A Missions-minded Orthodox Church?

You can find them every now and then: the Antiochians in the USA are one example--though mostly they are converting Christians to Christianity (something I don't find terribly impressive). But there is also the Orthodox Church in Indonesia, whose senior priest is himself a former Muslim. (Who converted to evangelical Christianity and only later became Orthodox.) Here is their website, I recommend their newsletter which has some nice pictures. It makes me glad to see that there are places where Orthodoxy is still out planting churches and catechizing and evangelizing non-Christians.

Friends of Indonesia

Mega-churches in Indonesia

Very interesting. Indonesia is famous for being the country with the most Muslims in the world, followed I think by India or maybe Pakistan...not sure. From the WSJ:

[...]In Kemayoran, a business district of high-rise offices near the city center, the Reformed Millennium Cathedral is set to open officially on Sept. 20. It will seat 8,000 and house a seminary, a university and a museum of Chinese porcelain.

Preacher Stephen Tong, a 69-year-old Chinese-born Indonesian, founded the Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church in 1989 and says it took 16 years to persuade the central government to issue a permit to build the new church. In that time, hundreds of churches have been burned down by hard-liners across Indonesia, he estimates.

"I've built a bigger one" than all the destroyed churches combined, says Mr. Tong, who used to hold his church's meetings in a hotel. "I want it to be an image that Indonesia still has freedom of religion."

Mr. Tong acknowledges persistent problems, and Christians complain that in day-to-day life, President Yudhoyono, who faces re-election next year, has generally been slow to defend religious minorities. The police often turn a blind eye to Islamist violence against churches without security in poor parts of Jakarta and rural Indonesia.[...]

Creation of the Orthodox Metropolis of Singapore

From OCMC.org:

[...] On Friday, January 11th, 2008, the Ecumenical Patriarchate announced the creation of a new ecclesiastical jurisdiction in southeast Asia, based in Singapore, to oversee Orthodox Christian parishes in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. The decision was taken after an unanimous vote to detach the regions from the Metropolis of Hong Kong and to establish the Metropolis of Singapore.

Meanwhile, Archimandrite Nektarios Tsilis was unanimously elected as the new Metropolitan of Hong Kong, with a jurisdiction over Orthodox parishes in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar. The ordination of the newly elected Metropolitan took place in the Phanar at the Patriarchal church of St. George in Constantinople, on Sunday, January 20th, 2008.

Archbishop Nektarios is a graduate of the Theological Academy in Athens and the Theological School of the University of Athens. He has also successfully completed courses and seminars on the structure, organization, and information technologies of the European Union.

He was ordained deacon in 1990 and priest in 1995. [...]

Indonesia: not so moderate anymore

Much has been made of the fact that Indonesia is at once a moderate nation and has religious freedom and blah blah blah. Well, not so fast:

In Indonesia, the claim to truth is increasingly being monopolized by a group of Islamic fundamentalists and conservatives, ironically, in collaboration with the state ... This weekend, a group of people, aided by officials, forced the closure of a Roman Catholic church in the West Jakarta district of Tambora, on the pretext that it did not have the necessary permission from the people in the neighborhood. The premise had been used as a church for the last 40 years with no problems. There have been many other attacks on churches around the country that have gone unreported. This week, the government prevented an Islamic scholar from Egypt from delivering a series of lectures and sharing his knowledge at a gathering in the East Java town of Malang, only because his understanding of the Koran was considered to be too different from that fundamentalist Muslim scholars ... If we allow this to happen without a single word of protest, we can expect more bans against lectures by Islamic scholars and more attacks on people of other faiths that do not conform to the conservatives' notion of truth. At stake is not only our freedom and the pluralistic nature of this nation, but truth itself.

--The Jakarta Post (Indonesia)

Good Advice?

Great quote from Deroy Murdock, hat tip to jihadwatch.org:

After Islamic terrorists blasted two Balinese nightspots in October 2002, killing 202, Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of al Qaeda's Indonesian franchise, Jemaah Islamiyah, told victims' survivors, "My message to the families is: Please convert to Islam as soon as possible."

Islamdom Rising in Indonesia

"But there is also fear that the global rise of militant fundamentalism has begun to change Indonesia. With democracy’s arrival, radical Islamists were allowed to return from exile, where the former military government had sent them. That was followed by the terrorist bombing of a nightclub on the predominantly Hindu island of Bali in 2002, in which 200 people died, then by other bombings in Jakarta and Bali, again. The government says it has seriously weakened Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorism network blamed for those attacks. But the Islamic Defenders Front, less lethal but more numerous, still vandalizes bars and discos in Jakarta and beats up their patrons, trying to force the businesses to close.

"Meanwhile, Islamic observance has turned more conservative. Many more women wear the veil. And Islamic political parties have gained strength by arguing that they can do something about Indonesia’s endemic corruption and violence."

From the NYT