We made a trip out to Bandung today. Bandung is known as the textile capital of Indonesia and even possibly in all of S.E. Asia. But our main purpose for going to Bandung was to visit some of the universities. Some of the top Indonesian universities are located in Bandung.
It was a long 2.5 hour car ride. We started our journey early in the morning. As soon as we arrived, we were greeting by Irene Tanu and her sister, Sylvia. Irene is a HMCC alum and she is now back in Bandung as a working professional.
Once again, I am just amazed and humbled to see not only all the HMCC alumni who are placed all over the world, but their willingness to sacrifice and host us. Every time we want to bless them with a meal, they constantly beat us in getting the bill. Our whole team has been blessed by the generosity of our alumni.
Our first stop was at Institut Teknologi Bandung. This is the best engineering school in all of Indonesia. It is also known for its strong Muslim population amongst the student body. We walked around campus and introduced ourselves as former students from the University of Michigan. It was great that we had Rebi on our team who graduated from the UM’s engineering school. Once we told the students that Rebi was a graduate from UM as a engineer, our respect level boosted up a notch! You should have heard the “ooh” and “wow.”
Afterwards, we met up with Pastor Sammy who lived in Seattle for 8 years. He came back to Bandung to be a pastor of a church. It was great talking with him because he was the 3rd culture person that we are finding ourselves connecting with very well. He mentioned that the transition from the United States back to Indonesia was not easy. People like Pastor Sammy are a growing population in many of these global cities. Due to their experience of the Western culture, they struggle in acclimating back fully to their culture right away – not because of language or food but rather because of a widening of their worldview. In many ways, they make up their own culture or better known as the 3rd culture.
Then we went out to a place where they had a school for prayer and worship. It was more like a retreat center. The part that blessed the team the most was meeting Pastor Jacob and his wife, Esther. They had a phenomenal testimony of God’s grace and their obedience to God’s will. Pastor Jacob was a famous musician who literally changed the face of music in the Indonesian culture. He has been recognized as one of the top guitarist in the country. We got to sample a little bit of his playing and we were completely blown away!
He and Esther heads up the School of Prayer and Worship that is run by a large church in Jakarta. They have up and coming worship leaders and musicians come out for 2 months to get trained and equipped for the worship ministry. Their ministry has grown so much that now they are hosting people from countries like, China, Taiwan, and Malaysia.
We closed out our time in Bandung with a good Malay dinner in the heart of the city where so many people gathered on the weekend.
There is definitely a lot of potential for ministry in this area. It is exciting to see different ministries doing their part in spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Tomorrow we are going to visit an Indonesian church so that we can get a taste of the local church here. Then afterwards we are going to visit an international church in order to get a feel of how international churches are done here in Jakarta.
We took a picture with some of the engineering students at ITB
Rebi dazzled them by sharing that he graduated with an engineering degree from UM. As you can tell from their project, they are Mechanical Engineering majors
Once we found out that they had a Russian MiG Fighter Jet, which they took apart the engine, we had to take a “Top Gun” picture
This was the School of Prayer and Worship’s piano training session
They had prayer rooms in their training school, which was influenced by the “Prayer Mountains” in Korea
We invited Pastor Jacob to play for us and we just sat there blown away as he made ordinary and simple songs like “Lord I Lift Your Name” into a jazz concert
We ended up joining one of the session for worship and the Presence of God was sweet
Pastor Jacob was a great inspiration to the whole team with his humility
Louisa and Engel have introduced us to the joys of street food
After dinner we walked around and saw another live concert in the mall