Cross-cultural commitment to serving Indonesian coffee people
Exclusive interview with Pastor Dai Huahua of Mother Zion Church in Los Angeles
Interview/Zheng Qiongyu
In the early morning of December 26, 2004, just after Christmas, the romantic, beautiful and warm Indonesian seaside town was crowded with holidaymakers and busy local residents. In the midst of the joy, there was a sudden earthquake. The earthquake finally subsided, and people were shocked. Unexpectedly, a bigger disaster was quietly coming from the sea.
The 9.1 magnitude earthquake with its epicenter off the coast of Sumatra created a tsunami that soared into the sky. Many people were killed by the flood before they could figure out what happened, or watched helplessly as their beloved family members were taken away by the waves. , crying heartbroken but unable to save. Disasters spread across 14 countries, with Indonesia being the worst affected. 230,000 lives suddenly disappeared, 17 villages were submerged into the sea, and nearly 620,000 people lost their homes and property and became displaced refugees.
Seek God's will
This was a catastrophe that shocked the whole world. The Los Angeles Co-workers United Prayer Club launched a fundraiser at the local Chinese church. Although the Los Angeles Mother Zion Church pastored by Pastor Dai Huahua is a small church with less than a hundred members, it is generous and willing to donate; just like the Macedonian church:“Giving freely, according to one’s ability and beyond one’s ability.” (2 Corinthians 8:3)
When the tsunami first occurred, Pastor Dai once asked God: "Why did such a disaster happen to Indonesia? Lord! What kind of things are you going to do in this country?" Seeing the brothers and sisters in the church giving so much money to Indonesia, He further prayed: "Lord! Do you want our church to do something for Indonesia?"
When Jesus went to Bethany and sat at Simon's house in Bethany, Mary poured out a flask of precious ointment worth a whole year's wages on Jesus' head without reservation. The ointment was originally prepared by an unmarried girl at that time for her marriage. Some disciples blamed her for wasting it, but Jesus praised Mary: "She poured the ointment on me in advance for my burial."
Pastor Dai saw that what Mary offered was not a tithe, not a half, but a completely sacrificial offering. For the sake of Jesus, she was willing to delay her marriage. The timing of her dedication was also extremely critical—Jesus was crucified on the cross shortly after that and shed every drop of his blood to save the world!
Pastor Dai was deeply touched by Mary's complete sacrifice and timely devotion. He couldn't help but ask himself, "What else can we give before Jesus comes again?"
▲Pastor Dai Huahua and his wife have focused on the pursuit and teaching of inner life for many years, and now they are even more committed to taking action to love what God loves. (Photo courtesy/Dai Yuhua)
Resolutely accept the call
Matthew 24:14:“This gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the world as a witness to all nations, and then the end will come.”After the catastrophe in Indonesia, Pastor Dai recited this verse repeatedly and felt an unquenchable sense of mission in his heart. He realized that preaching the gospel to the unreached people in the world and letting God’s word spread throughout the world is God’s call to the church in the last days. It is not an optional option, but a preparation for the return of Jesus.
He decided to respond to God’s call and lead the church to go out and spread the gospel to ethnic groups in Indonesia who did not yet know God.
In the past, the brothers and sisters at Lord Zion Church in Los Angeles tried their best to pursue personal spiritual growth and establish an intimate relationship with God, and had little exposure to missionary teachings.
After the Indonesian tsunami, God not only inspired Pastor Dai to lead the church into the field of missions, but also gave the church a co-worker who was extremely committed to missions and had received complete training. He preached missions to the brothers and sisters at Sunday gatherings once a month. information. After a period of teaching and persistent prayer, "mission" gradually became the consensus of the whole church, and even children were able to lead the entire congregation in praying for the Indonesian coffee people during Sunday worship.
