The Rim of Fire

Indonesia and the Malay-speaking world

Rim_cover-188x300Indonesia seems off the map to many in Europe (apart from their former colonists the Dutch), which is a great shame. This country, 13,000 tropical islands spread out across an area the width of the continental US, is a fantastic place to have the privilege of visiting.

I didn’t put in the book (though I certainly experienced) the joys of being comprehensively lost in the Jakarta bus system and of riding at dawn across a caldera to look inside a live volcano.

But it was fun to explore the way the Church has grown up here, rapidly, among nominally Muslim and also among tribal peoples, and the challenges it now faces.

The Church in this country does not have a choice between prayer, evangelism, frontier missions, demonstrating Christian integrity in society, works of compassion, nation-building, or working with other faiths for the national good. It has do to them all …

In 2006, I produced a second edition for the mission agency OMF, which is sold online at their site. I added an extra chapter to include Indonesia’s democratic revolution and also something about the Christian responses to the Boxing Day Tsunami, which hit Indonesia hardest of all.

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