To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews… (1 Corinthians 9:20 ESV)
Between 1965 and 1971, 2 million people in West Java, Indonesia, were baptized and began attending fellowships because of events clearly engineered by God. Most of the converts were Muslims. The westernized Indonesian churches hardly grasped this opportunity because, for the most apart, they failed to cooperate with the cultural and political events. They refused to receive people into the church as whole villages even though the traditional pattern of decision-making in those communities was by consensus. The churches in Indonesia that made the Javanese feel most at home and least foreign had the most church growth. These churches had conformed culturally to external practices and methods of communication, such as traditional dance and drama, as well as having “Javanesed” the gospel according to three of their religious traditions, one of which was Islam (Taken from The Challenge of Planting Churches in Muslim Cities by Greg Livingstone).
Contextualization is the process of understanding a people group’s worldview and subsequently communicating the gospel message in a way that is faithful to God’s revelation as well as meaningful to the recipients’ cultural and existential contexts. Workers are just beginning to analyze the Hui people’s worldview in an attempt to communicate the gospel message in a more meaningful way. However, Hui believers will do the main task of planting contextualized churches. Great discernment and protection from God is necessary as they seek to make biblical truth relevant to their context while maintaining fidelity to Scripture. Despite its potential hazards, contextualization is an important prerequisite to seeing a church planting movement among the Hui. About 99% of Hui believers have either not met with other believers or joined Han Chinese fellowships and become absorbed into the culture of other groups rather than starting their own Hui fellowship.
Prayer Requests:
- Ask God to give Hui believers vision and faith to step out of the relative comfort of Han fellowships to begin contextualized Hui fellowships.
- Ask God to protect Hui believers from syncretism as they start Hui fellowships.