Evangelism at any cost

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One missionary's devotion to the Himalayas

Editor's note: The following story about a GR recording team suggests that our evangelistic urgency shows in how we react to Gospel-sharing barriers. Some barriers are physical, others are social, psychological or spiritual. After reading this story, see Hebrews 11:32 to 12:1. Then identify the obstacles that discourage you from witnessing for the Savior. Consider how you, with God's help, can overcome them. May our lives be guided by the evangelistic imperative. Don't sacrifice the eternal on the subtle, crumbling altars of the temporal.

Nepal may sound to most a place fit only for Indiana Jones and daredevil mountain climbers who want to scale Everest, but to American recordist Dan Rulison it was a field ripe with languages waiting for a Gospel presentation.

Rulison lived in Nepal -- a small country straddling the Himalayan Mountains between India and China -- from 1981 through 1990, working with his brother and some Nepalese coworkers to capture the message of Jesus for Gospel Recordings in many of the approximately 130 languages there. (Today, there's a GRN base in Kathmandu with several full-time Nepalese is still recording, distributing and evangelizing. About 35 dialects remain without Chistian recordings.)

The mid-1980s saw Rulison and his team of two or three on a trip to record the Newahang dialect of the Rai language. Rai contains between 30 and 40 dialects, and most needed recordings of their own. Rulison and his team knew the Rai:Newahang people who lived somewhere in the eastern part of Nepal, but "we didn't know exactly where."

They once took an all-night bus from Katmandu down through the mountains to a town not far from the flatlands. While in the area they joined with a local Christian pastor named N.D. Thulung, who spoke the Thulung dialect of Rai. (Rai peoples often take their dialect as their surname.)

Rulison needed a native speaker, even one who didn't know the target dialect, because it increased the chances of eventually communicating with the Newahang.

From N.D. Thulung's town the group took another bus high up into the mountains, and a two-day hike brought them to yet another town. They stopped in a tea shop and found out from the locals the Newahang's whereabouts. Rulison and his team hiked down to a huge river that flows out of Tibet, to find that their only transportation across was a manually-operated 2-by-2 1/2 foot cable car dangling 150 feet above the raging waters. While pulling themselves along, N.D. Thulung caught one of his fingers between the cable and the car's rusted pulley and "cut it right down to the bone," Rulison says.

"We learned a lesson: We really needed to pray."

Their prayers were answered when they met Kesar Singh Newahang the headmaster of a Newahang school on the other side of the river. The team played for him a Gospel recording they had already made in another Rai dialect, to communicate what they wanted to do in his native tongue. Kesar Singh's face lit up as he listened to the tape. "That's my brother-in-law speaking," Rulison recalled him saying. (Singh's brother-in-law, who lived hours away had shared the Gospel with him years earlier.) Though not a Christian, Kesar Singh agreed to be the voice on the Newahang recording.

Rulison and his team set up shop in a local mud hut ("the acoustics are very good inside") or under a nearby hay-covered platform, and during the next week they grabbed whatever time they could with Kesar Singh. They didn't use written scripts but carefully walked him through the material one or two phrases at a time until he was comfortable enough to say it in his own language. They recorded a variety of scripts-from the creation story through Christ's resurrection-on their 20-pound reel-to-reel recorder. The message found open ears. "We could tell that he was convinced that what he was saying was the truth," Rulison recalls. I don't believe he came to Christ at that point... but I'm sure the Lord was working in his heart. They edited Singh's collection of sentences down to one cassette's worth of material that they could duplicate later. Distribution was handled by other groups.

"We don't always go back ourselves, but we try to make contact with Christians who are interested in the people and are in closer proximity who can reach out to them," Rulison says.

Yet the impact of the cassettes is undeniable. "Those tapes have been real instrumental to people."