Indonesian Christianity — the Independent Century

Indonesia holds one of the largest Christian populations in the Muslim-majority world, and its churches have been running themselves for most of a century. The Batak church, the HKBP, became independent in 1930 — the first self-governing church in the Dutch East Indies — and is among the largest Lutheran bodies anywhere. The archipelago's Christianity is regional rather than national: Sumatra, Java, Timor and the eastern islands each have their own story. Two of the century's turning points fall close together. Between 1965 and 1971 a revival ran through Timor, whose best-known account, Mel Tari's Like a Mighty Wind (1971), is disputed for embellishment, and whose most careful evaluation, George W. Peters's Indonesia Revival: Focus on Timor (1973), was written on the ground. And after the violence of 1965 and 1966, in a state that required every citizen to declare a religion, church membership grew very fast — a growth that cannot honestly be told apart from its context.