On Monday afternoon we arrived back at our “home” here in Salatiga after spending the weekend in a village about 30 minutes north of Salatiga, on the slope of Mount Oorung. We arrived there at about 10 on Saturday morning. We stayed with a remarkable family headed by a widowed mother, her daughter, and her niece. The village itself is small and strung out along the road going up the mountain. The pastor of the church there served as our guide and our translator. He is young, 32, and his wife is 3 months pregnant with their first child. His wife's father is the pastor emeritus of the church.
The daughter of our host is a remarkable young woman. She is 29 and works in a textile factory down on the main road. She is engaged to a young man who teaches at the Christian high school just up the road from our house. Her father died in 2005 of cancer. Two of her two sisters live nearby and are very present in the household. One sister lives next door and has a 3 year old daughter who is a real sweetheart! A third sister, age 22, is studying in Kudus to be a mid-wife, and she came home for the weekend.
On Saturday we walked around the village with the pastor and our 29 year old host. We saw the fields (rice and sweet potato) the church, and the pastor's mushroom growing facility. The church is a simple structure, although they are in the early stages of a building project. More on that later. The pastor has begun the mushroom farm with his brother as a way of attempting to diversify the local economy for his congregation. It was a simple but impressive operation.
After supper on Saturday we went to church for youth meeting. There were about 12 young people, from age 12 to 30 gathered. The meeting was lead by a young man from Sumatra who is a seminary student. It was remarkable to watch this group interact, with such a broad age range yet apparently completely comfortable with each other. One of the major activities that evening was a game of charades using Bible characters or events. It was quite fun!
This is a picture of the nativity scene at the front of the church. This was the last Sunday it was up. It is set inside Mount Merapi, the volcano that erupted causing such destruction this fall.
Church began at 7 on Sunday morning. I think everyone shook our hands before the service started. The service lasted 2 hours, and was lead by two of the women from the household we were staying in. There was a worship band with keyboard, bass guitar, and drums. There was also a powerpoint projector with which song lyrics were projected. This was quite helpful, as the language is fairly phonetic and Cathy and I could sing along much of the time. After the sermon, the pastor invited us to bring greetings and share a bit about ourselves. We were aided in this by some pictures that we had downloaded on Saturday night after a late-night motorcycle trip to an internet café. There was comfort in the flow of the worship service; the singing, praying, and preaching all seemed familiar even if the language was not.
Carrying fill out to the pick up truck to be transported to a local mosque, where it was used in the building expansion there.
After “breakfast” following the service, I went back to the church, where the congregation was gathering again to work at site preparation for the hoped for building project. Using buckets, we filled a small pickup truck with broken cement, soil, and rocks. In the end, we hauled out 5 truck loads of fill. I wonder, how would my congregation feel about spending time on a Sunday to work together? This really felt like the church being church...working together as a community. The amazing piece in this was that the fill was then taken from this Christian church over to a local mosque, where they were in the midst of a building project as well, and where they were needing fill. Clearly, these two religious communities worked together quite well, both at a structural level, where the leaders of the two communities were able to arrange for this sharing of resources, and at the lay level, where families might have both Christian and Muslim members. The family that lives next door to the church is Muslim, and provided some refreshment while we worked.
Children during the opening of Sunday School. Gotta love the little boy in the center of the picture!
At 3 on Sunday afternoon we observed the Sunday School hour which is held for the young children, and for which the youth group helps with music and teaching. Finally, in the evening some of the young people came over to our host home to sing and pray. We had a wonderful visit with two young men who are very active in the church, one as a seminary student and the other as a lay leader. The lay leader has applied to the IVEP program and hopes to come to the US or Canada next year. He was an especially wonderful young man, and I hope that he is successful in his application to IVEP. I told him that he should come to Virginia so we could spend more time with him.
Today we visited a Kindergarten and an elementary school to observe how teaching occurs. I won’t comment much on that except to say that the children are delightful.
It was a busy weekend, and we are thankful for the kind hosting we received, and for the many examples of God working through the church here in Indonesia.
Cathy will post more about what she is doing at the University.