Pastor Dai had some doubts about how to lead the church into missionary work. A missionary instructed him to dedicate the church’s most special gift (i.e., the church’s DNA) to God. Pastor Dai immediately understood that because the church members had always been extremely enthusiastic about prayer and had received a lot of training and equipment, they faithfully and continuously prayed for God. People who have not yet received the gospel should pray for God to remove the bonds that prevent people from believing in the Lord and give them action strategies to spread the gospel. This is the first step for them to launch missionary service, and it is also their duty to give 100% to God without hesitation.
At that time, Mrs. Dai was studying in the seminary and happened to take a course on "How to Preach the Gospel to Muslims." She was deeply moved and applied what she learned. She began to contact missionary organizations, collect information, and pray for missionaries and organizations. . During the years of praying and waiting, Pastor Dai tried many times to visit Indonesia, but failed. It was not until 2008 that he finally received a response from a missionary from the Overseas Christian Mission (OMF).
This missionary has served in Southeast Asia for many years, and now lives in Los Angeles. He is fully committed to mobilizing North American Christians for missionary work in Southeast Asia. Under his introduction, Pastor Dai and his church colleagues attended a missionary meeting composed of more than 100 missionaries serving in Indonesia.
That day, almost all the white missionaries attending the meeting spoke fluent Indonesian. Some of the missionaries’ second generation had already served locally. One of the missionaries had been infected with malaria seventeen times but never gave up. During this gathering, Pastor Dai and his colleagues not only gained a more concrete understanding of the needs and difficulties of evangelizing in Indonesia, but were also deeply impressed by the missionaries' commitment and enthusiasm.
During the meeting, an American missionary promised to introduce Indonesian co-workers who were proficient in English and served as translator when Pastor Dai and his co-workers visited Indonesia. After praying for five years, Pastor Dai and his colleagues finally visited Indonesia for the first time in 2009, entering another stage of missionary service.
Serving Indonesia’s “Coffee People”
"Unreached peoples" refers to ethnic groups where the gospel has not been spread or is difficult to spread, there is no self-reliant and self-supporting church, and the number of Christians is few or even completely non-Christian. Currently, there are more than 6,800 groups of people who have not been reached by the gospel in the world, accounting for nearly 30% of the global population. After prayer and actual visits, Pastor Dai and his colleagues decided to focus on serving the "coffee tribe" in the mountains of Indonesia.
There are about 200,000 people in the coffee tribe. They are located in remote mountainous areas with inconvenient transportation. The tribesmen use their own language on weekdays, but they have no written language. Schools teach in Indonesian. The entire coffee tribe does not have any church or Bible. The main economic activity is agriculture, and residents grow peppers, corn, lemongrass, cocoa, coffee and other crops.
It takes more than ten hours of driving to visit the local area. In addition, the mountain roads are undulating and the roads are often unpaved and repaired. It is a physical challenge for outsiders who are accustomed to living on flat land to enter and exit the area. Pastor Dai deliberately learned to ride horses in North America before his first visit to adapt to the bumpy road conditions.
About 90% people in Indonesia believe in Islam, making it the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. Although church and state are separated and people ostensibly enjoy freedom of belief, persecution of Christians is common. Most of the Indonesian coffee tribes are fundamentalist Muslims and are very hostile to Christianity. If a tribesman becomes a Christian, they will be driven out of their homeland, or even die. In fact, "coffee tribe" is not the real name of this tribe. In order to protect local gospel work and Christians, co-workers gave them this nickname after the most distinctive crops of this tribe.
In the past, the main force in preaching the gospel to the coffee tribe was a few Indonesian Mada1 Christians living there, but the results were not effective. When Pastor Dai and his team first visited the area, there were only two Christians in the entire coffee tribe, and both of them were because of Converted to Jesus and was expelled from his hometown.
When preaching the gospel to Muslims, one must be cautious and dexterous. If one's identity is exposed, one will be deported without mercy. Pastor Dai and his colleagues visited the local area as teachers, established friendship with the residents, understood their needs, helped solve some problems, and at the same time served the Mada tribe who preached the gospel to the coffee tribe.
