A Book About A TRŪe Amazon Adventure - "Beyond The Call" By Harry G. Flinner (retired) Missionary of the Church of the Nazarene

A Glimpse Of

Chapter Nine   Pages 211-224

“DID WE MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE?”

I remember how certain I was that the mouth of the Cusu River was God’s chosen site for us to begin our ministry in the jungle.  For thirty-five years it remained the center of the Nazarene work in the Upper Maranon.  Establishing that location, constructing a safe comfortable home and raising several other permanent buildings was a major accomplishment.  Maybe establishing the physical foundation of the mission was the principle reason God called Genny and me to work in that remote place.  It was no little thing that we were able to successfully penetrate a hostile heathen society and win the friendship of a few Jivaro families who were still headhunters when we dared move into their jungle and live with them. 

Yon was our first convert. 

He was murdered by order of the shaman

Yon, the Indian I trained to operate the cement mixer, was really our first convert.  I don’t know who Yon was, or where he lived. He showed up one day to work when we were digging the hillside in the early stages of building my house.  When the house was finished and my family had moved in, Yon kept coming back for work and I used him.  He helped me build the chapel.  I got close to Yon because he understood a little Spanish.  Everyday before work we would read together a few verses from the New Testament and pray.  God the Holy Spirit gave that young Indian enough understanding to invite Jesus into his life.  One morning before work Yon’s life was changed.  He was our first convert.  About three weeks after his conversion Yon stopped coming to church, and we missed him.  One day I got word that Yon had been murdered.  The shaman had ordered his death.  I told you about the power of pujuta.  That is why he was killed.  It was because Yon had taken the White Man’s ways. Yon was a martyr.  Our first convert was dead.

I tried to keep Genny and my children from knowing what happened.  Yon was not only my friend, but he was a friend of our entire family.  I can still see him kicking a soccer ball around in our yard with my kids.  I didn’t lie to my family.  I simply avoided telling them the truth.  I didn’t want the horrors of the jungle to come that close to home.

 

            I did not know what to think the first Sunday those families knelt for prayer.  I asked myself, “Can the Lord save these people kneeling here?”  I had no way to determine what was going on in the heart and mind of those seekers.  That was the Lord’s department.  Genny and I decided to treat those seekers as newborn babes in Christ, even though we did not approve of their heathen lifestyle.  Some critics think I was wrong.  “God cannot save a man with four wives.”  When I tried to find guidance and understanding from my church I didn’t get much help.  Now, years later looking back, I think we did the right thing.  Some of the children of those headhunters graduated from Bible School and today are pastors and wives of pastors of Nazarene Churches scattered across the jungle.

Genny and I frequently discussed how we could more effectively demonstrate to the Indians that Jesus was not just a dead man who came back to life.  Jesus was not some kind of a ghost.  He was the resurrected Savior and He lives with us today.  I found that to be a difficult concept to communicate to those people.“We are trying to find a way to make Jesus real.  How can they see Jesus as being a real person that we know is right here with us?   This is my idea. We should talk out loud to Jesus in the presence of the Indians.” 

 

Chomapi would be a good candidate for our experiment.   He was there working every day. When Chomapi came to work the next day I made a feeble effort to remind him that he was my friend and I was his friend.  I said, “I have another friend I want you to know.  His name is Jesus.   Jesus is my amíkich.  (intimate friend).”  I knew the word kumpagjínat, which means to have a friend.  Using that word I tried to say something like this: “Chomapi, Jesus wants to be your friend, and He wants you to be his friend.”  I told him I talk to Jesus every day. He listens to me.  That’s what prayer is.  “Before you go to work I want to talk to Jesus about you, Chomapi.”  I prayed a simple prayer in Spanish and tried to clarify some of the words in Aguaruna.  He left me to do the job I had assigned for him that day. friend. Every day I had a prayer with Chomapi.  I don’t know how much of my prayers he understood, but he knew I was talking to Jesus.  I think Chomapi began to feel that Jesus was right there, standing with us when I placed my hand on his shoulder and prayed.

