapore?
My message back home is simple: Give as much as you can.Whether that means donating to the Red Cross, to the World Central Kitchen, to Ukrainian aid organisations or missions organisations in Ukraine.
I’ve seen the soup kitchens here, seen the aid and seen the faces of kids as candy gets passed around with warm bedding and backpacks and other essential items.
There still is a huge need in Ukraine.
Serve if you are called. If God says go, and you have a ready heart and some useful skills — then go!
Get connected to an organisation that needs you, and seek the Lord always.
When I stand in buses, trains and train stations and say to the refugees before me boldly: “Singapore is for Ukraine! And I stand here before you saying that Asia is for Ukraine!” — people start to cry.
You always represent something. You always are an ambassador of something — your country, your continent, your faith, your story.
And what you represent is beautifully powerful.
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2016
- Messages
- 35,356
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Fucking Christians.
Christian missionary John Allen Chau, 26, who died on November 17 on a remote island. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock
The 26-year-old American adventure blogger was killed by an isolated tribe last year. His father blames ‘extreme’ Christianity
J Oliver Conroy
Sun 3 Feb 2019 07.00 GMT
One day, as a small child, John Allen Chau was rooting through his father’s study when he found something curious and alluring: an illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic story of a sailor shipwrecked on a deserted island.
“After struggling my way to read it with early elementary school English,” he later told a website for outdoors enthusiasts, “I started reading easier kid-friendly books,” like The Sign of the Beaver, “which inspired my brother and I to paint our faces with wild blackberry juice and tramp through our backyard with bows and spears we created from sticks”.
In November, on an obscure island in the Indian Ocean, Chau – a 26-year-old American adventure blogger, beef-jerky marketer, and evangelical missionary – was killed by the isolated tribe he was attempting to convert to Christianity.
When Chau’s death became international news, many Christians were keen to disavow his actions; Chau’s father believes the American missionary community is culpable in his son’s death. John was an “innocent child”, his father told me, who died from an “extreme” vision of Christianity taken to its logical conclusion.
All Nations, the evangelical organization that trained Chau, described him as a martyr. The “privilege of sharing the gospel has often involved great cost”, Dr Mary Ho, the organization’s leader, said in a statement. “We pray that John’s sacrificial efforts will bear eternal fruit in due season.”
Ho also told news organizations that Chau had received 13 immunizations, though Survival International, an indigenous rights group, disputes that these would have prevented infection of the isolated Sentinelese people. The Sentinelese, hunter-gatherers who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Andaman island chain, are considered one of the Earth’s last uncontacted peoples; their entire tribe is believed to number several dozen people.
“John Allen Chau is not a martyr,” responded one Twitter user, capturing the prevailing sentiment on social media. “Just a dumb American who thought the tribals needed ‘Jesus’ when the tribals already lived in harmony with God and nature for years without outside interference.”
In this handout photo provided by the Indian coastguard and Survival International in 2004, a man with the Sentinelese tribe aims his bow and arrow at an Indian coast guard helicopter. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
“I’m sorry,” another commented, “but what a deluded idiot.”
In a brief message posted on Chau’s Instagram account, his family pleaded for a more sympathetic understanding of the person they called “a beloved son, brother, uncle, and best friend”, who “loved God, life, helping those in need, and had nothing but love for the Sentinelese people”.
After talking with people who knew him, and delving into the blogposts, diary writings, photos, and social media he left behind, a complicated picture emerges.
Chau’s decision to contact the Sentinelese, who have made it clear over the years that they prefer to be left alone, was indefensibly reckless. But it was not a spontaneous act of recklessness by a dim-witted thrill-seeker; it was a premeditated act of recklessness by a fairly intelligent and thoughtful thrill-seeker who spent years preparing, understood the risks, including to his own life, and believed his purpose on Earth was to bring Christ to the island he considered “Satan’s last stronghold”.
Man killed on remote Indian island tried to 'declare Jesus' to tribe
Read more
Chau was born in Alabama but grew up in Vancouver, Washington, near the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. He was raised by a Chinese father, a psychiatrist, and an American mother, an attorney, with two siblings. As a child he was consumed by two passions that became increasingly intertwined: outdoor adventure and Jesus Christ.
“[W]hen I was a little kid,” he recalled in 2015, “my family went camping”; during “that time of my life, I had a habit of eating wild things not meant for humans to eat, like bright red or stark white berries”. Consequently he “destroyed several sleeping bags that night. My family stopped going on camping trips after that.”
