One of the fascinating things that I have been discovering over the years is that there are many international students who come to the States to study. By pastoring on a college campus, I have seen many international students who represent many nations come to the States and then return to their country. In fact, at one point at the University of Michigan we had close to 122 nations represented. Wow… that is a lot of nations!
As I have been out here in Indonesia for about 2 months now, I am meeting a lot of these international students who have studied abroad. Many of them come back to their country to help out with the family business or they just end up starting up new ventures. It is exciting to see many of these young, well-educated single adults who are making an instant impact in Indonesia.
This is one of the target groups that we are trying to reach with the Gospel. They are a unique group of people because of their experiences overseas. Their perspective is more global and they bring to Indonesia a freshness of vision for the country.
One person in particular has recently launched a BlackBerry application which enables a the user to use a lot of functions that is related to everyday life, such as news, restaurant information, movie showing times, and stock exchange data. Some of us were one of the first ones to download it to our BlackBerry and it has been a great resource.
It is exciting to see what Indonesia will look like in the next 10-15 years with so many young, overseas educated people investing into their country. It is my prayer that many of them will come to know Christ and that those who are already believers will leverage their blessings to make a difference for Jesus Chist.
You can check out an article on the Jakarta Globe about one of the re-expatiated Indonesians that we have gotten to know over the months.
Click here to read the article.