Sunday came, and Shimbukat was there to translate for my weekly sermon.   After the service, when the crowd had gone home, something very special happened.  Chomapi asked Shimbukat to help him talk to the pastor. The three of us sat on a chapel bench and I heard that heathen Indian ask how he could become a creyente. (a Christian)  “I want to know Jesus,” he said. 

That Sunday afternoon the angels rejoiced in heaven over the news that the name Chomapi was written down in “the Lamb’s Book Of Life.”  My Bible says, “Anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

There was no Bible in Chomapi’s language, so I began discipleship classes with my Spanish Bible, even though he could not read it.  I wrote selected verses of Scripture in Spanish on index cards.  I did my best to explain in his language the meaning of those Scriptures.  He learned to read them.  He learned to pronounce the words in Spanish, and eventually understand the meaning.  I was amazed one morning when he came to work and quoted some of those Bible verses.  He had memorized them in Spanish. 

That Indian was happy in his new found faith, but was not content to keep it to himself.  I was both amazed and amused when I listened to that new Christian, trying to tell a heathen Indian working beside him about Jesus.

 

The Mission Board transferred our family to Uruguay on the other side of South America.   In Montevideo Genny and I were teachers in the Bible school.  I was named Bible school director. The new missionary family moved into the house I built.  The Garmans fell in love with the Aguaruna people just like we did.  They recently retired after 40 years of dedicated ministry to that tribe of Indians isolated in the Peruvian rain forest.  My hat is off to Dr. Larry and Addie Garman and their children for the fabulous work they did across those years.  They are a fantastic missionary family.

            A farmer can devote weeks and even months preparing his field.  He pulls out stumps, digs up roots, hauls off rocks, plows and harrows the field and plants a thousand dollars worth of seed.  Then he has to wait for the harvest.  When that farmer walks away from the field where he has invested so much time, effort and money he sees only dry, barren, lifeless ground.  But he has faith that what he planted will eventually produce a crop.  

            When Genny and I flew out of the jungle in that Cessna pontoon plane it was like that farmer walking away from a newly sown field.  Together Genny and I spent ten years of sacrificial labor planting the seed with only a handful of converts.  We saw no great evangelistic result from our efforts.  But, just like that farmer, Genny and I left confident that the seed we planted would bring forth abundant fruit.  It is true what God’s Word says, “Some plant, others water, God makes it grow.”

            Genny and I left Peru in 1965.  We had labored ten years preparing the ground and planting the seed in the Amazon rain forest.  Before we left I could see faint evidences of the seed beginning to sprout.  I saw it in the way families cared for their kids.   Men were beginning to show respect for their women.  Mothers brought their children to the mission when they were sick rather than take them to the shaman for his incantations.   People were learning Gospel songs and singing them from their heart.  I saw a decline in drunkenness and killing.  More and more young men were taking only one wife and establishing what appeared to be a more Christian home.  I would have liked to see more spiritual results.  We had weekly church services in the chapel, but we did not have even one Aguaruna pastor and not one church member.

Back then as a young, inexperienced missionary I began to form a missionary philosophy in my mind.  I wanted the church I was planting to grow out of the experience of those indigenous people and not be a foreign entity I was forcing on them.  Our goal was not to establish an independent indigenous church.  The budding congregations scattered throughout the Aguaruna tribe were part of a much bigger endeavor.  That group of converts, meeting with me along the Maranon River in Peru, was part of a worldwide church consisting of hundreds of thousands of members on every continent.  They were part of the church in Africa, India and Taiwan.  In time delegations of Aguaruna Indians would travel across the Andes to represent their people at an annual District Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene.  That was a bigger goal than establishing a so-called indigenous church on the banks of that river. 

             In the final chapter of this book I want to take you back to the same jungle so you can see some of the positive effects the Gospel has had on that primitive, heathen culture.  Forty years after Genny and I left that work I returned on four different trips to visit the Garmans and see the flourishing work of the Church of the Nazarene on the Upper Amazon River.  I rejoiced in what I saw.   I want to share glimpses of those trips with you.  Great and marvelous changes have taken place.  I don’t know how much of that harvest came as a result of the seed we planted.  Whatever fruit I might see today does not glorify this missionary.  It is God who makes it grow.