Our Witchdoctors Are Too Weak: A Book Review

For me, biographies are usually hit 'n' miss. I purchased a little biography of Eric Liddell for a few dollars at the missions conference I went to in St. Louis. It's probably the worst written bio I've ever read. Now, I love learning about missionaries and hearing about their work, but it was very poorly written. So poorly written I gave up reading the book about a third of the way into it.

When I was in high school, I read one called "Peace Child" by Don Richardson that I found amazing. I also remember my mom reading missionary biographies about William Carrey and George Mueller that made us cry or laugh at some points.

Our Witchdoctors Are Too Weak was fantastic. Davey Jank is a missionary/linguist with New Tribes in the Amazon working with the Wilo people.

I found the preface misleading, but the purpose of the book is revealing day to day struggles that Davey had. Things like trying to learn a culture nobody else had studied. Things like trying to figure out how the language's counting system worked. The struggles of a missionary and a linguist (yay!). He presents his linguistic struggles in non-linguist (for the most part) terms but still keeps it interesting and amusing for the trained linguist (or so I thought).

Davey is very witty in his presentation of some of his struggles. For instance, he has an entire chapter about his trouble with a particular suffix. But he presents it metaphorically. I laughed so hard during that particular chapter that I forced my brother to listen while I reread it.

I've never read a missionary biography quite like this one.
By far, the last couple chapters were my favorite. Davey is very honest about his feelings of inadequacy and, well, fear of sharing the Gospel with the Wilo people for the first time. I found it really encouraging. I'm not the only one who's gonna feel like they're in over their head.

2 Corinthians comes to mind: "Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (3:4-6).

It's not about us. It's about God. He chooses us for His own reasons. I also think He purposely chooses us because we are inadequate. He uses us to bring knowledge and His Spirit totally takes over from there.


You can purchase this book by following this link.