He loved survival stories, like Hatchet, Gary Paulsen’s gritty young adult novel about a boy forced to live off the land after crash-landing in the Alaskan wilderness. He came to count as heroes the naturalist John Muir, the explorer-missionary David Livingstone, and Bruce Olson, famous in the missionary community for converting the Bari people of South America.
Chau was raised in a Christian home and his family appear to have been members of the Assemblies of God, an international Pentecostal church whose members sometimes speak in tongues. He attended Vancouver Christian high school, a close-knit school with just 90 students across seven grades.
A natural overachiever, he thrived. He threw himself into clubs, charities and other extracurriculars. In the Royal Rangers, a Pentecostal scouting organization, he achieved a gold medal of achievement, a rank equivalent to Eagle scout; one of the medal’s requirements is reading or listening to the entire Bible.
He loved hiking, camping and travel, and he meticulously documented his exploration on social media. On Facebook, he was fond of quoting Jim Elliot, one of five missionaries killed by a tribe in Ecuador in 1956.
A mission trip to Mexico during high school was particularly formative. When he returned, he gave a short homily on his experiences. “We can’t be lukewarm,” he argued, shifting nervously but speaking with conviction. “We need to know how to defend our faith.”
“When we go out in our world, there are people that’ll just come and oppose us, and they’ll have questions, and they’ll have arguments … We can’t just, like, go out there unprepared. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it.”
It seems inevitable that Chau’s personality – God-fearing, outdoors-loving, and obsessed with pushing himself to extremes – would be attracted to being a missionary. He first read about the Sentinelese during high school, according to the New York Times, on a missionary database called the Joshua Project.
The Joshua Project entry for the Sentinelese describes them as “extremely isolated” and notes that the Indian government bans access to North Sentinel. The website suggests praying for the Indian government to allow Christians “to earn the trust of the Sentinelese people” and “live among them”.
In addition to “basic medical care”, the Sentinelese “need to know that the Creator God exists, and that He loves them and paid the price for their sins”.
John Chau and his father attended Oral Roberts University. Photograph: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images
Like his son, Dr Patrick Chau is a graduate of Oral Roberts, an evangelical university in Oklahoma. I had thought he might want to defend evangelical doctrines against the unsympathetic media coverage sparked by his son’s death. In an email, however, he called religion “the opium of the mass[es]”.
“If you have [anything] positive to say about religion,” he told me, “l wish not to see or hear” it. He said his son’s zeal was a longstanding point of contention and that they’d agreed not to talk about John’s missionary work.
“John is gone because the Western ideology overpowered my [Confucian] influence,” he said. He blamed evangelicals’ “extreme Christianity” for pushing his child to a “not unexpected end”, and he referred with particular bitterness to the Great Commission, Jesus’s injunction that Christians spread the gospel to all peoples.
Like Patrick Chau, Justin Graves, a pastor and a friend of John’s from linguistics school, has blamed evangelical culture for enabling Chau’s death. “John Chau was a good man,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “He was a loving, passionate individual I was blessed to befriend, and the loss of his light on this earth was devastating. But it cannot be left as a mere tragedy. His death brings to light a multitude of issues with Evangelical views” and “hell-based ethics”.
John Middleton Ramsey, a friend of Chau’s and a fellow evangelical, defended his actions. “His motivation was love for the [Sentinelese] people,” he told me. “If you believe in heaven and hell then what he did was the most loving thing anyone could do.”
He added: “A lot of people have said these people obviously want to be left alone, so we should respect their wishes. Well my ancestors were also savages that wanted to be left alone. I’m sure glad missionaries like [Saints] Kilian and Boniface stepped up and were willing to give their lives, and that I don’t live in a society like that any more.”
The United States sends the most Christian missionaries abroad of any country, according to Reuters – almost 130,000 in 2010. Although many denominations send missionaries, the most visible are Mormons – 70,000 per year, according to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – and evangelical Protestants.
A large and sophisticated apparatus exists to assist Americans interested in proselytizing. The universe includes organizations like WorldVenture, which provides support services, training, and life insurance for missionaries, and Wycliffe, which is working to translate the Bible into every language. Databases such as People Groups and the Joshua Project gather information on what evangelicals call “unreached people groups”.
At Oral Roberts, Chau was more completely immersed in evangelical culture than ever before. The conservative university forbids smoking, drinking, swearing, and any kind of sexual relations outside heterosexual marriage.
Chau traveled frequently. He spent one summer during college at a Christian soccer academy in South Africa. After graduating in 2014, he went on a trip to Kurdistan to do outreach to refugees, as well as a trip to Israel sponsored by Covenant Journey, an organization founded by the rightwing Christian activist Mat Staver.