▲The burial place of Henry Lyman and Samuel Munson, the American missionaries who were killed in the Mada tribe. (Photo source: Cosmic Light Spectroscopy Monthly July 2010)
Pray to loosen the bonds of evil spirits
Most Muslims have been isolated from outside beliefs since childhood and are very closed-minded. For them to accept the gospel, God's direct intervention is often required. After deciding to target "coffee people" for missionary work, Pastor Dai and the entire church continued to pray for the gospel to smoothly enter the coffee people. And exciting news is coming one by one!
The coffee tribe is located in a remote mountainous area. In addition to believing in Islam, the residents are also exposed to the worship of spirits. The wife of a wizard was seriously ill and saw no improvement after seeing doctors. The wizard had no other choice but to ask for help from a Mada missionary who had been preaching the gospel to the coffee tribe for many years. The preacher anointed the wizard's wife and prayed for her, and she The evil spirits on the body are immediately driven away, and stubborn illnesses are cured without treatment.
After personally experiencing the authority and power of God, the wizard couple understood who the true God was, but they still dared not attend gatherings. Shortly thereafter, their daughter was also possessed by an evil spirit. The wizard took out the olive oil left for him by the Mada missionary and personally anointed his daughter with oil and prayed, successfully expelling the evil spirit. After experiencing these miracles, the wizard couple opened their hearts to accept Jesus as the Savior of their lives and stopped practicing witchcraft. God also blessed and kept their family safe from persecution.
Another man who did not believe in Jesus had a strange dream. Three balloons representing different faiths appeared in the dream. Among them, only Jesus’ balloon could rise to the sky. He knew that this was God speaking to him personally. After waking up from the dream, he took the initiative to express his willingness to believe in Jesus. And two missionary couples who had been sowing seeds in a certain village for many years recently led another couple to believe in the Lord.
Pastor Dai and the church members are extremely encouraged by these good news, knowing that their faithful prayers are bringing great power to gradually untie the bonds of evil spirits in the local area that were originally difficult to loosen.
Surrounded by crises, God protects us
Public security in Indonesia is not good. In 1998, a tragic anti-Chinese incident broke out, killing more than 1,500 Chinese. The government has not yet held anyone accountable. The government forces and the rebels have been fighting for more than 20 years. They have reconciled on the surface, but they are still competing with each other behind the scenes. Many militants are hiding in the mountains and waiting for opportunities. Therefore, whether they are soldiers, policemen working for the government, or rebels, The government's rebels are very wary of outsiders, fearing that the other party will do bad things.
In the past, there have been several reports of preachers being shot and kidnapped on mountain roads. When Pastor Dai and his colleagues visited the coffee tribe for the first time, they encountered a frightening danger. When they visited the village chief, there happened to be a soldier in the village chief's house. After some interrogation, the soldiers sent them to the military camp for detention and photocopied and registered all their documents. Fortunately, in the critical moment, the local translator found a brother in Christ in time. The officers stepped in to help them escape safely.
In addition to man-made disasters, there are also fierce spiritual battles!
One time, Pastor Dai asked a local Christian sister to invite coffee friends to her home for a gathering. Unexpectedly, that morning, the preacher's young son was scalded. At noon, Pastor Dai and a co-worker suddenly suffered from diarrhea without warning until late at night. , and still no coffee tribe members were invited to the meeting that night.
The next day, a group of people visited a university and had a pleasant chat with the faculty. As soon as they stepped out of the campus, a co-worker began to feel numbness in his body, which then spread to his hands and feet. After everyone prayed earnestly, the co-worker The symptoms of discomfort gradually disappeared.
Pastor Dai had a dream when he was in Indonesia. In the dream, he was in a house with many Indonesians. Suddenly, an Indonesian young man rushed in with weapons raised in his hands and wanted to assassinate the Indonesians in the house. In order to protect the Indonesians, Pastor Dai used his left hand to resist several times, and the young man then changed his target and tried to kill him. At the critical moment, Pastor Dai swung his right fist and struck back hard.
