Missions Insider Podcast

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Matra, said to be the largest most unreached island in
the world, less than one percent Christian. In the prayer
is that someday there would be public worship of Jesus
in all these places. And the Ministry Indigenous Ministries we're
working with in Indonesia, that's their vision.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Welcome to Missions Insider podcast and Inside Look at the
World's most difficult Mission Fields. All right, today we welcome
back David Bogosian President and CEO for Christian a mission.
He's going to be sharing about his recent travel to Indonesia.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Welcome David, Thank you Christy. I'm excited to be here
with you guys today. After Cambodia, I went to Indonesia,
which is a land of over seventeen thousand islands, and
so as you fly into Indonesia you get a kind
of a view of that there's just coastline everywhere. It's

(01:00):
an island nation. And I was visiting the island of
Java and Sumatra. Sumatra is said to be the largest
most unreached island in the world, very little Christian presence
in many of the places in Sumatra, and we're supporting
a work there which I will not specify but it's

(01:24):
an amazing work among some of the larger unreached people
groups in the island of Sumatra. Indonesia has what we
call a number of mega unreached people groups. These are
people people groups and the millions of population that are
very unreached with the gospel. Most of them are less
than one percent Christian. Even one percent would be a

(01:45):
large amount. It's just points zero zero, you know, type
of situation. And it's very difficult to evangelize in many
places in Indonesia because of just the community persecution that
is there. There are a lot of Christians in Indonesia.
There are millions of Christians in Indonesia from various people groups,

(02:07):
most of them from an animistic background, and the people
groups that are Muslim are very proud of their Muslim heritage.
One of these groups, like the Achenese, they regard themselves
as the guardians of Islam, and they're very much in
tune to what is happening in the Muslim world. When
things like the current war in Israel are happening, they

(02:31):
have protests in Indonesia. They see themselves as being almost
fundamental and their belief, even though that is more of
a recent thing. You might even say that much of
Indonesia is kind of a recent conversion to Islam. Islam
has been there for centuries, but it's only been in

(02:53):
recent times when you have had missionaries start to come
over from the Middle East that they have become more
Islamic in their outlook and their beliefs and their practices.
And so, just as we were saying in Cambodia, underlying
Buddhism you have animism, which is very powerful in people's lives,
the same thing is true in Islam, and especially in

(03:17):
a place like Indonesia, and these animistic forces are even
more compelling for Indonesian people than Islam, and it is
something that you have to deal with and confront as
a missionary. The indigenous missionaries that are there, they have
to deal with both of those things. And the significance

(03:38):
of that is you have an ideology which is anti Christian.
Islam is very anti Christian in its outlook, but you
also have these spiritual powers that are there that confront
you when you go into a place that don't want
you to be there. And so the missionaries that we
work with there, they spend a lot of time in prayer,
They're outdoing evangelism every day. It's a very unique approach.

(04:02):
They are daily going out to find people, new people
to share the gospel with. This is not easy, and
so they'll go out and they'll introduce themselves. They have
a kind of a strategy, if you will, for how
to begin conversations with people and how to share the
gospel with people in that context. Obviously, you cannot go

(04:23):
up to somebody in Indonesia in many of these contexts
and just say, hey, I'm here to tell you about Jesus.
You have to start differently than that. But it's basically
friendship evangelism. But at the end of that conversation, they're
going to hear the gospel. And so these guys are
out there every day, every week, every year. They're sharing

(04:43):
the gospel with hundreds and thousands of people of that course,
and you know, it's kind of in one way, it's
kind of slow going in the Muslim world. It's not
like in other places where you can have open air
evangelistic crusades. It can only be done one on one
and so many times. What will happen is you'll get
to know this person, You'll find out what they're going through.
And then you'll pray for them, similar to what we

(05:04):
were saying in Cambodia, where people are responding because of prayer,
and this is what's happening also in the Muslim world
and especially in Indonesia. People are coming to know Jesus because
he's answering prayers for them on their behalf. And so
getting to know what people are going through, getting to
understand their heart and what their challenges are, and allowing

(05:24):
Jesus to touch them at that level, at that emotional
and spiritual level, is what is most important. Because ideologically
they have all of these apologetics against Christianity. They're taught
that Jesus is not the son of God, Jesus did
not die on the cross, the Bible has been changed.
All of these things they have already there. So the