John Middleton Ramsey met Chau in Israel. He was relaxed and “easy to connect with”, Ramsey recalled, and “preferred one-on-one conversation as opposed to larger groups”. He was “good-looking and received a fair share of female attention, but very humble”.
Chau avoided romantic entanglement, believing it irresponsible given the risks of his mission to North Sentinel, and forwent full-time employment in order to focus on preparing. He did a National Outdoor Leadership School course, trained as an emergency medical technician, and stayed in shape. He spent three summers at Whiskeytown national recreation area in California, working as a ranger and emergency nurse and living alone in a small cabin.
He was a good photographer and never failed to document his love of nature on Instagram. “Met new friends, watched spectacular sunrises and sunsets, and marveled at the the beautiful creation around us that we are all called to care for,” he wrote after one excursion. His adventures began to earn him social media followers. A beef jerky company asked to sponsor him as an influencer.
These outdoor expeditions sometimes got dangerous. Once he almost died – thanks to “a gnarly bite from a rattlesnake and a subsequent platelet count of 10”. On another occasion, he and two friends got lost during a 14-day trek. To get back on course, they were forced to climb down a frozen waterfall.
In 2015 and 2016 he took four trips to the Andaman islands. He made contacts in the local Christian community but did not visit North Sentinel.
In 2017 he was accepted to a boot camp run by All Nations, a Kansas City organization that works to see Jesus “worshipped by every tongue, tribe and nation”. All Nations urges Christians to inculcate a “wartime mentality” and “make strategic decisions in the battle we’re waging against a real enemy”.
One of the bootcamp’s exercises, the New York Times reported, involved navigating a mock village peopled by missionaries pretending to be hostile natives, with fake spears. All Nations’ leader, Mary Ho, told the Times that Chau was one of the best trainees the program ever had.
That year he also attended a program at the Canada Institute of Linguistics, a missionary language school. There he befriended another student, Ben S, who was struck by his “quiet determination” and “confidence”.
“Was it his faith?” Ben wondered in a post remembering his friend. “Was it his years of mountaineering and extensive emergency medical training? Probably all of this factored in” – Chau “was just the kind of person who inspires your confidence and trust”.
One night in the computer lab, Chau told Ben of “his burden” to save the Sentinelese.
“I was impressed immediately that this was something no one but God alone could relieve him of,” Ben writes. “He had already heard all the arguments of why this was a fool’s errand and would jeopardize any mission associated with it, let alone the [lives] of the individuals involved.” This “was a sacred trust for him that no amount of reasoning would wrest from his grasp”.
In October, Chau traveled on a tourist visa to Port Blair, the Andaman islands’ regional capital, and took up residence in what he described as a “safe house”.
There he assembled an “initial contact response kit” – including picture cards for communication, bandages and dental forceps for removing arrows – and gifts for the Sentinelese: tweezers, scissors, cord, safety pins, fish hooks.
He carefully documented his activities in a handwritten diary. The resulting, 13-page testament – written with the earnestness and self-consciousness of someone who had digested many missionary and anthropologist accounts of indigenous contact and knew he might be writing for posterity – recounts his final days in fascinating and tragic detail.
Hoping it would lessen the risk of accidentally infecting the Sentinelese, he entered a self-imposed quarantine. For 11 days he went without direct sunlight. He prayed, exercised, and read The Lives of the Three Mrs Judsons, a 19th-century missionary account.
John Chau: ‘You guys might think I’m crazy in all this but I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people.’ Photograph: REX/Shutterstock
On the night of 14 November, he and some fishermen – Christians who had agreed to help – set out in darkness for North Sentinel, carefully avoiding coastguard vessels. Their journey was illuminated by glowing plankton, Chau wrote, and around them fish jumped “like darting mermaids”. They reached North Sentinel late at night and anchored nearby.
The next morning, 15 November, he made his first approach. The fishermen refused to go any closer to the island, so he stripped to his underwear – he thought it would make the Sentinelese more at ease, the fishermen later said – and paddled a kayak toward the shore.
He saw a hut and some dugout canoes. As he paddled up to the beach, several Sentinelese, faces painted yellow and speaking a language of “high-pitched sounds”, came rushing out.
“My name is John,” he shouted from his kayak. “I love you, and Jesus loves you.”
When the islanders began stringing their bows, he panicked. He threw toward them some fish he had brought as a gift, then, according to his diary, “turned and paddled like I never have in my life”.
Later that day he made another attempt, this time landing on the island.
