In Papua New Guinea, Haggai Leader Shelley Launa has spent the better part of her career proving that one equipped leader can reach places, people, and languages that no outside organization ever could.

Roughly 55% of Papua New Guinea’s population is illiterate, 97% are unemployed, and the tribal communities she serves are among the most isolated on earth. Even within the local churches, progress is slow. Many church leaders are territorial, blocking their congregations from outside teaching or Christian literature, which keeps the believers in the villages fragmented and weak. And despite the country’s enormous natural wealth in gold, oil, gas, timber and seafood, most of her people remain in poverty, cut off from the resources and education that could change their lives. 

In 2005, at one of the most difficult seasons of her life, Haggai Australia Pioneer, Carmen Nunn, sponsored Shelley to attend the Haggai Leader Experience in Maui, HI. The experience transformed her professionally and personally. The HLE taught her to give herself fully to God before setting any goals, and introduced her to a vision of leadership she hadn’t seen modeled in her own country. 

“If it wasn’t for my HLE in Maui in 2005, I would accept Christian nominalism as most professional women Christians do in my country.”

The HLE gave her a framework for training and equipping others, and she came home with clarity, courage and a sense of calling that has driven everything that has followed. 

Today, God is multiplying what she could never have built alone. The character solidified in the HLE showed up in the founding of a political party that is now in parliament, appointments to national governance boards and a university council, and in training programs that now reach into West Papua, Indonesia and across the Pacific. Looking back, Shelley sees the thread clearly of a God who kept opening doors and a Haggai community that gave her the tools, the language and the relationships to do it with integrity.

Through God’s great provision, Shelley is developing safe, affordable housing units for young professional women and a national women’s trading center that will become a hub for Gospel-centered leadership, women’s restoration and economic empowerment that reaches across Papua New Guinea and into the Asia-Pacific region. This project was first envisioned at a Haggai gathering in 2012, and inspired by her years working with victims of domestic violence her desire to prevent this type of abuse through women’s empowerment. 

“I spent 36 years [helping] abused women [get]  into safe houses, now I want to prevent professional single girls from getting into the problem of violent relationships. Especially those I mentored from girls to women in professional career development and training phase in their journey.”

After 36 years as a socio-economic development facilitator with the Australian Aid program, Shelley founded Starbrook Inc. in 2020, a faith-based organization built around her signature program, the Haus of Prayer for Nations. Through Starbrook, she designs and delivers training in literacy, family life skills, agriculture, environmental conservation and Christian leadership, targeting rural and tribal communities across all four regions of Papua New Guinea that have no roads, electricity or medical services. Her work spans 800 language groups and extends into the broader Asia-Pacific region, with a particular focus on equipping women and youth to live sustainably within their own communities.

She describes all of it through the lens of a challenge she took to heart from John Edmund Haggai: “Attempt something so great for God, it’s doomed to failure unless God be in it.” 

written by Leah Spivak