(05:46):
moment you start talking, if you just go and you
start talking about Jesus, they've already been pre programmed to
reject him as their savior. And so you have to
allow Jesus to touch them first. You have to allow
them to see Jesus and to feel and experienced Jesus,
and then they become open to who he is. And
that is what's happening in Indonesia, and there's actually a
huge harvest that's coming in Indonesia post pandemic. It's really

(06:11):
interesting how God has used the pandemic. We talked about this,
you know, in Cambodia, how God used the pandemic to
prepare the way for this broadcast, and the same thing
is happening in Indonesia. God used that period of time
to accelerate the gospel and there are hundreds now of
house churches that did not exist pre pandemic. So it
really is an amazing time of harvest and growth.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
So you were talking about a strategy that the missionaries
have for evangelism other than someone just flat out rejecting Jesus,
if they just went right on ahead and shared the
gospel without building that friendship, are there any other risks
that the missionaries are taking by sharing Jesus other than
just being rejected.

Speaker 1 (06:55):
Absolutely, I mean it is considered to be an affront
for them to even be there. So think of a
place where there's no Christian presence. You only have Muslims,
you only have a mosque, and for Christians to even
go there and be in those places is a challenge.

(07:15):
But then when they find out you're there to tell
them about Jesus. That can create an even bigger challenge
for those people. So they are every single day they
are taking those risks for the gospel, and they do
that because they know that Jesus loves those people and
they need to hear the gospel. Everyone should hear the
gospel at least once. And you have millions of people

(07:36):
in Indonesia who haven't even been given their first opportunity
to receive Christ. And one of the challenges that missions
faced in Indonesia in the past is that they didn't
share the Gospel with enough people. And so as a
result of that, and looking back, we realize this is
why we weren't getting to church. We weren't getting that

(07:56):
critical mask because we weren't sharing the Gospel with enough people.
And the challenge there is, of course, what we were
just describing. It is not easy to go into a
place where you're not welcome, where you're not wanted, and
to share Jesus with everybody, right, And so what happened
is that missionaries in the past is they would stay
in one place and they would try to develop as

(08:17):
many meaningful relationships as they could in that place, but
that was not getting to church. That wasn't getting to
that critical mass because you could only get to know
so many people. So this approach is actually kind of
unique and it's kind of an experiment, but it's working
and it's resulting in more people coming to Christ and
more house church is being planted because more people are

(08:39):
being exposed to the gospel. And in many ways it
kind of follows the instructions that Jesus was giving to
those seventy evangelists that he sent out, and he sends
them out and they go from village to village, and
in many ways, it's like what Apostle Paul did. He
didn't stay in one place for that long. He goes
from place to place. He looks for the people that

(09:00):
are interested, that are seekers, and then he gathers them together. Now,
it's not to say that this other approach is wrong.
It's not wrong to stay in a place for a
long time and to build, you know, meaningful relationships. That's okay,
that's fine. But when you are when you're dealing with
people groups that are millions in size, do you have

(09:21):
kind of a little bit of an advantage there? In
one sense, because in any group of people, you know
there are going to be seekers of the gospel because
Jesus is drawing people to himself, and the Bible makes
that clear that God is sovereign over salvation and so
our job, our task is to find those people. Right.

(09:44):
That's how the first church gets started. And it always
is going to be a small group of people. Right.
So imagine you know you're dealing with a people group
of ten million people. Right. If you just stayed in
one place, in one village of five hundred people and
that's all you did, well, you're probably going to reach
a few people in that place, right, less than one percent.

(10:06):
But imagine you spread that out now over one thousand
villages over ten twenty years. You can then see a
critical mass emerge. And what's important about that is that
it's from that group of people where you're going to
see your pastors and your evangelists and your teachers. The
fivefold ministry is the Bible talks about. You're going to
see those giftings begin to emerge when you get a

(10:28):
larger pool of believers coming together.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
So what does the church look like in the area.
Are there house churches established churches because of the persecution.
What does that look like.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
So right now in all of these areas, what you
have are small groups what you could call house fellowships. Now,
the vision, the dream, and the prayer is that someday
there would be public worship of Jesus in all these places.
And the ministry and indigenous ministries we're working with in Indonesia,
that's their vision and their dream and one of the
people groups that they're working among where they now have
two hundred house fellowships, that is their dream for this

(11:02):
next year and something to pray for. They're actually going
to try this to do public worship of Jesus, and
that is not easy to pull off. You know, I
was visiting a ministry in Bangladesh that's doing this and
they are willing to take the risk to do public
worship of Jesus in a Muslim context. And what they
figured out is if they can keep a church building

