Indonesia
JAKARTA: INDONESIA’S “IBU KOTA” OR MOTHER CITY
New Team Members Welcome
We would love to welcome new team members, so if you feel God’s invitation as your read about our team and our ministry, please get in touch. We are particularly praying for a midwife to join our team.
Contact your nearest linking team to start a conversation, or click the button to read about the process of joining a team.
A Taste of Life in Jakarta
Jakarta is Indonesia’s capital city and also the largest city in the country with 10 million in Jakarta proper, and 30 million in the greater metropolitan area (it is the world’s second largest city agglomeration, with Tokyo being number one). Like many capital cities, Jakarta hoards more than its fair share of wealth. An estimated 80% of Indonesia’s wealth is in Jakarta, yet it only accounts for 10% of the nation’s population. Even so, Jakarta has the country’s greatest extremes between affluence and poverty. Eight-story shopping malls are surrounded by some of the country’s poorest urban slums. Over a hundred high-rise apartment buildings have popped up throughout the city, yet the U.N. calculates that at least 25% of the city’s residents live in slums.
A Brief History of Indonesia
For over 300 years, Indonesia was under Dutch occupation and was known as the East Indies Trading Company. During this time the Dutch and many other Western nations mixed together their efforts to advance their religion and economy. The outcome of this in Indonesia was that Christianity became virtually synonymous with Western domination and greed, while Islam flourished as an anti-colonial symbol.
In 1945 Indonesia became an independent country. Today, roughly 88% of the population are Muslim. Since the country has a massive population of 264 million people, this means there are more Muslims in Indonesia than in all Middle Eastern countries combined. Yet, Islamic beliefs and devoutness vary greatly throughout the country. For most parts of Indonesia, including Jakarta, Islam originally came from Muslim missionaries sent from India, not the Middle East. Therefore, for many Indonesians, their Islamic beliefs are mixed with mysticism (folk Islam). When you spend time in Indonesia, you quickly realize they are a deeply religious and gracious people.
In Servants, we hear God calling for laborers to choose His downward model of becoming a servant amongst the poor, living with them, and seeking the transformative power of Jesus Christ in their lives and community. Especially because Christianity in Indonesia tends to be associated with the exploitative West, we believe there is an urgent need for Christians to draw alongside the local church and model the nature of God’s kingdom. Instead of exploiting the poor, we want to empower the poor. Instead of seeking to become affluent off of Indonesia’s resources, we sense God inviting us to set aside our affluence in order to join God’s beloved poor in Indonesia.
Servants’ History in Indonesia: First Banda Aceh, Now Jakarta
Servants came to Indonesia in response to the tragic Tsunami of December 2004. Read more here.
The Servants Jakarta Team launched in October 2009, living in one of a cluster of slum communities. From the start, God very evidently was preparing the way for the team to live in this beautiful yet impoverished neighborhood. On the team’s first visit, an elderly Christian man spoke of how he was the only Christian in the otherwise entirely Muslim community and how he had been praying for years for God to send more Christians to this neighborhood. Sadly, before the team moved into this slum, this modern-day-Simeon had passed away. Additionally, the Servants Jakarta team were blessed to receive enthusiastic permission to move into the slum from the community and regional leaders who had previously denied any Christian charities from working in their communities because they had seen too many well-meaning groups cause more harm than good. These leaders greatly appreciated Servants’ desire to spend the first year simply learning from neighbors instead of immediately starting projects.
The first years were filled with much learning as well as many struggles. Two years after moving into the slum, the community began receiving letters about eviction. True to the fears of the neighbors, a devastating fire followed- most likely set on purpose to speed up eviction. After the fire, families rebuilt their homes, only to be evicted four months later and their new homes destroyed. It was a very large slum area, with over a thousand families forced to move. Today it is the location of a fancy shopping mall and apartment complex.
At the time of the eviction, some of the Servants team sensed God calling us to relocate with friends who were moving to a new slum community. That led us to our current squatter community; we moved along with fifty or so families from the first slum. In the first community we witnessed the death of a slum. In this second community, over the past seven years, we have watched the birth of a slum.
About the Current Team
Over the years, the Jakarta team has seen much transition but the Lord has been faithful. The slum community where we are located now has been the team’s home for seven years. A large portion of the slum is made up of garbage collectors and people who make their livelihoods through scavenging through trash for recycleables. Our neighborhood is almost entirely Muslim, and we long to see our friends meet Jesus.
The main ministry that the Lord has entrusted to us is House of Hope. This is a free kindergarten and afterschool program for kids in our neighborhood. We have around 30 kindergarteners each year, and around that many elementary school kids for the after school lessons. We use a curriculum that focuses on helping children learn to read in a fun and interactive way. Kindergartens are not free in Indonesia, so if House of Hope did not exist, most of these kids would start elementary school significantly behind their classmates. With the help House of Hope, our students are able to enter school confident and reading. We hope it gives them a head start in education that will encourage them not to drop out.
Other involvements in the community that have grown out of House of Hope are a weekly educational prenatal group and a weekly futsal club (indoor soccer).
Through living in the community and serving with House of Hope, our team has become well-known and much loved. Hundreds of families have been touched by House of Hope over the past seven years. As the slum continues to expand, however, we recognize our limitations and pray that our small efforts will be like yeast in the dough— may the Lord use our efforts, however small they seem in comparison to the needs we see, to bring transformation.
Our team currently is entirely Indonesian, with the exception of one foreigner. We are passionate about loving and serving our neighborhood, and long to see the Kingdom of God transform the lives of our friends here!
If you feel the Lord calling you to humbly love and serve in a Muslim context, please contact us for more information.
