At one point during a training, he was blindfolded and taken to a remote location where a group of people pretended to be hostile villagers armed with spears. “Pack your bags, come to CPx, and get your world rocked by Jesus!” its Web site reads. In 2017, he joined All Nations, an organization based in Kansas City, Missouri, that trains missionaries to travel to remote locations. He became an accomplished outdoorsman and documented his feats of derring-do-chasing cougars, descending dangerous cliffs, and eating mysterious berries-on a blog called the Rugged Trail. He attended a private Christian high school in Washington State, and then Oral Roberts, a conservative Christian university in Oklahoma. When Chau was in high school, he learned about North Sentinel Island through the Joshua Project, an evangelical organization that focusses on reaching the world’s last “unreached” people he spent most of the next decade preparing to carry the gospel there. It is illegal to visit, and the country’s Navy patrols the surrounding seas to prevent visitors from landing. The Indian government maintains their isolation in order to preserve their culture and protect them from lethal microbes that outsiders might introduce. North Sentinel is home to an indigenous population of between fifty and a hundred hunter-gatherers. In the last two years, the Trump Administration has won favor with evangelicals by negotiating the release of American pastors who were arrested while proselytizing in Turkey and North Korea. The region is also known as the Resistant Belt, because many countries there make proselytizing illegal and, in some cases, punishable by death. Chau was part of a community of people who do extreme, sometimes undercover missionary work among the five billion people who live within the “10/40 window”-a term coined by a Christian missionary strategist named Luis Bush to describe a rectangular region of Africa and Asia that lies between ten and forty degrees north of the equator and is home to the majority of the world’s Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. John Chau, a twenty-six-year-old American missionary, was killed last month on North Sentinel Island, seven hundred miles off the coast of mainland India.
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