This severe pain woke Pastor Dai from his dream. It turned out that he hit his right fist on the wall with such force that his hand still hurt for a while after returning to the United States. This shows that the dream was as real as if he were present at the scene. After learning about it, a local Chinese co-worker in Indonesia told Pastor Dai that the weapon in the hands of the young man in his dream was the traditional weapon of another ethnic group in Indonesia (a total of 4.2 million people), and this ethnic group defeated coffee in the past. tribe, and manipulated and squeezed the coffee tribesmen as slaves.
Only then did Pastor Dai realize that caring for the coffee tribes meant not only praying for them to escape from the power of Islam, but also praying for them to be released from the hatred and oppression of the past ethnic groups, so that the true light of the gospel could enter into their midst.
After joining the missionary mission to the coffee tribe, Pastor Dai and the brothers and sisters in the church prayed more fervently and got closer to God than ever before. Because they truly realize that in the missionary field, which is full of crises and difficult environments, God’s guidance and protection are needed at all times.
God gives strategies and opportunities
Since 2009, God has gradually given us abundant resources and appropriate strategies. During their third visit to the coffee tribe, they got in touch with the Indonesian Chinese Methodist Church and will combine local and North American resources to serve the coffee tribe together.
A local university also agreed to allow colleagues to teach there. Pastor Dai and his co-workers hope to take this opportunity to build friendship and trust with young students and enhance their competitiveness in finding jobs abroad after graduation. If these children go to work in the city or go to North America for further study after graduating from college, they will have the opportunity to break away from the closed faith environment of the coffee tribes, know Jesus freely, and then spread the gospel back to their hometowns.
In addition, the area produces high-quality coffee, which is valuable in the market. However, the coffee tribesmen are not familiar with sales methods and channels, and have been severely exploited by outside businessmen, resulting in poverty. Pastor Dai and his colleagues have begun to seek Christian entrepreneurs who are willing to invest funds and have marketing channels to purchase coffee from local coffee farmers with a missionary heart to help residents escape poverty and to allow coffee people to know and experience the love of Jesus. .
good hope
Pastor Dai emphasized that spreading the gospel to all races and peoples is God’s call to us to prepare for the return of Jesus. He invited more churches to commit themselves to serving the vast unreached people. If brothers and sisters need missionary information, have the burden to participate in service, or entrepreneurs are moved to help local coffee farmers escape exploitation, please contact Pastor Dai.
Revelation 7:9-10:“After this I looked, and behold, a great crowd, which no one could number, from all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and holding palm branches in their hands. Shouting with a loud voice, , Salvation be to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”
God gave this passage to Pastor Dai and the brothers and sisters of Lord Zion Church in Los Angeles, and it also painted a beautiful vision that they longed for: in the future, in heaven, they will rejoice in front of the throne together with the coffee tribe and other ethnic groups. Worship and praise the Lamb Jesus Christ…
Want to contact Pastor Dai Huahua? Please send your letters to—
Email: revivalzion@yahoo.com
Notes
The Mada people are the most prosperous group of Christians in Indonesia. This group once strongly rejected Christianity. In 1834, two young American missionaries, Henry Lyman and Samuel Munson, went through all kinds of difficulties to enter the tribe, but were brutally cooked and killed. Miraculously, in the year when these two missionaries were martyred, the German missionary Ingwer Ludwig Nommensen was born. In 1862, Robinson sailed for 142 days to reach the Mada tribe. God helped him escape from danger many times. In the first three years, he led three people to believe in Christ. Twelve years later, the number of believers reached 2,000. In 1918 When Robinson died, there were approximately 200,000 believers in the Mada tribe. In 1991, the number of Christians in this ethnic group reached 3 million. At present, most of the Mada people are Christians, except for the Mandheling people in the south who believe in Islam.
Journalist profile
Zheng Qiongyu, from Taiwan, settled in Northern California with her husband and son, enjoying a simple and ordinary home life. I like reading, traveling and camping on weekdays.