He laid out more gifts, then approached the hut he was chased from earlier, staying out of arrow range. About half a dozen Sentinelese emerged and began to “whoop and shout”. He walked closer to try to hear what they were saying. He tried to “parrot their words back to them”, and the Sentinelese burst out laughing. They were probably “saying bad words or insulting me”, he concluded. He sang worship songs and preached from Genesis. For a while the Sentinelese seemed to tolerate his presence.
Then a boy shot an arrow at him. The arrow struck the waterproof Bible he was holding. He pulled it out, gave it back to the boy, and hastily retreated. The Sentinelese had taken his kayak, so he was forced to swim almost a mile to the fishing boat.
“I‘m scared,” he wrote that night in his diary. “Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful.” He was “crying a bit” and “wondering if it’ll be the last sunset I see before being in the place where the sun never sets”.
“You guys might think I’m crazy in all this,” he wrote to his family, “but I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people.”
Is this “Satan’s last stronghold”, he asked God – a place “where none have heard or even had a chance to hear your name?”
He decided he would make his next attempt without the fishing vessel floating nearby. Appearing alone might make the Sentinelese more comfortable, he thought. And if the approach went “badly”, this would spare the fishermen from having to “bear witness to my death”.
His diary makes it clear that he didn’t want to die, but accepted the possibility. “I think I could be more useful alive,” he wrote, “but to you, God, I give all the glory of whatever happens.” He asked God to forgive “any of the people on this island who try to kill me” – especially “if they succeed”.
Shortly after dawn on 16 November, the last day he was seen alive, John Chau asked the fishermen to drop him off alone. He knew the risks; but the people of North Sentinel were damned, and he was determined to save them.
He struck out once more for the shore.
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The life and death of John Chau, the man who tried to convert his killers
Christian missionary John Allen Chau, 26, who died on November 17 on a remote island. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock
The 26-year-old American adventure blogger was killed by an isolated tribe last year. His father blames ‘extreme’ Christianity
J Oliver Conroy
Sun 3 Feb 2019 07.00 GMT
One day, as a small child, John Allen Chau was rooting through his father’s study when he found something curious and alluring: an illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic story of a sailor shipwrecked on a deserted island.
“After struggling my way to read it with early elementary school English,” he later told a website for outdoors enthusiasts, “I started reading easier kid-friendly books,” like The Sign of the Beaver, “which inspired my brother and I to paint our faces with wild blackberry juice and tramp through our backyard with bows and spears we created from sticks”.
In November, on an obscure island in the Indian Ocean, Chau – a 26-year-old American adventure blogger, beef-jerky marketer, and evangelical missionary – was killed by the isolated tribe he was attempting to convert to Christianity.
When Chau’s death became international news, many Christians were keen to disavow his actions; Chau’s father believes the American missionary community is culpable in his son’s death. John was an “innocent child”, his father told me, who died from an “extreme” vision of Christianity taken to its logical conclusion.
All Nations, the evangelical organization that trained Chau, described him as a martyr. The “privilege of sharing the gospel has often involved great cost”, Dr Mary Ho, the organization’s leader, said in a statement. “We pray that John’s sacrificial efforts will bear eternal fruit in due season.”
Ho also told news organizations that Chau had received 13 immunizations, though Survival International, an indigenous rights group, disputes that these would have prevented infection of the isolated Sentinelese people. The Sentinelese, hunter-gatherers who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Andaman island chain, are considered one of the Earth’s last uncontacted peoples; their entire tribe is believed to number several dozen people.
“John Allen Chau is not a martyr,” responded one Twitter user, capturing the prevailing sentiment on social media. “Just a dumb American who thought the tribals needed ‘Jesus’ when the tribals already lived in harmony with God and nature for years without outside interference.”
In this handout photo provided by the Indian coastguard and Survival International in 2004, a man with the Sentinelese tribe aims his bow and arrow at an Indian coast guard helicopter. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
“I’m sorry,” another commented, “but what a deluded idiot.”
In a brief message posted on Chau’s Instagram account, his family pleaded for a more sympathetic understanding of the person they called “a beloved son, brother, uncle, and best friend”, who “loved God, life, helping those in need, and had nothing but love for the Sentinelese people”.
After talking with people who knew him, and delving into the blogposts, diary writings, photos, and social media he left behind, a complicated picture emerges.
Chau’s decision to contact the Sentinelese, who have made it clear over the years that they prefer to be left alone, was indefensibly reckless. But it was not a spontaneous act of recklessness by a dim-witted thrill-seeker; it was a premeditated act of recklessness by a fairly intelligent and thoughtful thrill-seeker who spent years preparing, understood the risks, including to his own life, and believed his purpose on Earth was to bring Christ to the island he considered “Satan’s last stronghold”.
