Two reflections on the Protestant
Church in Bali, the first is a book review of mine published in
Missiology, the second is a more recent review (on the 1997 edition) and a
series of more questions and observations drawn up by Ed Schroeder while he was
working there in 1999 and sent out on his CROSSINGS emails.
John Roxborogh
THE MANGO TREE CHURCH. THE STORY OF
THE PROTESTANT CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN BALI.
By Douglas G.
McKenzie (In association with Bishop I Wayan Mastra).
Brisbane,
Queensland 4006, Australia: Boolarong Publications.
1988, vi + 81 pp.,
paper. No price given.
Reviewed by W John
Roxborogh.
This account of contextualisation in a church that is
evangelical, ecumenical and serious about its relations with its neighbours of
another faith is a good read and deserves wide use as a missiological case
study.
The author is an Australian with some years
association with Bishop Mastra who was the key figure in promoting the
integration of Balinese cultural forms into the Church. McKenzie also records how international
partnership has worked in developing credit co-operatives and training schemes
which have been of benefit to the wider community.
The church dates from the 1930s when the first
missionaries took a fairly negative attitude towards the surrounding Balinese
Hindu culture. This may have been more
understandable at the time than McKenzie allows, but the transformation that
subsequently resulted from encouraging the rich heritage of Bali to find
appropriate expression in Christian art, architecture and worship is
startling. Although one wonders whether
the new outlook was accepted quite as readily as described - it is often
converts not just missionaries who are hesitant about these things - the
results are clear enough.
The church was fortunate in the leadership of
Mastra who from the early 1970s provided a confident and articulate formulation
of how contextualisation ought to work in a way felt to be appropriate by those
involved. It is significant that this program was under the leadership and
direction of the local church and that the overseas partnership was also
subject to that leadership. Although
not explicitly stated, the levels of trust and integrity on all sides must also
have been important elements in the outcome.
This book should inspire others to work at these
issues in depth and over a period of time, but there are some questions all the
same. Bali has provided an essentially
monocultural context, but how does a church in a multicultural context
contextualise? Is it possible to relate
to more than one at the same time?
When church members migrate to other parts of
Indonesia under government resettlement schemes they are sustained by a strong
Christian Balinese culture that in turn proves attractive for non-christian
Balinese migrants. This is no doubt a good thing, but at some point they need
to seek to develop a Christian culture rooted in the new context rather than
the old. Will there be the same
enthusiasm for contextualisation when it is somebody else's culture that they
have to relate to? It would appear that
appropriate contextualisation is about timing as well as principle, and that
there remain some aspects of this process to be worked through. There are not many churches that are
privileged to think about mission beyond contextualisation and beyond a
holistic gospel, but this is one of them and the ongoing story will be interesting
to follow.
THURSDAY THEOLOGY #69 October 1999, Ed Schroeder
Douglas G. McKenzie (in
association with bishop I Wayan Mastra) THE MANGO TREE CHURCH. THE STORY OF THE PROTESTANT CHRISTIAN CHURCH
IN BALI. Moorooka, Queensland, Australia: Boolarong Press. 1988 (Updated
reprint 1997).
Kipling's couplet, "East
is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet," is no longer
true, says author McKenzie. If nothing
else, cyberspace and global economy have rendered it passé here at the end of
the 20th century. Bali is a prime
example, where international tourism, mostly from the West, has become THE
industry of this tiny island (as large as the state of Delaware in the
USA). Thousands of tourists arrive each
day, and on average each one leaves US$5K behind upon their departure. The twain are indeed meeting and money is
passing from one to the other. And with
money comes the money's culture-willy-nilly.
[Romantic Westerners even come
here, not just for honeymoons, but to meet the East by having their wedding
"in Balinese style." A week
ago Saturday one such wedding took place in "my" church in Legian--50
people from both families having flown in from Australia for the event. There is now a "Bali weddings"
industry. Item: this very week I was
asked to dedicate (with Christian liturgy) the new office of Raja Weddings
International, owned and operated a by
one of the elders in our congregation!]
But is Kipling's quip still
valid for the Protestant Christian Church in Bali, officially Gereja Kristen Protestan di Bali [hereafter
GKPB]? Well, yes and no. Yes, if you read the minutes of the
"watershed" synod of 1974. Here the GKPB made policy decisions NOT to
be a "western" European church [= shaped by Dutch missionaries] , but
a "Mango Tree Church," a church of the Gospel planted in Balinese
cultural soil, a church of the East, not the West.
