Sunday, July 18 - The Hok Im Tong church we are singing in today is part of a group of over 25 churches, mostly in Indonesia with essentially identical services every Sunday (worship songs, order of worship, scripture reading, sermon topic, etc.) founded by Caleb Tong, Stephen Tong's brother. We got up early to sing at their 7:30 AM service (we just couldn't make the 6 AM service). We then boarded our bus to sing at their other church near the universities at the 10 AM service. This second church is interesting in that 80% of the congregation are native Indonesian (instead of Chinese) and most of them are transient students, so they focus on converting these students and disciplining them before they go home in 4-5 years. Another interesting thing about both churches was that it was the Pastor's wife who preached. After the service, the Elders wanted to take us to lunch but we had already ordered box lunches delivered to the church so we declined. This gave us some time to rest and also rehearse our music before leaving to the Doctors' and Nurses' fellowship located fairly close to this church.
It turns out that this fellowship is called the Indonesian Missionary Fellowship (IMF), and has members from different professions who meet to do ministry. Every year, they do a short term missions trip to some unreached people group in Indonesia in some outlying island. They bring a team of doctors, nurses, dentists, counselor, and evangelist with the Jesus film and do a holistic ministry for about 2 weeks, living in quite primitive conditions. Last year, while they were there, not a person accepted the Lord individually, but after they left, the tribe made a group decision to follow Jesus and they had 200 some baptisms after the team left. This concept of group decision for salvation seems strange to westerners with their emphasis on individual decisions but well documented to missiologists. We had a great time of worship and did one of our longer programs, over 1-1/2 hours with Jeffrey, Janine, and Adi sharing powerful testimonies of answered prayers and encounters with the Lord plus a skit. Pastor Ben then gave a message of encouragement and we ended up praying for one another in small groups. We returned to our hotel to eat dinner about 7:30 PM and debriefed the day and did today's group devotion which we skipped this morning since we started so early. During debriefing, several shared that while we were discouraged at not having the chance to do more direct evangelism to Muslims, we gained the insight that perhaps God has sent us here to encourage believers who are doing the front line ministry like the IMF, the local churches, and the organization doing friendship evangelism. Indeed thinking back over the last week, we have received many words thanking us for encouraging the local believers. One lady told us that your choir is different from any other group she has heard, that God will use us to bless many because everyone sings from their heart. It is also clear that we were really not adequately prepared to evangelize Muslims, so this has been a good learning experience for us. We did meet a lady at the IMF meeting who is coordinating prison ministries in the Bandung area, so we are now going to visit a men's prison Tuesday and a women's prison on Wednesday, during time slots which were open (but God certainly has His plans for us even if we did not know it). We are excited about these new opportunities for ministry.
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