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Mega-church opens in Indonesia

JAKARTA: A multi-million dollar mega-church opened on Saturday in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, with a rousing service attended by some 4,000 people singing hymns and reading from the Bible in Bahasa Indonesia.

Jakarta’s grand Katedral Mesias is the brainchild of a Chinese-Indonesian preacher, Stephen Tong, who says the church is aimed at dispelling the misconception that Indonesia is intolerant of minority faiths.

“This proves that there are no restrictions from the Indonesian government to build religious centres,” said Tong, a charismatic preacher who founded the Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church in 1989.

“It gives the world a new impression of Indonesia: it is not a messy country or full of troubles.”

Worshippers at the mega-church, most of them Chinese Indonesians, listened in rapt attention as Tong spoke in both Mandarin and Bahasa Indonesia on a host of issues such as church reform and homosexuality during the nearly three-hour service.

The worshippers, many of them dressed in their finest traditional batiks, prayed and sang to Gregorian music and other hymns before ending the service with Handel’s Hallelujah resonating through the massive pillared hall.

Funded by contributions from followers, the white-domed church will eventually also house a seminary, a concert hall and a museum of paintings and Chinese porcelain in an effort to promote religious and cultural understanding. Christians account for about 10 percent of Indonesia’s 226 million people, and have in the past been the target of hardline Islamic violence in some parts of the sprawling Southeast Asian archipelago. reuters

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