Yes, if you look at the
architecture of churches built since that GKPB' 74 synod meeting. You see that especially in the now classic
building in Blimbingsari, the mother church of the GKPB. It takes Balinese Hindu temple architecture
and puts it under the sign of the cross.
Or again at the most recent one in Bukit Doa (Hill of Prayer) in Nusa
Dua, suburban Denpasar. Here the
government initially offered space for five buildings side by side, one each
for the five recognized religions of Indonesia. So there they stand: Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic and
Protestant. Yes, hereabouts the last
two are understood to be two different religions. The Protestant building may someday be hard to distinguish from
the Hindu temple under construction next door, when that one is finished. The bell tower, donated by German
Christians, does inform newcomers that something "other" than Hindu
is here.
And yes, the GKPB is
"east" when you see and hear the liturgical dance, the visual
arts-painting, sculpture, shadow puppets-and the gamelan music that are now at
home in the church's life.
But then there's the other
side, the side where East and West have met-and even merged-in the GKPB. Example:
In my English-language congregation the worship tradition I stepped into
was straight out of American
fundamentalism. [I'm a stranger at
times on Sunday mornings, not because what's going on is Balinese, but
Bible-belt.] The same is true of the
weekly Wednesday "prayer meetings" we have. And even in the Indonesian-language congregation meeting in the
same building, as far as I can tell, the ethos of European pietism (e.g., the
songs, the 4-times a year celebration of the Holy Communion, etc.)-- the
"colonial theology," as John Titaley called it-shapes congregational
faith and life.
And apropos those recent gems
of Balinese church architecture, not one of them would have happened without
massive infusions of western money-much of it from Australia and Germany. In fact, the Nusa Dua structure, we heard,
was actually bank-rolled by the German government, possibly because of its
quasi-official status as a cultural artifact initiated by the Indonesian government.
The GKPB also continues to meet
the West in funding its widespread ministries in economic development and
education in Bali. This in no way
minimizes the heroic hard work of GKPB people in these efforts. Even finding such resources signals their
Balinese entrepreneurial pragmatism.
Yet without this "meeting the west" it's hard to imagine how
the marvel of Balinese church architecture as well as their large-scale
economic/educational ventures, could have come to pass. For the GKPB is not a mega church. Its numbers (1999) are modest: 62 congregations, 45 pastors, and 8000
members.
Though "the West"
has helped the GKPB put these artifacts in place, they are now embedded in the
church's "eastern" mission strategy.
The church buildings seek to invite the Hindu outsider to look inside,
to listen to the Christian Gospel as not totally alien to the world of
Bali. And the economic and educational
services are offered to the populace at large as "what Christ urges us to
do," with no religion test required for the receivers.
So how did this all come
about? McKenzie tells the story. The GKPB's history is not all that long.
The first baptisms happened in 1931 (not far from where we've been living these
three months). That's not yet 70 years
ago. Dutch colonial policy didn't want
Christian missions in Bali, intending, some say, to preserve this island's
unique Hindu-rooted, Buddhist-blended, animist, and ancestor-reverent
culture. Mission work among the Chinese
here was tolerated, but Balinese Hindus were off limits. And when, no surprise, some Balinese Hindus
became Christ's followers, and the word got back to the authorities, the
missionaries were evicted. But the seed
was planted, even if it came in a Dutch package, and again-no surprise-it grew.
Bishop Mastra was born in that
year of the first baptisms, born into a Hindu family in the village of Sibetan
in eastern Bali. McKenzie chronicles
Mastra's own remarkable journey into the Christian church. And when Mastra enters the narrative, the
GKPB's history and his own biography become warp and woof of the author's
weaving. It's not that there were no
others whom Christ used to build his church here. McKenzie tells us who the significant others are, but we don't
get to know them well. Granted, there
is only One Who is The Cornerstone to the church-also in Bali. Yet Mastra appears without doubt to be the
prime architect for the GKPB's foundations built on that stone.
That was especially so at that
"watershed synod" at Abianbase in 1972. Freshly returned from the USA with a doctor's degree the year
before, "he was welcomed with open arms," McKenzie writes. He chaired the meeting at the synod and the
program he advocated became church policy from that point on.
The synod said that it was
"finally time to erase" the culture-denying legacy and westernization
left them by the missionaries, time to wipe out the Dutch colonial
influence. That meant a sea change in
the church's self-image, as well as its
imagination. They were no longer to be
"a bonsai church, potted in an artificial context," but a "mango
tree church," the product of the Gospel planted in Balinese cultural soil.
