Mosaic Mennonites

Missional - Intercultural - Formational

Indonesia

Interspace – Courage to Stand Between

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By Marta Castillo, Leadership Minister of Intercultural Formation

“Inter” words are familiar to most of us – interact, interdependent, intermission, intertwine, international, intercede, intercultural, etc.  Based on the Latin, “inter” means “between,” “in the midst of,” “mutually,” “reciprocally,” “together”.  Interspace is an adventure of new learnings, a place of possibility, sharing, rest, and reconciliation, but it is also a space that is unnerving, humbling, uncomfortable, and challenging.

Since the end of 2017, when I resigned from a pastoral role at Nueva Vida Norristown New Life, I have been living in the space between church homes and between work roles. It was strange and exciting to know that in this in between space, I could visit other churches and experience worship and Word in new ways. However, there was no church home because I was “in between”. The ministry that I was involved in was my responsibility no longer and it was freeing to dream and envision what shape my role will take as Leadership Minister of Intercultural Formation with Franconia Conference, but hard to leave behind the relationships that I had nurtured for years. In the first two months of 2018, I was in interspace, in between, waiting for my new role to begin. Then in the beginning of March, I began my international adventure with a trip to Indonesia with the purpose of studying Indonesian, a language that I had once learned and spoken as a child, to enhance my future intercultural ministry within the conference.

What an experience! The food, the culture, the language, and the people brought my childhood in Indonesia flooding back. I kept moving between being so comfortable and so uncomfortable, so quickly it was disorienting. I was delighted to experience familiar tastes, words, and culture while feeling so humbled as a person who was learning a language and speaking it so poorly and who didn’t know the cultural expectations, so I embarrassed myself. This interspace of being in a different country required courage, creativity, willingness to fail, and engagement with people who were different. It was the perfect connecting space between my past experiences and my future hopes and ministry.

A young friend of mine shared with me recently of her journey towards learning to stay in the interspace, the space between, like the Saturday between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, holding onto the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross while celebrating the power of the resurrection.  It takes courage to stand “between”.  Isn’t that exactly what Jesus has done through his life, death, and resurrection?  Even now, Jesus “intercedes” comes and goes between God and us, to keep that interspace holy and righteous.  Romans 8:34, “Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.”

Furthermore, we are invited to share the same interspace of intercession, interrelationship, and interconnectedness for deeper relationship with others.  1 Timothy 2:1-3, “I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people—for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.”

In our conference, we have a shared priority to be intercultural, meaning that we seek to connect, stand, and live in the space between the cultures represented in our conference and the world.  This is different than being multicultural which advocates for equal respect and promoting cultural diversity.  When “multi” is not enough, we seek “inter”. With multicultural, we still have a sense of “us and them”.  With intercultural, a between space is created where “we” belong. Our conference priority is for networking and cultivating intercultural ministry relationships. This process is described as “including an assessment of current and emerging relationships that work cross-culturally while building further capacity toward mutually-beneficial relationships among ministries and congregations. Increasingly, these relationships will be defined by reciprocity and transformation rather than paternalism and patronization.  Relationships will be built around both work and celebration, both doing and being together.” Read more about some of Franconia Conference’s intercultural and multicultural work here.

Indonesia pioneer partnership bears lasting fruit

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By Richard Showalter, reposted by permission from Mennonite World Review

Indonesia-mission
Yesaya Abdi, left, of Indonesia and Richard Showalter of the U.S. ride a Dayak long boat in Kalimantan with Indonesian co-workers. — Photo by Tilahun Beyene

In 1978 Luke and Dorothy Beidler moved to Kalimantan, Indonesia — where the Dayak people live along wide rivers in a great tropical forest — as pioneer missionaries with Eastern Mennonite Missions.

In a groundbreaking partnership between an Anabaptist mission agency in the global South and two from the West, the Mennonite Mission Board of Indonesia (PIPKA), EMM and Mennonite Central Committee united to send the Beidlers and others from Indonesia and the U.S.

