REACHING THE UNREACHED

Have you ever imagined a trip back in time? Have you ever dreamed of exploring a native village that hasn't changed from its primitive past? Have you ever thought what it might be like to take the Gospel to an unreached people group? Since 1972 Barry Blackstone, a pastor from Maine, has imagined, dreamed, and thought of doing just that again. Those imaginations began with a trip to the deserts of Western Australia (recorded in his published book The Region Beyond) to minister to an Aboriginal tribe that had just been reached, but it wasn't until 2022 that this dream was fulfilled once more. Travel again with Pastor Blackstone to the remote tribal villages in Chhattisgarh and Kerala, India. Experience again the thrill of proclaiming God's word to villagers so removed from the modern world that the only way to reach them is by foot. It was on this trip that this pastor of fifty years learned why the apostle Paul said, "How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things" (Rom 10:15). Share in a baptism in a concrete water storage tank for goats; witness the first graduation of an institute educating natives to reach their own tribes with the good news of Jesus Christ; experience the thrill of preaching to four native churches on one's seventy-first birthday; walk over a forest trail, up a steep incline, through virgin trees for nearly a mile before coming to a hidden hamlet were many of the people live in trees; then return to the modern world to be the graduation speaker for the fourth time at Kerala Baptist Bible College. The contrasts will be epic, the connections will be eternal, and the cultures will be eye-opening. This was Pastor Blackstone's sixth journey into the unknowns of India, and perhaps his most dramatic!