A Far Green Country

Lord willing Mindy & I will be working in Indonesia for the summer on the island of Java. It is a potential "feeling-out" of our future. The couple we are working with we met in Banda Aceh when we went to Indo for tsunami relief in early '05. Long story short, we have kept in email contact with this family who lives in Semarang & this summer when I visted an Indonesian congregation in Elmhurst, NY (in Queens) the pastor there was about to do the marriage ceremony of the missionary's daughter in Kentucky just 2 weeks later. This got me talking with the missionary again, who has since written up a request for Mindy and me to come serve alongside him after graduation in May of '08 (bless the Lord if I see that date). Soooo....here's some info on the people group we will be working with:

• Name: Jawa Pesisir Lor (Java Pal for short - simply means: North Coast Javanese)
  

• There are over 22 million Java Pal's, making it one of the largest unreached people groups in the world
  
  
• Less than .02% are Christian
  
  
• They are considered a "least-reached people group" which means, people groups among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group (usually less than 5% adherents & less than 2% evangelical
  
  
• They are Sunni Muslims
  
  
• They speak primarily Javanese & some Indonesian
  
  
• Most make their living through agriculture or used to work in ag & have come to the cities

This summer we would be doing evangelization and church planting (Lord willing) among this group, but if we came full time with the IMB and accepted this position, we would primarily be doing church planting and evangelization and I would teach one seminary course a semester at the Baptist seminary there after the first year of language training.

- to read more about the Jawa Pesisir Lor click here