Paul and Esther Bucher were appointed by MCC in 1979 from the U.S. From PIPKA came Pak Darmono in 1977, followed by John Reiner Paulus in 1978 and Gusti Ngurah Filemon in 1980.

EMM already had a long history of sending workers to places where the church did not yet exist, and PIPKA was fired with the same vision. Together they went to West Kalimantan, a region of Indonesia to which Islam had come 300 years before but where a high percentage of its people still followed their traditional religion. MCC contributed skills in community development as well as in verbal Christian testimony.

The Beidlers found in Kalimantan a people who knew of, but did not worship, God.

“God speaks to us through the birds,” the villagers said. “Some are evil, and others are good. When we hear the chirping of the evil birds, we do not go to our fields for three days, and we must sacrifice pigs. We fear the birds.”

The Beidlers learned the Dayak language and began to share the Good News. Traveling by boat and sometimes living on the water in a bandung (house boat), they began initiating fellowships of new believers.

“We heard that when Jesus was baptized, a bird from heaven descended on him, and this was a special sign to us who feared the birds that God himself had come to us,” said believers at Jelemuk, a neighboring congregation. “We no longer fear the birds.”

Now 35 years later there are 19 PIPKA congregations scattered along the region’s rivers.

A team from the International Missions Association, a group of Anabaptist mission bodies, visited the region in March. It consisted of Yesaya Abdi, chair of PIPKA and president of IMA; Dri Soesanto, regional director for PIPKA; Tilahun Beyene, coordinator of IMA, and Richard Sho­walter; IMA coach and president emeritus.

Since EMM and MCC disengaged from ministry in the region years ago, little has been reported in the West. However, the seed sown then and now by PIPKA is far from dormant.

Long-remembered legacy

Everywhere the team went, people remembered the Beidlers, now members of Methacton congregation.

“They spoke our Dayak language, and they spoke it well,” said Pastor Hendrikus Kipa of Melapi.

The Beidlers’ and Buchers’ willingness to live among the Dayak villagers in primitive conditions is long remembered.

“Go back home to the United States and say thank you to the people who sent Luke and Doro­thy,” said Petrus Kipa, a young pastor and the son of Hendrikus.

“My grandfather heard the gospel from pastor Luke and met Jesus,” he said, close to tears. “As a result, my father became our pastor at Melapi. And now I’m a grandson in the gospel because of that witness.”

Today many churches comprise half a village’s population. At worship gatherings, the benches are filled with children, fathers, mothers, grandpas and grandmas. Village chiefs are staunch members of the congregations.

In the village of Uchung Bayur, Pastor Yusak Sudarmanto led the people in preparing an elaborate ceremony of welcome to the team of visitors from Jakarta, Ethiopia and the U.S. Dancers led a procession to the meetinghouse, festooned with palms, lights and ribbons. Seventy-five children formed a great choir.

The congregation Sudarmanto leads dominates the spiritual life of the village, but this brings challenges as well as rewards.

“What do I do when two of the candidates for village chief are in my congregation and they want our support against other candidates?” he asked. “I believe it would harm the church to take sides politically, but threats come if I don’t.”

Abdi, Soesanto, Beyene and Showalter offered encouragement and prayer, noting that tough political questions can torture church leaders in Kalimantan forests as well as in Jakarta and Lancaster, Pa.

Sharing reports

The visiting team did more than observe. They preached, sharing reports of growth and opposition in the global church, with a special focus on Ethiopia and the Middle East. The villagers turned out in force even at inconvenient hours.

After visiting the PIPKA congregations, the team made its way to the isolated mountainous region of Silat Hulu, where PIPKA had been invited for a conference of pastors and revival meetings among churches planted by Worldwide Evangelization for Christ missionaries.

Abdi used peanuts to illustrate financial giving. Beyene told stories of the Ethiopian underground church to people who had never heard of Ethiopia.

Dri Soesanto, the PIPKA regional administrator, frequents the Putussibau region, helping maintain contact with the national and global Anabaptist community.

“The mission to Kalimantan is a model for partnership between agencies from different nations,” Abdi said. “Decades later, the fruit keeps growing.”