God works in many ways and what often is considered a coincident is anything but. The story of a 12-year old Maori girl, Tarore, of the Waikato tribe being given a copy of the Gospel of Luke in in her language is both tragic and awesome. The translation of the Gospel of Luke was completed in 1835 by The Bible Society and only 100 copies were printed including the one given to Tarore.
The story goes that the warring Rotorua tribe attacked Tarore's village killing her and taking her precious book. Eventually the Rotorua chief hear a translation of the gospel of Luke in his language and was converted. The convicted chief eventually made peace with Tarore's tribe resulting in many conversion to Christianity.
As for the text, “In his preface, Luke reveals himself as a historian. He describes the source materials to which he had access and the method he followed. Then he explains his purpose in writing. From the human standpoint he had two types of source materials—written accounts of the life of Christ and oral reports by those who were eye-witnesses of the events in His life.”
[Believer’s Bible Commentary]
The Gospel of Luke has been very successful as a witnessing tool. The Jesus Film (also simply called Jesus) produced in 1979 is a Biblical drama film that uses the Gospel of Luke as the basis for the story of the life of Jesus Christ. It was filmed on location in Israel and financed primarily by Campus Crusade for Christ with a budget of $6 million.
In 1981 American evangelist Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, created the Jesus Film Project Organization. The organization’s goal was to “Accurately translating Jesus into other languages and showing them around the world. The first translation was done for the Tagalog-speaking people of the Philippines. The organization works with thousands of missionaries around the world to show the film, sometimes to audiences who have never seen a motion picture. The Mandarin Chinese version of the film is widely distributed in China by the government-linked China Christian Council's Amity Foundation in Nanjing, both on VCDs and DVD.”
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_(1979_film)]
The Official Jesus Film Project Ministry Statistics – January 12, 2017 lists 1,501 as the Total number of languages available with an audience in the billions and more than 200 million people "Indicated decisions for Christ following a film showing."
[http://www.jesusfilm.org/about/learn-more/statistics.html]
The full movie, The Gospel according to Luke is located at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTb4UIbnOHE
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