Indian authorities continued over the weekend to search for a way to recover the body of John Allen Chau, an American Christian missionary who was killed a week and a half ago by inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, an isolated island in the Bay of Bengal.

Authorities in India on Friday continued to search for the body of John Allen Chau, an American Christian missionary who was killed by island tribesmen known for their hostility to outsiders. After several visits to North Sentinel Island late last week to share Christianity with the island’s inhabitants, Chau, 26, returned a final time Friday. According to his journal, he had survived an arrow shot by one of the younger tribesmen on an earlier visit, noting that the arrow hit a Bible he was holding before he fled. “Would it be wiser to leave and let someone else continue,” he wrote.

Family members of an American missionary in northwestern Cameroon confirmed he died Tuesday after being caught in crossfire between security forces and separatists amid ongoing post-election violence in the country. Indiana native Charles Wesco arrived in the city of Bamenda less than two weeks ago with his wife, Stephanie, and their eight children.

In March 1994 Ray Rising disappeared into the Colombian jungle. FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) had abducted the Wycliffe missionary and radio technician. For the next 810 days, hard men with machine guns in their hands and murder in their hearts held him captive, constantly moving from camp to camp, always watching.

When the guerrillas released Rising in June 1996, he thought his ordeal was finally over. But Rising’s battle had only just begun.

In a residential neighborhood in Hanoi, Vietnam, church leaders of the Dao ethnic group gather in a newly built classroom to learn about Christian leadership.

Afterward they stream downstairs to a communal kitchen where attendees of a women’s training program are eating lunch, the room filled with sounds of Vietnamese and the Dao’s local dialect.

Up on a hill above the Tamsui River, past the renovated Fort San Domingo, stands Aletheia University, a quiet campus filled with leafy trees, an imposing neo-Gothic church with a 32-foot-tall pipe organ, and two pointed arches at its entrance. Walk through the arches, follow a winding stone path in a manicured garden, and cross a bridge over a koi pond, and you’ll reach a red brick schoolhouse, a blend of Western and Eastern styles of architecture. 

A Michigan judge last week ruled that a former Baptist missionary doctor accused of sexually abusing more than 20 minors in Bangladesh will not stand trial. Ottawa County Circuit Court Judge Jon Hulsing said Donn Ketcham, 87, is incompetent to stand trial, citing dementia and Parkinson’s disease, according to WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids, Mich.