Aceh

I recently returned from a 3-day trip into Indonesia. While I was there, I was able to go up to Banda Aceh and visit the devastation area. I had intended to do whatever I could to help while there. I figured this would be helping to clean out a house or two, maybe clear a neighborhood of refuse, or help in a refugee area. I was unprepared for what I would see. To be honest, I think it is difficult for anyone to prepare for it.

Most of the city is all right. There is some earthquake damage, but for the greatest part the buildings are fine. However, at a certain point you cross an invisible “line.” Beyond this point, there is nothing left of the city except 90%-damaged buildings and refuse littered across a muddy field. What was once city, shopping area, park, fishing village, etc., is now nothing more than toothpicks and trash.

To see something like this is overwhelming to the senses. How can over half a city be rebuilt? To grapple with it is an incredible mental sensation. Suddenly cleaning out a single house seems immaterial. An entire city must be cleaned before anything can be done, and that process might take months or years.

In the midst of this I was thinking a lot about short-term and long-term results. To do anything in Aceh takes a long time: it takes over 12 hours just to get there by truck from Medan. Airplanes run sometimes, but not always. My thoughts went back to the night before, and one of the reports that was given.

It appears that some workers - I don’t know who, I never found out, and I’m not sure I want to - had already been to Indonesia, expressing the desire to “win all Aceh for Christ.” They had a water baptism scheduled already.

The reality of missions is that we struggle with our point of view on this. On the one hand, we know that every minute souls are slipping into eternity. I had a vivid reminder of this as a truck full of bags of corpses went past us on the road. A co-worker told me she had heard from one soldier that they were still burying 300 people every day. The vast majority - perhaps all - of those dying have never heard the Good News. They are slipping into a Christless eternity. Different theological strands within Christianity try to deal with what happens when an unevangelized person dies; the plain fact is that we do not KNOW. Many of us have fairly strong ideas. The most that we can say with authority is that they died not knowing Christ. We can be even stronger and say that they died not knowing Christ because we did not tell them.

So, with this criminal indictment hanging over us - that we have not obeyed Christ’s Great Commission and brought the Good News to the world yet - how do we view the time in Aceh? It is probable that our time is limited. The government will not allow aid workers in there forever, and the separatists are already expressing concern about the number of Christians in the area.

We could try to “win all Aceh for Christ.” But I wonder about this. As much as I call for people to mobilize, for people to go to the harvest field, at the same time I know that evangelization here in Asia requires much more of a relationship for it to be effective. (Actually, I theorize that the same is true about Western evangelism… and that is why there is so much nominalism and backsliding.)

So we could go in and hold secret crusades and get possibly a handful of believers. But what happens when we then withdraw? We can say we evangelized Aceh, that we told them the News, and if they didn’t accept it their blood is on their own hands. We can rationalize it. But in our rationalizing, are we really just telling ourselves rational lies?

I wonder if the long-term approach, with its significant difficulties, isn’t the better road. I know that means that in the short-term we aren’t sharing the Gospel immediately on a wide-spread basis. I know that means some souls are slipping away. I ache for that. But at the same time, I think that a long-term approach of building relationships, of serving in love, of being a blessing, of modeling what it means to follow Christ - I think that this approach will result in more fruit in Aceh.

This is a reality that we all have to grapple with. It smacks in some ways of situational ethics, and that’s certainly not what I intend. It’s just something we have to think about, pray about, deal with.