Man killed on remote Indian island tried to 'declare Jesus' to tribe
Read more
Chau was born in Alabama but grew up in Vancouver, Washington, near the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. He was raised by a Chinese father, a psychiatrist, and an American mother, an attorney, with two siblings. As a child he was consumed by two passions that became increasingly intertwined: outdoor adventure and Jesus Christ.
“[W]hen I was a little kid,” he recalled in 2015, “my family went camping”; during “that time of my life, I had a habit of eating wild things not meant for humans to eat, like bright red or stark white berries”. Consequently he “destroyed several sleeping bags that night. My family stopped going on camping trips after that.”
He loved survival stories, like Hatchet, Gary Paulsen’s gritty young adult novel about a boy forced to live off the land after crash-landing in the Alaskan wilderness. He came to count as heroes the naturalist John Muir, the explorer-missionary David Livingstone, and Bruce Olson, famous in the missionary community for converting the Bari people of South America.
Chau was raised in a Christian home and his family appear to have been members of the Assemblies of God, an international Pentecostal church whose members sometimes speak in tongues. He attended Vancouver Christian high school, a close-knit school with just 90 students across seven grades.
A natural overachiever, he thrived. He threw himself into clubs, charities and other extracurriculars. In the Royal Rangers, a Pentecostal scouting organization, he achieved a gold medal of achievement, a rank equivalent to Eagle scout; one of the medal’s requirements is reading or listening to the entire Bible.
He loved hiking, camping and travel, and he meticulously documented his exploration on social media. On Facebook, he was fond of quoting Jim Elliot, one of five missionaries killed by a tribe in Ecuador in 1956.
A mission trip to Mexico during high school was particularly formative. When he returned, he gave a short homily on his experiences. “We can’t be lukewarm,” he argued, shifting nervously but speaking with conviction. “We need to know how to defend our faith.”
“When we go out in our world, there are people that’ll just come and oppose us, and they’ll have questions, and they’ll have arguments … We can’t just, like, go out there unprepared. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it.”
It seems inevitable that Chau’s personality – God-fearing, outdoors-loving, and obsessed with pushing himself to extremes – would be attracted to being a missionary. He first read about the Sentinelese during high school, according to the New York Times, on a missionary database called the Joshua Project.
The Joshua Project entry for the Sentinelese describes them as “extremely isolated” and notes that the Indian government bans access to North Sentinel. The website suggests praying for the Indian government to allow Christians “to earn the trust of the Sentinelese people” and “live among them”.
In addition to “basic medical care”, the Sentinelese “need to know that the Creator God exists, and that He loves them and paid the price for their sins”.
John Chau and his father attended Oral Roberts University. Photograph: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images
Like his son, Dr Patrick Chau is a graduate of Oral Roberts, an evangelical university in Oklahoma. I had thought he might want to defend evangelical doctrines against the unsympathetic media coverage sparked by his son’s death. In an email, however, he called religion “the opium of the mass[es]”.
“If you have [anything] positive to say about religion,” he told me, “l wish not to see or hear” it. He said his son’s zeal was a longstanding point of contention and that they’d agreed not to talk about John’s missionary work.
“John is gone because the Western ideology overpowered my [Confucian] influence,” he said. He blamed evangelicals’ “extreme Christianity” for pushing his child to a “not unexpected end”, and he referred with particular bitterness to the Great Commission, Jesus’s injunction that Christians spread the gospel to all peoples.
Like Patrick Chau, Justin Graves, a pastor and a friend of John’s from linguistics school, has blamed evangelical culture for enabling Chau’s death. “John Chau was a good man,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “He was a loving, passionate individual I was blessed to befriend, and the loss of his light on this earth was devastating. But it cannot be left as a mere tragedy. His death brings to light a multitude of issues with Evangelical views” and “hell-based ethics”.
John Middleton Ramsey, a friend of Chau’s and a fellow evangelical, defended his actions. “His motivation was love for the [Sentinelese] people,” he told me. “If you believe in heaven and hell then what he did was the most loving thing anyone could do.”
He added: “A lot of people have said these people obviously want to be left alone, so we should respect their wishes. Well my ancestors were also savages that wanted to be left alone. I’m sure glad missionaries like [Saints] Kilian and Boniface stepped up and were willing to give their lives, and that I don’t live in a society like that any more.”
The United States sends the most Christian missionaries abroad of any country, according to Reuters – almost 130,000 in 2010. Although many denominations send missionaries, the most visible are Mormons – 70,000 per year, according to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – and evangelical Protestants.