Mastra makes much of the mango
tree image. Although the mango tree is
highly visible, he explains, it adapts itself in a way that blends in with its
rich, green, tropical environment. It
provides welcome shade in a hot climate and produces refreshing fruit. He links the mango tree church with
"the tree of life" at the end of the Book of Revelations,
"yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the
healing of the nations." In
McKenzie's words "Mastra's matching vision is to see the GKPB become a new
spiritual center for the life of the Balinese people. From this spiritual center he sees streams of living water
flowing-satisfying streams of God's mercy, love and grace . . . perpetually
bearing fruit to satisfy the deepest hunger of those who search for life's
meaning. As the leaves of the
scriptural tree were for the healing of the nations, Mastra sees the GKPB as a
living sign of God's power to reconcile and to heal." (p.x)
When that vision got to the
Watershed Synod, the minutes record the following:
"The GKPB has adopted a
NEW POLICY of addressing the issues of Christian mission in Bali.
It resolves to formulate a
program for building a cultural and training centre in Den Pasar, called Dhyana
Pura (Temple or Place of Meditation) with the following goals:
(a) to seek to proclaim and live the Gospel of Jesus Christ in
ways relevant to the Balinese people.
(b) to help Balinese Christians gain a greater appreciation of
their cultural heritage within the context of the faith, and to find new ways
of expressing that faith within the culture.
(c) to stimulate greater use of the Balinese architecture and
cultural symbols in expressing the Christian faith within Balinese
culture."
Then came resolutions laying
out the church's economic and educational proposals for following such a
calling in Bali. Theological
undergirding for the whole package was a commitment (using the New Testament
Greek words) to martyria (witness), koinonia (fellowship) and diakonia
(service). Curious to me is that the
"witness" word, as McKenzie reports it, gets linked to the church's "extensive
educational system, seeking to produce students of a high calibre, able to
progress and obtain tertiary level (=university) degrees."
There is no reference here, no
proposed strategy, for mission or evangelism to the people enjoying the shade
and the fruit of the mango tree church.
The "fellowship"
accent is in-house focusing on "forming its own identity, striving for
self-determination in theology, and for building up of the body of
Christ." The commitment to
"service" is articulated as "stomach theology," meeting
people's material needs and the vast enterprise of the church's development and
social ministry agency, the MBM. [=Maha Bhoga Marga, literally, the path to
sufficient food].
I twitch when McKenzie
articulates the MBM's "mandate to stress the Christian concept of
stewardship," namely, "the small business management principles
outlined in the Biblical book of Nehemiah, a story found to be in complete
accord with modern methods." And even more so when he commends MBM because
it "emphasizes biblical principles of prosperity." He does not pause to ask how such prosperity
theology connects to Christ the suffering servant.
Thursday Theology #70
Reflections on the Mango Tree Church
In the last paragraphs above [book review from last
week] I’ve been signalling questions that I’d like to talk about with GKPB
pastors and leaders. But there’s been
no real opportunity for that in our time here.
I’ve met four of the (I think) five people at the top of the church’s
administration, but only for the briefest of conversation. Should that door yet open in our final two
weeks here, these are some of the topics on my list.
1. McKenzie’s history is a story
of success, the story of a Mango Tree Church that seems always to be a
winner. Were there no losses, no
mistakes, no conflicts, no failures?
There is a hint of something happening in 1988, “a period of in-house,
tough, tense ecclesiastical brokerage,” McKenzie says, but we get no further
information other than that when it was over the “church had shed a few leaves
and some of its fruit, but it was surviving to face a new day in new
ways.” You don’t have to be a space
scientist to know that there is a
chapter missing here.
2. We’ve learned that there is
another written history of the GKPB, different from McKenzie’s, but we’ve never
seen it. And if we did, we’d need a
translator since it’s only in Indonesian.
How does that retelling go?
3. As far as we have learned there
is no doctrinal statement, no confessional document articulating the GKPB’s
theological commitment. The word
Protestant in its name, as everyone knows, can mean most anything. As one of my teachers said years ago: It can
mean “Here I stand.” It can also mean
“But I can also stand over here as well, and maybe over there too.”
