A call for prayer for the survivors of the tsunamis which have devastated Southeast Asia. It is estimated that more than 11,000 people in seven countries have lost their lives.
Fearing attacks by Islamic militants, Christians in Indonesia are moving their church meetings “underground”.
Amidst fears of bombings and shootings by Islamic militants, some Christians in Indonesia are trading in their traditional churches for more secure, though unorthodox, buildings. On any given Sunday, thousands of Christians flock to office buildings, shopping malls, hotels, and even movie theaters to worship.
“It puts us at a lower risk for being a target for religious persecution,” said Pastor Steve Lunn, whose International English Service holds worship services for 1,000 people in a downtown Jakarta office building.
“People tell me they feel safer,” Lunn told the Associated Press. “The facility itself is not the most important thing. It’s just a place to gather. The most important thing is being together and worshipping God together.”
Christian leaders also say the unorthodox approach is necessary because they cannot get building permits and that ignoring the rules risk having a facility shut down, or worse, destroyed by protesters. In addition, plans to build new churches sometimes draw violent protests from Islamic groups, which view them as an attempt to convert Muslims.
Islam is, of course, as we are reminded almost daily by the mainstream media, the “Religion of Peace”. Please pray for the Lord’s protection of the church members in Jakarta and other regions of Indonesia.
For a seventeen year-old, Chase has an incredible grasp on the meaning of things that eludes most adults:
[…] human life is not absolute. The physical forces acting upon us at any given time can be manipulated with mass or velocity. Everything around us can be changed in some way. Without an absolute “invisible cloud being”, how exactly, since biotic and abiotic nature is certainly not absolute, do you know that “lying, stealing, murdering” etc is wrong? How do you know that inflicting those consequences upon other people is not fine and dandy? In order for you to care about human life, it has to have value. Outside of God, how can human life, your fellow man, have any sort of intrinsic worth, if we are simply inserted into creation without design? Value is created by some sort of labor, some sort of work towards that. If there is no higher authority to give that life worth, then we must earn it for ourselves. Given this logic, we must not consider life from conception to graduation valuable. If your only reason for not “lying, stealing, and murdering” is legal consequences and the threat of death, then you obviously have no moral values to begin with.