In a highland village in Papua New Guinea's Eastern Highlands Province, a community of about eighty people had never heard a church service. No missionaries had reached them. No road connected them to the nearest town. Their only contact with the outside world was a monthly supply helicopter.
The Satellite Dish
In 2023, a development organisation installed a Starlink dish in the village as part of an internet access initiative. The primary purpose was educational — connecting the village school to online resources. But the signal reached beyond the school.
A young man named Kopi, who'd learned basic English through the school programme, was exploring the internet on a shared tablet when he found a livestream of a Hillsong service in Sydney. He'd never seen anything like it — the music, the crowd, the passion. He gathered his family around the tablet.
The First Hearing
The service was in English, which only Kopi partially understood. But the worship music transcended language. The villagers watched, transfixed. When the camera panned across thousands of people singing with their hands raised, Kopi's grandmother asked: "Who are they singing to?"
"They call Him Jesus," Kopi said.
Over the following weeks, Kopi found more services online — some with subtitles, some in Tok Pisin (which the village understood better). He also found the Bible in Tok Pisin. He read it aloud each evening under the solar light.
The Village Church
By the end of 2023, thirty-seven people in the village had decided to follow Jesus. They meet under a tree on Sunday mornings, stream a worship set when the satellite signal allows, and Kopi reads scripture. They're not connected to any denomination. They've never met a pastor in person.
When a visiting development worker asked the village chief about the change, he said: "A metal dish on a pole brought us a signal from the sky. Through that signal, we heard about a God who made the sky. Now we talk to Him every morning."
The development organisation has since facilitated a visit from a Papua New Guinean pastor who's helping train Kopi as a village church leader.
"The internet can carry anything," Kopi says. "It carried us the best thing in the world. We found God on a screen — but He was already here. We just didn't know His name."