4. Just as an outside observer in
our second week here, I think I saw the consequences of this lack of
confessional criterion. The bishop had
invited in a team from The Vineyard of Portland, Oregon USA. He and a few pastors had been in Portland
and liked what they saw and heard, so the invitation went out. I attended one of the sessions where the
entire Vineyard team, 44 of them, was present, giving their testimony and
praying for the spirit’s outpouring on the several hundred participants. As the Vineyard folks went down the rows
praying for this one and that one standing in the large room now cleared of
chairs, a number fell to the floor
“slain in the spirit,” with corresponding sound effects of barking, crying,
shouting, screaming. A few GKPB pastors (bishop included) were on the floor
involved in the process, but the vast majority of clergy were at the sidelines clearly sceptical that
this was genuinely Christian, let alone Protestant. I only heard bits andsnippets of the discussions that ensued
when the Vineyard team went home. But a
theological manifesto might have helped.
It surely is better than the one proposed to me by a Balinese
pro-Vineyard pastor: “We will sample whatever we can of Christian options
available and then we will decide what is fitting for our Balinese
context.” Here was a case where some
did and some didn’t—and they were all Balinese.
5. The image of the mango tree
church needs testing. When Jesus uses a
tree image in the gospels, he talks about people as trees bearing fruit. He begins by speaking of the fruit (good or bad),
but the root of the matter is the roots of that tree, where people are
grounded. Jesus offers to root people
in the Gospel that he brings, the Gospel that he is. So the ministry of Jesus (and ours too as his disciples) is to
uproot people from the soil in which their lives are planted and re-plant them
into the Gospel.
6. Is it possible at all to plant
the Gospel into a culture, any culture—Balinese or any other? The Gospel is a message. If you want to talk about “planting” it,
then human hearts are the seedbed, not that person’s culture. The ear, says St. Paul, is the organ of
faith. Faith comes by hearing, and
hearing comes when the Good News is proclaimed. How do cultures “hear,” if they can hear at all? Where are the ears? Whose ears? Which human ears in a culture
count when Christian witness tries to get a culture to listen? Are they the Brahmins or the beggars? Jesus gave a clear answer to that.
7. At root is the fact that every
culture has a cultus. Cultus is where
the term culture comes from. A
culture’s cultus is the pattern of worship it urges on its people, the
sacrifices and ceremonies addressed to the god(s) at its center. Whether the culture is religious or secular
makes little difference. Cultus
happens in every culture. Thus the gods
of secular America’s current culture are (among others) pleasure, profit,
prestige, power. The holy places for
liturgies to these deities are Wall Street, Hollywood, the Pentagon, sports arenas. Any talk about inculturating the Gospel must find out what cultus
is working in the given culture.
8. I learned recently that one of
the GKPB pastors is doing a graduate dissertation relating to this. As I understood it, he’s examining some of
the critiques that have been raised about the image of the mango tree church.
One that relates here is voiced by Christian converts
from Balinese Hinduism, who were driven out, persecuted out, of their villages
because they deserted the old cultus and its contexting culture. Such people, it is said, don’t think it’s a
good idea to context the Gospel in Balinese culture. They can imagine nothing worse, yes, contra-Christian, than to
shape their Christian faith and life by that antithetical culture of
oppression. For them, it seems, the
newness of the Good News is not only a new cultus (worshipping Christ) but a
new cultural context for that life as well.
That sounds plausible. I hope I
can see his thesis when it’s finished.
9. On that topic, didn’t Jesus
say: “New skins for new wine”? Try to
put the new wine in the old skins and the skins will burst and the wine be
lost.
That doesn’t mean: Go western. But it surely tempers the inculturation
agenda, calling for the same theological precision, the same sort that first
century Christians needed vis-a-vis the two cultures that they faced:
Jewish and Hellenistic. Since they too got persecuted for being threats to the local
culture, they must have been creating a new culture for their new wine—from
their new wine.
10. An offhand comment I
heard during our first days here was that the mission theology shaping the GKPB
was taken more from the work of Karl Rahner, 20th century Roman
Catholic star theologian, than it was from the Dutch Reformed theologian
Hendrik Kraemer. In H. Richard
Niebuhr’s classic book of just 50 years ago, Christ and Culture, he gives
Luther a separate chapter, distinguishing his theology of culture from both the
Roman and the Calvinist paradigms.
Granted all of these are “western” theologians. But if the GKPB claims the term Protestant
in its name, why Rahner? Why not
Kraemer—or even Luther?
11. Finally a disturbing
statistic. McKenzie says that “by 1970
GKPB church membership was nearly 7000.” Last Sunday one pastor told me that
the current (1999) membership was “about 8000.” What does this mean?
Edward H. Schroeder
Guest pastor for English worship
GKPB Legian congregation
September 14, 1999