Overseas Council Australia

The Week of Living Dangerously

It was the second week of the recent Iraq War (March, 2003). A few days before I left I heard Alexander Downer on the radio say that no Australians should go to the Indonesian city of Surabaya due to a credible threat to Australians on the following Sunday. Just one week later I was in Indonesia, in Surabaya, and of all places in McDonald’s. The sign said owned and operated by Indonesians but would that help?

My new job would take me all over Asia, but one step at a time. First I had to go to Indonesia, where due to Australia’s involvement in the war with Iraq, we are not the flavour of the month.

When I landed in Jakarta I was naturally a little nervous and even more so when my guide explained that the train station we were going to was right near the US Embassy. A few days later there would be 100,000 people protesting on the streets of the capital, but this day I could see just a few hundred and nearly as many police keeping order.

I was told of one instance of ‘sweeping’ the day before I arrived. That’s the local term for militant Muslims accosting westerners in a random ‘sweep’ of an area.

I couldn’t help think of the 1965 Marxist uprisings in Indonesia and the movie made about it ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’.

The irony about the whole thing was that it was not me that was really under any threat, but the Indonesian Christians who live there permanently.

My new position is heading up a small mission agency, which has the wonderful vision of providing money from Australia to fund theological colleges in the third world, especially Asia. We come alongside colleges that raise up nationals to evangelise their own country. It is a very cost effective way of furthering Christ’s Great Commission.

What I learnt on my first trip was the pressures of ordinary Christians in some parts of Indonesia, particularly when they want to do evangelism and church planting.

Let me tell you about just one college we support – Nusantara Bible College in Malang on the main Indonesian island of Java.

For just $1,600 a year Australian Christians can sponsor a future church planter and leader. This amount covers the costs of a student for tuition, accommodation and food (lots of rice, as I said to my wife “flavour without fibre”). In this case, the Bachelor’s course goes for five years. The last year is spent in the field, assisting with planting a new church. About 20% of students from the college plant their own church in the final year before graduation. The following year the graduates go on to plant churches somewhere in Indonesia.

And it works.

Did I mention that to graduate each student has to have 10 people converted and enfolded into their congregation? And this is no ‘easy believism’. Many of the converts are from Muslim or folk Muslim backgrounds where to become a Christian has costs in the community and family.

From this college alone there are nearly 100 new churches that have been planted.

It was a challenging experience to listen to one college student excited that his church could reopen the weekend before, after having been closed by the Muslim leaders of the town in concert with the Police. He was thrilled to show me the letter from the ‘mayor’ that allowed them to reopen.

This was one of several stories of persecution. I heard of rocks thrown during church services; rejection by families including disinheritance; police intimidation; refusal for permission to open a church; frequent opening of new large mosques next door to a small church; and, armed gangs threatening the college we support. All this is part of the background of church planting in Indonesia. Not that such opposition happens every time or everywhere, but there were many stories to suggest it is frequent.

My encouragement to Australian Christians is to pray for their brothers and sisters in Christ in Indonesia and of course support for church planting can be given through our mission.

By Rev Stuart Brooking