A large and sophisticated apparatus exists to assist Americans interested in proselytizing. The universe includes organizations like WorldVenture, which provides support services, training, and life insurance for missionaries, and Wycliffe, which is working to translate the Bible into every language. Databases such as People Groups and the Joshua Project gather information on what evangelicals call “unreached people groups”.
John Chau
At Oral Roberts, Chau was more completely immersed in evangelical culture than ever before. The conservative university forbids smoking, drinking, swearing, and any kind of sexual relations outside heterosexual marriage.
Chau traveled frequently. He spent one summer during college at a Christian soccer academy in South Africa. After graduating in 2014, he went on a trip to Kurdistan to do outreach to refugees, as well as a trip to Israel sponsored by Covenant Journey, an organization founded by the rightwing Christian activist Mat Staver.
John Middleton Ramsey met Chau in Israel. He was relaxed and “easy to connect with”, Ramsey recalled, and “preferred one-on-one conversation as opposed to larger groups”. He was “good-looking and received a fair share of female attention, but very humble”.
Chau avoided romantic entanglement, believing it irresponsible given the risks of his mission to North Sentinel, and forwent full-time employment in order to focus on preparing. He did a National Outdoor Leadership School course, trained as an emergency medical technician, and stayed in shape. He spent three summers at Whiskeytown national recreation area in California, working as a ranger and emergency nurse and living alone in a small cabin.
He was a good photographer and never failed to document his love of nature on Instagram. “Met new friends, watched spectacular sunrises and sunsets, and marveled at the the beautiful creation around us that we are all called to care for,” he wrote after one excursion. His adventures began to earn him social media followers. A beef jerky company asked to sponsor him as an influencer.
These outdoor expeditions sometimes got dangerous. Once he almost died – thanks to “a gnarly bite from a rattlesnake and a subsequent platelet count of 10”. On another occasion, he and two friends got lost during a 14-day trek. To get back on course, they were forced to climb down a frozen waterfall.
John Middleton Ramsey, friend to Chau
In 2015 and 2016 he took four trips to the Andaman islands. He made contacts in the local Christian community but did not visit North Sentinel.
In 2017 he was accepted to a boot camp run by All Nations, a Kansas City organization that works to see Jesus “worshipped by every tongue, tribe and nation”. All Nations urges Christians to inculcate a “wartime mentality” and “make strategic decisions in the battle we’re waging against a real enemy”.
One of the bootcamp’s exercises, the New York Times reported, involved navigating a mock village peopled by missionaries pretending to be hostile natives, with fake spears. All Nations’ leader, Mary Ho, told the Times that Chau was one of the best trainees the program ever had.
That year he also attended a program at the Canada Institute of Linguistics, a missionary language school. There he befriended another student, Ben S, who was struck by his “quiet determination” and “confidence”.
“Was it his faith?” Ben wondered in a post remembering his friend. “Was it his years of mountaineering and extensive emergency medical training? Probably all of this factored in” – Chau “was just the kind of person who inspires your confidence and trust”.
One night in the computer lab, Chau told Ben of “his burden” to save the Sentinelese.
“I was impressed immediately that this was something no one but God alone could relieve him of,” Ben writes. “He had already heard all the arguments of why this was a fool’s errand and would jeopardize any mission associated with it, let alone the [lives] of the individuals involved.” This “was a sacred trust for him that no amount of reasoning would wrest from his grasp”.
In October, Chau traveled on a tourist visa to Port Blair, the Andaman islands’ regional capital, and took up residence in what he described as a “safe house”.
There he assembled an “initial contact response kit” – including picture cards for communication, bandages and dental forceps for removing arrows – and gifts for the Sentinelese: tweezers, scissors, cord, safety pins, fish hooks.
He carefully documented his activities in a handwritten diary. The resulting, 13-page testament – written with the earnestness and self-consciousness of someone who had digested many missionary and anthropologist accounts of indigenous contact and knew he might be writing for posterity – recounts his final days in fascinating and tragic detail.
Hoping it would lessen the risk of accidentally infecting the Sentinelese, he entered a self-imposed quarantine. For 11 days he went without direct sunlight. He prayed, exercised, and read The Lives of the Three Mrs Judsons, a 19th-century missionary account.
John Chau: ‘You guys might think I’m crazy in all this but I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people.’ Photograph: REX/Shutterstock
On the night of 14 November, he and some fishermen – Christians who had agreed to help – set out in darkness for North Sentinel, carefully avoiding coastguard vessels. Their journey was illuminated by glowing plankton, Chau wrote, and around them fish jumped “like darting mermaids”. They reached North Sentinel late at night and anchored nearby.
The next morning, 15 November, he made his first approach. The fishermen refused to go any closer to the island, so he stripped to his underwear – he thought it would make the Sentinelese more at ease, the fishermen later said – and paddled a kayak toward the shore.
