Marshallese churches foster some very unusual beliefs. One day William Maddison, a Protestant deacon, tested Julian Aki: “In Philippians, Paul wrote that ‘every knee would bend to Christ, those in heaven, on the earth, and under the ground.’ My question is, ‘Who are those under the ground?’” (Phil. 2:10) When Brother Aki explained that they were the dead who would be resurrected, William was elated. He had been bothered by his church’s teaching that those “under the ground” were the ri menanui, “little people” who, according to Marshallese legend, came above ground only in the dead of night.

William immediately arranged for his family to study the Bible with Brother Aki, and he and his wife, Almina, were baptized together in 1966. He has served as an elder since 1983, and she has been a regular pioneer for 28 years, longer than anyone else in Micronesia.

With such local brothers as William and Sailass assuming responsibility, Julian Aki and Donald Burgess, a newly arrived missionary, were able to move on to Ebeye, a tiny atoll in the western Marshall Islands.