our family in jakarta...

rocks!!!


the guys here are great, everybody has a wild story to tell about how jesus changed their lives. now they are living together and are doing crazy stuff all over the place. some are involved in hiv prevention work, caring for the sick, educating the young, hanging out with the people in the most vulnerable communities. others run a sort of education center for children of families that are too poor to afford education, and lots more.
at the heart there is the community, sharing lives together, living together and by this learning from each other, encouraging each other to live what god has put on everybody's heart to do. it's all very simple, very passionate and very natural.
and they invited us right into it all. showed us around, let us take part of their every day life.


yesterday night we visited some of their friends from the local punk scene, and i faced the challenge of riding on a motorbike through jakartas streets. i was really nervous but it got better, i guess the prayers i kept muttering helped :-).


I have a lot to learn from the guys here. I remember Ton in India saying "church is irrelevant without the poor" and here it is again, the poor people right at the heart of the community of believers. and although there are many projects, many things to be done, it is all very relational. they are not building some other type of denomination. instead a network of friends has been established all over indonesia. and there is freedom for all sorts of things, friendships with junkies on the streets, business ideas to enable the communities of the rural poor to earn a living, creative ways of communicating the good news and educating children about drugs and hiv... it's very broad and it's totally about living and enabling others to find real life as well.

hey thank you so much everybody for the generous gifts for jakarta!!!
we have some things planned and will let you know how the money is used.

Punkrock in the holy land

We had a good time watching the docu of the punk scene in Israel. The guy introducing the film mentioned a christian music club in Jerusalem we heard of earlier for several times. On the last Freakstock we had a girl who is working there in one of our workshops. Because Israel is so small, the people know each other across the country. We didn't expect to hear about that club in in a small alternative cinema in Hamburg, this confirms that they are doing a great job. The place was packed with people and the filmmaker Liz Nord said it was the biggest audience so far. We bought the DVD so we can show it to other people. For the two of us it was a great encouragement to see all those young alternative people, their passions and their needs. We hope to find similar scenes in all the neighbour countries we will visit soon. And another very cool thing:Niina, a girl from Finland we befriended on the Connect Europe, plans to go to Lebanon exactly the same time as we, so we will be able to be there together. This is gonna be great...