He saw a hut and some dugout canoes. As he paddled up to the beach, several Sentinelese, faces painted yellow and speaking a language of “high-pitched sounds”, came rushing out.
“My name is John,” he shouted from his kayak. “I love you, and Jesus loves you.”
John Chau, in his diary
When the islanders began stringing their bows, he panicked. He threw toward them some fish he had brought as a gift, then, according to his diary, “turned and paddled like I never have in my life”.
Later that day he made another attempt, this time landing on the island.
He laid out more gifts, then approached the hut he was chased from earlier, staying out of arrow range. About half a dozen Sentinelese emerged and began to “whoop and shout”. He walked closer to try to hear what they were saying. He tried to “parrot their words back to them”, and the Sentinelese burst out laughing. They were probably “saying bad words or insulting me”, he concluded. He sang worship songs and preached from Genesis. For a while the Sentinelese seemed to tolerate his presence.
Then a boy shot an arrow at him. The arrow struck the waterproof Bible he was holding. He pulled it out, gave it back to the boy, and hastily retreated. The Sentinelese had taken his kayak, so he was forced to swim almost a mile to the fishing boat.
“I‘m scared,” he wrote that night in his diary. “Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful.” He was “crying a bit” and “wondering if it’ll be the last sunset I see before being in the place where the sun never sets”.
“You guys might think I’m crazy in all this,” he wrote to his family, “but I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people.”
Is this “Satan’s last stronghold”, he asked God – a place “where none have heard or even had a chance to hear your name?”
He decided he would make his next attempt without the fishing vessel floating nearby. Appearing alone might make the Sentinelese more comfortable, he thought. And if the approach went “badly”, this would spare the fishermen from having to “bear witness to my death”.
His diary makes it clear that he didn’t want to die, but accepted the possibility. “I think I could be more useful alive,” he wrote, “but to you, God, I give all the glory of whatever happens.” He asked God to forgive “any of the people on this island who try to kill me” – especially “if they succeed”.
Shortly after dawn on 16 November, the last day he was seen alive, John Chau asked the fishermen to drop him off alone. He knew the risks; but the people of North Sentinel were damned, and he was determined to save them.
He struck out once more for the shore.
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Plane should've hit an air pocket, break all their necks and send them to Jesus.
Another F Hypocrite Bastard.
Thats what he is.
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Plane should've hit an air pocket, break all their necks and send them to Jesus.
Another F Hypocrite Bastard.
Thats what he is.
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This Sinkie is God's messenger.
Edwin Tong really look like a midget dog. lol
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Yes. Sing that call to prayer that begin with "Allahu Akbar". Make the infidels sing along or else. See the double standard?
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Plane should've hit an air pocket, break all their necks and send them to Jesus.
Church speaks up for S’porean who belted out worship songs during flight and claims that we are in “increasing anti-Christian climate” and “many will amplify these narratives”
AureBesh123
·
Their modus operandi is:
- Do something publicly abrasive or obnoxious.
- Claim persecution and "increasingly anti Christian sentiment" when criticised.
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Church speaks up for S’porean who belted out worship songs during flight and claims that we are in “increasing anti-Christian climate” and “many will amplify these narratives”
View attachment 142965
AureBesh123
·
Their modus operandi is:
- Do something publicly abrasive or obnoxious.
- Claim persecution and "increasingly anti Christian sentiment" when criticised.
The church defending Jon is to be expected. After all, they share the same misguided and stupid belief in a fairy tale. Religion is also a very lucrative business! And Jon is their marketing rep.
But they ought to ask themselves why the increasing anti-christian and also anti-religion sentiments? This is because most people are getting smarter, have learned to question and use their powers of reason and logic. Only idiots believe a virgin can give birth, the dead can rise, a burning bush that does not burn, a guy can survive three days and nights in the belly of a whale etc. I weep for them.
Not me! To me LW has sold his soul to devil when he joined PAP. He needs to repent!
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S’porean Belts Out Worship Songs During Flight, Called Out For Being Inappropriate
FEATURED LATEST NEWS VIRAL
His provision of in-flight entertainment was not very appreciated.
By Sudeshna Dhar - 18 Apr 2022, 6:17 pm
Singaporean Receives Flak For Singing Christian Worship Songs During Flight
Imagine sitting back and enjoying your flight… only to be subjected to an impromptu karaoke session. Not a typical airplane experience, is it?
This was what greeted passengers on an easyJet flight when a man took it upon himself to spread joy through worship songs in the middle of the journey.
