Testimonies from the Field – Indonesia

Indonesian Man

Pray for some new believers, mostly youth, who have been imprisoned for nearly a month now due to “Christianising” Muslims in a small town in the west of the most populous island. Pray also for unity as a colleague has slandered another leader for creating “Rice Christians” through financial incentives. These lies cause confusion and distrust in communities of believers that are already under pressure from unbelievers and do not need the added stress of disunity and personal attacks from within.

Under the Towel

Tomorrow my husband heads out for a meeting before we sneak to the US for our only child’s graduation. So, today was errand day – get money, pay the rent, return a colleague’s car, buy drinking water, etc. We all have days like that – ordinary and mundane. But what I saw today was far from ordinary.

I’ve been researching a particular object some of my Khmer friends own. The teepee-looking object with a coconut at the bottom is supposedly home to a guardian spirit that a fortuneteller invites to protect and heal a needy person. Surprisingly, that’s an ordinary practice here.

The Legacy of Missions in SE Asia

This is a brief history of the Morse family’s involvement in missions in SE Asia. It is extracted from the newsletter of Bobby and Tassanee Morse whu currently serve in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Their ministry includes a hostel for tribal children attending school in Chiang Mai and a media ministry in Thailand, Burma and China. Bobby Morse is a 3rd generation missionary of the Morse Family legacy. 

The Spirit Tree

Let me tell you a story about what happened to some of our evangelists. Two of them took off for a remote village in the mountains near the border. When they arrived, they met with a village elder andtold him why they had come. They said, “We have come to tell you about the living God, who made heaven and earth and your buffalo and your people. This is a God who loves you. We’ve come to tell you about this God.”
The village elder looked and them, and he said,

The Pastor, the Spirit, and the Waterfall

Because of what God taught us and all that spirit world with tribal people, we had faith for bigger things because of what happened here. But I’m going to stick with these stories. Hundreds have come to faith, and it’s all been

The Headhunter

_1790800″ src=”https://asiastories.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/460_17908001.jpg?w=150″ alt=”460>_1790800″ width=”82″ height=”82″>The people of our country had a significant segment that were headhunters. In fact, they were headhunting up into the 1970s and even beyond. In a village just a couple of years ago we saw seven human heads, some with flesh still

The Farmers and the Cucumbers

_1790833″ src=”https://asiastories.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/460_1790833.jpg?w=150″ alt=”460>_1790833″ width=”122″ height=”81″>My husband began to do a Bible study in a new area, with a group of people that were very, very poor. In fact, nearly everybody in this community, they were tenant farmers, and they were all sickly, very sickly.

Hinduism in Indonesia

Hinduism was the main religion in Indonesia before Islam came to the country through Muslim traders in the 12th and 13th centuries. Hinduism came to Indonesia as early as the 1st century. By the 4th century, Hindu states had been established on Java. Hinduism spread throughout the rest of Indonesia and reached its peak in the 14th century. Although most of Indonesia was Muslim by the end of the 16th century, Bali remained Hindu. In 1959, the Indonesian government recognized Hinduism as an official religion. Indonesian Hindus practice Dharma Hinduism because of this. It was a major reform movement that lobbied for Hindus’ rights in Bali. This reform helped start a revival of Hinduism in Indonesia.

A Media and Missions Testimony

I want to share with you a testimony from a Christian ministry that has Media and Missions projects working together. This concept where there is media outreach that generates a “lead” and a way for the person to contact a Christian via email, text or social media is ideal. I discuss this approach in a case study in my book, EVANGELISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE: Media Case Studies. My other books are on this page also.

Serving in Thailand 48 years – Part One

This is part one of an interview with veteran missionary Alan Eubank. Alan and his wife Joan have served in Thailand for over 47 years.

When you get to be as old as I am, you like to share some of your experiences that maybe somebody can learn from. I never thought I’d be a missionary, but I was impressed by the missionaries that visited our church when I was younger. I found that they were active Christians. I went on to Texas A and M and graduated in geological engineering and took a regular US Army commission and fought in the Korean War. After the war I was considered staying in the army but that’s when I began to seriously look at the Bible. I started to open it up and read a scripture before I went to sleep.