In early May, the missionary counsellor visited Gereja Toraja Mamasa in Indonesia together with Rev Wim Wüllschleger of deputations for foreign churches. During a meeting with pastors in the port city of Makassar, challenges of the churches there were shared. It brought those churches very close.
Families
Makassar is a city of over one and a half million people. The Gereja Toraja Mamasa has thirteen churches there. We meet some of the pastors of those churches in the Efrata church building, right in the city centre.
The first thing that stands out in what pastors say about the churches they serve is that they always talk about how much families there belong to their church. Where we in the Netherlands talk about numbers of baptising and professing members, the pastors in Makassar talk about families. Of course, a family consists of several people, but we really hear in this something of 'me and my house', as Joshua talks about it in the Bible.
Rev Alexander Thomas, for example, serves a church where more than 600 families gather. The church is in a neighbourhood with a lot of Roman Catholic families, and its members work hard to be well known in the neighbourhood. They do this by regularly going through the neighbourhood and keeping the streets clean. The church's regular handyman is not a member of the church himself; he is Muslim. In this way, he comes into frequent contact with Christians and can see how faith is lived in the church.
A multicultural church
Rev Chris Sanda has been working at Moria Church, over three kilometres from Ephrata Church, for eight years now. One hundred and forty families are affiliated to the Moria church. Rev Sanda says his congregation does not resemble the average congregations of GTM. The members of his congregation are Chinese, and people from East Timor. His church is really a multicultural church, and he has the challenge in this regard that the families live very scattered across this metropolis. And then his church is not only under the ear of the minaret of one of the city's many mosques, but right next to it is a Buddhist temple and a Hindu temple. We get impressed by the situation Christians live in Makassar.
Challenges
Very different are the challenges of Rev Jakob Kilaundi's church. Most families in his church earn their living as pig farmers. But earlier this year, a disease broke out among the pigs, taking away their livelihood. In Indonesia then, there are no government schemes. As a result, most of the fathers left the church in search of work for their families. There are now only five fathers left in the commune.
Driving back to the hotel in the evening, we asked each other a question: what could we in the Netherlands learn from the different stories?