(11:26):
intact and not burnt down or destroyed within a year,
if they can keep it alive for a year, they
can keep it existing for a year, it can go
on forever because it just becomes accepted by the community
over time. They see, okay, this is a community of
people that's doing good to our community. And it's one
of the reasons I believe Jesus told us to go
out and do good. But I said, Jesus went around

(11:48):
doing good, and Apostle Paul said, go do good to everybody. Right.
This is I think part of the strategy of the Gospel,
and part of what Jesus wants us to do, is
he wants us to go out and love people. It's
part of the way that he builds his church because
he's building this community that is a light. He said,
let your light shine before men, that they may see

(12:10):
your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. So
he wants us to be these people that are going
out and loving the people around us. And when they
come and they see where does this come from, it
points all back to him. They come and they see worship.
That's why public worship is so important. In tandem with
going out and loving the community. That's when you begin

(12:31):
to see the fire spread, you begin to see the
breakout of the gospel when those two things are happening
at tandem.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
Could you give us an example of friendship evangelism. I mean,
I'm just imagining I was one of these people in
Indonesia and I hear a knock on my door and
there are two strangers there. I don't know who they are,
where they came from. Can you kind of walk us
through what that looks like for the missionaries?

Speaker 1 (12:56):
Actually, actually it's more simple than you might think. Right first,
you might look at it and you're like, wow, how
do you build a friendship in a day with somebody?
Right Well, in a culture like Indonesia, in places like this,
when you love people, they love you back. They they're
they're reciprocal cultures. And so what they do is they
go and do very practical things. They have. They have

(13:18):
a whole toolkit of things that you know, ministries like
ours are empowering them to do. So they can go
into places and they can say, hey, is there anybody
here who has some medical needs? Anybody here who has
the eye? Vision isn't a great example? You can you
can make eyeglasses for people very very easily. You know,

(13:40):
there's there's a number of different things that they can
do with people to have them be welcome into their
home and almost become lifelong friends. It happens very quickly
in these cultures, unlike you know in our culture where
it can take us a long time. You know. You you
go to New York City maybe and people aren't even
smile at you, right, But in other cultures friendships can

(14:04):
happen much faster. Now obviously, it's not like it's like
a friendship where Hey, I've known you for twenty years
and I'll give you my house, right, you know, but
I'll welcome you into my house because you're here to
love me, You're here to serve us. And that opens
the doors and the opportunities for people to share about Jesus.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
What would you say the biggest prayer needs are for
that area? How can we be praying?

Speaker 1 (14:30):
Yeah, I think one of the big things is for
believers that have come to faith, how they share the
gospel with their friends and their family. This is the
main thing. If people can overcome that fear, you can
see momentum start to happen in the Muslim world. And
fear is the biggest thing. It's palpable. You can feel
it when you walk into a Muslim community. There is

(14:51):
a spirit of fear that rules over people. And when
Jesus comes into the picture and he breaks those bondages,
especially that bondage of fear or it is so powerful.
And when people can't be shut up by fear and
they are just what we call gossiping the gospel, right,
they're just going around and telling everybody how awesome Jesus is.

(15:12):
That's when you begin to see huge momentum and that's
what we need to happen. And many places Indonesia we're
still praying for that gospel breakthrough moment to happen. And
really it comes down to the new believers having this
fearlessness to go out and share Jesus with everybody. So
that's a big prayer. Second prayer is, you know, for
the missionaries themselves, that God would sustain them. There. As

(15:36):
we were saying about Cambodia, there is a physical weariness
that can come up on you, a fatigue of day
in and day out. You know, these guys will travel
in a gaven day, they might travel one hundred miles
let's say, to go share Jesus in a new village
and doing that day in and day out, that can
wear you down, right, and so we need to pray

(15:58):
just for their physical strength. Often we don't think about
that as being a prayer request, right, There's other things
but that's just a really practical thing that they're confronted
with every day. So we need to pray just for
physical strength, and then of course we need to pray
that God would open doors for them, opportunities and all
of these places. He would lead them to the right people.

