Labu Miti villagers decommission historic church bell after 80 years

MORE than one hundred Evangelical Lutheran Church congregation members, sister churches and villagers from Labu Miti, Huon-Gulf, Morobe, gathered on Sunday to decommission an empty 1942 gas cylinder that was used as their church bell for many years.
The bell was a gas cylinder brought to Labu point in 1942 by Australian soldiers at their camp before the Japanese invaded Labu and took over the area during the Second World War.
Church leader Jacob Kelly said in 1942 the Labu villagers fled the fighting and went to Wuku and settled there and continued their normal lives and preached the Gospel.
In 1945, they had no bell for the Lutheran church so their chief ordered young men to go by canoe to Labu in search of a bell.
They found the cylinder and decided that it would make a good bell for them.
The young men took it in their canoes to Wuku and when they arrived at Basis, they started hitting the cylinder to signal the villagers that the bell had arrived. The men brought the cylinder and placed it in the middle of a crowd, shared a Word of God and blessed it as their bell.
Between 1945 and 1959, after the war had ended, people started relocating to the coast (now Labu One, Two and Three), built homes and expanded the village as more people arrived.
In 1960, village men from Labu paddled to Wuku and brought the cylinder bell to the coast of Labu. When they reached Labu Lake, along the mangroves towards the coast, they started hitting the bell (cylinder) until they arrived at the village where they hung it between two mango trees in the church area.
The bell was used in Wuku from 1945 to 1960 and in Labu from 1960 to 2023, served and helped spread the Word of God for almost 80 years.
Their cylinder bell had rusted and could no longer produce a sound, ending its duty to help spread the word of God in the church and had be decommissioned.
The church and the village of Labu have seen this bell as an important item that was used by their ancestors for church purposes.
Everyone watched as the bell was decommissioned and replaced with a new one after it was blessed by the pastor.
The journey of the ‘bell’ will always be remembered by the people of Labu and will be a story to tell to this generation and to others in years to come.