Despite his good intentions, reactions to his behaviour have been mixed.
Many criticised him for being inconsiderate to other travellers, while others believe that his behaviour was harmless.
Singaporean man sang worship songs during flight
In a 20-second clip posted to Twitter on 16 Apr, a man is seen singing worship songs in the middle of a flight.
Source: Twitter
The man, who has since been identified as Singaporean Jonathan Neo, strums his guitar as he heartily belts out a Christian worship song in the centre of the aisle.
Other passengers are also shown singing along with him.
Source: Twitter
However, not everyone was as enthusiastic — the camera pans to a few folks who look decidedly less thrilled about the free show.
Source: Twitter
The video itself contains the caption, “Worshipping Jesus 30,000 feet in the air!” However, the OP of the short clip does not seem to share the same cheerful sentiment.
Instead, he wrote, “Imagine you get on a plane and you have to listen to this.”
The tweet has since gone viral with over 30 million views and was cross-posted to other platforms like TikTok, with Neo’s actions sparking intense debates about playing worship songs during flights.
Criticised for singing worship songs
Neo may have simply intended to uplift his fellow passengers, but he earned a very different response than what he expected.
Many criticised his actions, claiming that it was inconsiderate and disruptive.
Source: TikTok
One TikToker quipped that she would demand to get her money back if she were on that plane. Another pointed out that, religious or not, it wasn’t appropriate for Neo to “disrupt the flight” like that.
Source: TikTok
Others argued that flying is already nerve-wracking enough, so Neo did not need to make it worse for the other passengers.
Source: TikTok
This commenter even had a cheeky suggestion for an alternative song to counter the one Neo was singing.
Source: TikTok
Furthermore, one TikTok user went as far as to doxx Neo, posting his social media accounts in his video.
However, there are those who do not find Neo’s behaviour aggravating. A few users stated that he should be allowed to sing his songs if he so desires to.
Source: TikTok
Some also deemed the hostile reactions to Neo’s behaviour excessive.
Source: TikTok
One said that while it may have been inappropriate, calling what Neo did “scary” would be going too far.
Neo’s social media accounts have been deleted
It looks like the reactions eventually became too much for Neo to bear. According to AsiaOne, most of his social media accounts have been deleted.
They also reported that Neo did obtain permission from the easyJet flight crew to perform during the journey.
MS News has tried to reach out to Neo, but all attempts have been unsuccessful thus far.
Source: Twitter
Prior to the incident, Neo was spotted conducting a similar performance with his band for Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
In an interview with Christian media site Thir.st, he said this is something he does often.
Should Neo have performed during the flight?
Both sides of the argument regarding Neo’s form of ‘in-flight entertainment’ have equal merit.
On one hand, his performance did inconvenience other passengers. After all, not everyone is willing to listen to live songs – religious or not – in the middle of an exhausting journey by air.
On the other, Neo definitely had good intentions — he merely set out to share his faith with others, perhaps to encourage them during these difficult times.
What do you think about Neo’s behaviour? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
Have news you must share? Get in touch with us via email at [email protected].
Featured image adapted from Twitter.
What's wrong with singing praises to God?
If only he sang my favourite hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers"
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OK if a Buddhist start chanting Buddhist mantras to the plane passengers?
OK if the Muslims in the plane pull out their prayer mats and start praying in loud voices to Allah?
OK if Taoists start doing a trance dance in the plane to the accompaniment of cymbals and drums?
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I'm okay with all that.
But I'm guessing the guy with the guitar and singing is likely to be the least annoying of all the examples you quoted.
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I must do a BDSM collaboration with Sun Hoe with her screaming oh my god. Let's see what church says when I insert the cross into her hole.The church defending Jon is to be expected. After all, they share the same misguided and stupid belief in a fairy tale. Religion is also a very lucrative business! And Jon is their marketing rep.
But they ought to ask themselves why the increasing anti-christian and also anti-religion sentiments? This is because most people are getting smarter, have learned to question and use their powers of reason and logic. Only idiots believe a virgin can give birth, the dead can rise, a burning bush that does not burn, a guy can survive three days and nights in the belly of a whale etc. I weep for them.
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Sounds like a good plan. You can also sell tickets to the event and/or film it and sell copies. Title it China Whine.
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Sounds like a good plan. You can also sell tickets to the event and/or film it and sell copies. Title it China Whine.
I will make a DVD and send every church a copy, they can use it during all their sunday mess.
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OK with you but you are not the only passenger in the plane. Is it OK with all the other passengers?
The Christian singer is the least annoying only from your point of view.
From a Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Jew, atheist point of view, he may be one of the more annoying ones.
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