(16:18):
And of course they themselves, they pray every day, they say, God,
lead us to the right people. What Jesus called the
man of peace. They're looking for that person of peace
that was as a seeker that will be open, that
will become the gateway really for the Gospel to enter
into a community. You think of the Samaritan woman at
the well. She was the person of peace that introduced

(16:39):
Jesus to an entire village. And that's what you're looking for.
You're looking for that one key person. So that is
what should be our prayer, that God would lead them
to that woman at the well, Lead them to that person,
you know, buy his fishing boat. Who is the person
that will come the gateway for the Gospel in that place.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
So do missionaries and Christians risk being persecuted by the
government as they do in other Muslim countries, or is
the persecution mainly coming from their own communities and families
and friends.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah, it's more of the latter. There is a general
openness to Christianity because there are so many Christians in Indonesia.
At the same time, you know, one of the things
that missionaries have to deal with are local governments. So
you have local law and you have a national law,

(17:33):
and sometimes the local law is a law into itself.
Doesn't matter that there's freedom of religion in the country.
If they decide that you're disturbing the peace, they'll throw
that law at you, you know, And so that's always there.
But at the same time, it's amazing how the grace
of God covers his people, covers his missionaries, and how

(17:55):
he can even turn persecution into something that is good.
There is almost in almost every case, God uses persecution
to advance the Gospel. And you know, like my background
as an Armenian person, you would look at that and say, okay,
fifty percent of your population was killed for their faith,
how does that serve the gospel? Right? And you know,

(18:16):
you can make a case that that was devastating, that
was over the top persecution. But at the same time,
the scattering that took place from that Armenians being sent
all over the Middle East. And then how God has
used them in those places. You see how it furthered
the Gospel where they were scattered. Now it eliminated the
church in Turkey where they were, and yet it resulted

(18:37):
in the church being established in other places. And so
that is what you see. You see it in the
Book of Acts. When the scattering happened in Jerusalem, it
looked like the church in Jerusalem was being eliminated, you know,
it said only the apostles remained right, and so everybody
else was scattered. And yet that resulted in the church
going all over the place. And so the same thing
happens in a place like Indonesia. If people leavers are

(19:01):
persecuted and they're forced out of their village, well they're
going to go some other place, and God's going to
use them, and he's sovereign over that. And so God
always wins. Is the point. Even though there's persecution, even
though it might look like a setback. In the end,
God said, I will build my church and the Gatesville
can't prevail against it. So He's going to triumph even
in the midst of whatever persecution happens.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
Can we go back a minute you talked about, you know,
praying for missionaries that sometimes travel one hundred miles in
a day. What does that look like, is it rule?
Are they on motorcycles? That, are they in cars? How
are they doing that?

Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, so if they can take public transportation, that's usually
going to be your go to And that's a great
thing because you can share the gospel on the bus,
you know, or whatever it is. So you know they're
going to places. Yes, they are mostly rural, these are villages.
There's a lot of people that live along the coast
in Indonesia, so they might be sharing the gospel with

(19:57):
fishermen who are out, you know, doing something with their nets.
You know. Just you know, even in my own personal evangelism,
when I will go onto a campus or to a mall,
I will look for that person who's just sort of
standing by themself, you know, and I will go talk
to that person. I usually find the most opportunity with that.
There's always going to be opportunities in all of our

(20:18):
lives and every moment of every day where we are
witnesses for Christ, there's going to be somebody out there
who is just needing to hear about Jesus. I remember
the first time I shared the Gospel with somebody in
my high school in Passing in California. And he was
this young kid. He was just sitting there by himself.
He looked really lonely, and I was like, that person,

(20:38):
he's Jesus. And within five minutes he was praying to
receive Christ. And so, you know, that's how God works
is he has those those moments, those encounters. They has
that woman at the well, you know, like the Samaritan woman,
and she was all there by herself, she was maybe
an outcast from her village, and then she leads her
whole village to Christ right, and so that that's what

(21:00):
That's what happens in these context is that in every place,
we are guaranteed there is going to be somebody there
that is open, somebody that's seeking, somebody that desperately needs Jesus,
and that's what they're willing to go that distance, travel
that one hundred miles to go find that one person,
just like Jesus did in Samaria.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
That's interesting. Would would you be able to share a
little bit about just the cultural experience of being in Indonesia.
You said you were on Sumatra and Java islands. So
were those two islands similar, different, or just what was
it like being there.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
It's a magnificent place. It's tropical, and so if you
like tropical climates, you're gonna love Indonesia. I lived ten
years in the Philippines, so it felt like home almost.
I think of the Philippines as a second home, and
so it was like I was seeing all of these
things that were so similar between the Philippines and Indonesia.
That was a cool part about it. You know, these

(21:57):
are two worlds that have been separated by, you know,
thousands of years in one sense, and yet because they
are of the same origin, I guess there is so
much that is similar between them. That was very cool.
They love their food, obviously, they have amazing food. And
the Indonesian cuisine is very interesting because it's kind of
like a fusion of every good thing. You know. So

(22:20):
you have Chinese, you have Indian, you have Malay, it's
all Arabic, it's all mixed together because they had influences
from all of those places. And many people don't know
this about Indonesia, but Indonesia used to be a Hindu country,
and you're like, what Hinduism that's India, right, But actually
India colonized Southeast Asia, and so all over Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam,

(22:45):
Indonesia you find these elements of Hinduism. And even in
Indonesia you have an island, the island of Bali, which
is a famous place for tourists. It's still a Hindu island.
It's the only one that's left. But all of Indonesia
it was like that. So all long story short, you
have big influences that are still there from that that

(23:06):
Indian context. And then of course, you know you have
the Chinese. There's millions of Chinese. Many of the believers
in Indonesia are from a Chinese background, and God is
using them in amazing ways, so you have their influence. Anyway,
the food there is awesome, nothing like Indonesian cuisine.

Speaker 3 (23:26):
All right. So I have to ask how difficult would
it be for a Western or an American missionary to
be able to do this type of friendship evangelism that
these local native missionaries are doing.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
Yeah, so you have, first of all, you know, the
challenge of language. You know, you're going to have to
figure out how to remain in the country after you
start leading people to Christ. You're you know, you're not
going to be able to go there and and be
a missionary. You know, you're going to have to do
something else. And so it is a big challenge. And

(24:02):
and thank God that you have so many thousands of
indigenous missionaries now that are that God has raised up
in Indonesia to take the Gospel to some of these
difficult places. And you know, obviously God can use anybody.
He can use anybody. If God calls somebody to go
to Indonesia, God bless them. But thank God He's raised

(24:22):
up thousands of missionaries from with Indian Indonesia to go
to these very difficult places. And they're able to do
it in a way that is very culturally sensitive. They're
able to do it in a way that doesn't draw
immediate attention to themselves. You know, if I go there
as a white person and show up in some village
in Indonesia, I mean it's gonna be, you know, a

(24:43):
big deal. So that is the big advantage that they have,
is this ability to go there and basically not make
a big scene just by showing up. You know, they
look like them, they're you know, they they speak Indonesian,
and so it just allows them to do what they
need to do without creating unnecessary problems.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
Did you feel a little conspicuous just being there as
a tourist? Did people kind of look at you like, who,
who's this guy? Where did he come from?

Speaker 1 (25:18):
It's like that here, that is true. Yeah, I mean
in many of these places, you know, there are tourists
that come to these places, and so they're used to tourism.
But post pandemic, you know, tourism is just getting going again,
and so people aren't as used to foreigners as they

(25:40):
were before, you know, and so especially like little kids,
they will look at you and like who is that?
Is that an alien? You know, because they haven't seen
white people for a while. You know, just tourism is
just getting going again.

Speaker 3 (25:54):
Now those islands that you visited, were those affected by
the tsunami that happened, Well, it's been kind of a
while now, so I'm assuming.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
That it's the island of Sumatra was affected by the tsunami,
especially in the Acha area, and God has used that
in amazing ways to open doors. The ace are probably
you know, in the top ten of the largest most
resistant people groups to the Gospel and the Acha regard
themselves as being the ones that brought Islam, you know,

(26:25):
to the island of Sumatra, and they think of themselves
as the guardians of Islam. So they're very proud of that.
And they are also very militaristic. So a lot of
the you know, type of al Qaeda type stuff that happens,
you know, have has its roots among the ace. So
that is what you're dealing with there. And yet God

(26:46):
decided to send a tsunami their way, and that open
doors for Christian presence and witness among the ach. So
God has used that and there's still some ongoing fruit
because of that.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
Well, thank you David, Thank you guys. To learn more
about Indonesia, go to our website at Christian Aid dot
org slash Indonesia.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
Awesome. Yeah, did you try any coffee while you were there?

Speaker 1 (27:22):
Yes, the coffee is amazing. Yes we all know that.
I no comments on that, but the coffee is absolutely amazing,
uh in Indonesia. And and yes they did load me
up with coffee. I've kept it to myself up till now.
But yes, if you go to if you go to Indonesia,

(27:44):
they're gonna give you coffee to take back home. It's
just you know their culture, the way they are, and
and it is better over there for some reason than
once you get in Starbucks.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
No disrespect Starbucks.