FICA Kalamazoo Trip Report: 3 – 5 November, 2017
This trip is born out of our conviction and our admiration toward a Papuan Christian fellowship in Western Michigan University (WMU) in Kalamazoo. We are fully convinced that God has a divine purpose for these Papuan students. This trip has confirmed our conviction that it is God’s plan for these guys to come to WMU in Kalamazoo. WMU has the best Aviation program in the world and Kalamazoo has the lowest unemployment rate in Michigan due to strong industries presence. These industries are concentrated mainly in aviation and in agriculture, which both are critical for the development of Papua. It is no surprise a majority of the Papuan students study in the field of aviation.
We also admire this Papuan Christian Fellowship. There are maybe one of the two Papuan fellowship in the US campus. In this trip, we can see their passion toward Papua and toward one another. It is truly amazing to see this brotherhood formed out of a love and passion to serve God.
We really believe that God wants us to reach out to this fellowship to develop long term relationship. We want to see these students to keep their focus on God (John 14:31) and be fruitful as described in John 15:5. We see God’s vision clearly in this visit. They are truly bright students and definitely will be worthy to carry the mantle to lead the church in the future. All we need to do is to inspire them to see this vision: that they can actually lift Papua from economic and social depression.
During this trip, we tried to inspire and challenge them to carry this vision. To inspire them, we took them to a local non-profit organization, Tillers International, that works on developing rural areas. They were offered internship opportunities to learn further. To challenge them, we shared the vision and the expectations of current Papuan leaders. The current Papuan elders and leaders expect these students to bring something new to Papua to accelerate the economic growth. They also expect this students to fill the top post in government to develop social welfare.
We believe God has provided all the pieces in Kalamazoo to equip these students. We have the Indonesian Community Church in Detroit that are committed to serve this fellowship. We also have the support of the churches in Kalamazoo, and Christians that are working in WMU, Kalamazoo Valley Community College, and various other non-profit and local businesses.
FICA’s role is to guide them to reach these resources so that they are transformed to be solid Christian intellectuals. Our Lord Jesus Christ has shown us that this transformation occurs through discipleship. We need to be willing to both share our lives with them and to proclaim God’s love to the world. One of the way we could do discipleship is through doing real projects. To continue the OMC theme, we choose to develop a business as our first project. Business is important because it needs to create value by serving people’s needs. We also need to be discipline and completely trust and obey God to be successful.
To follow-up our visit, we will continue to ask them to work together in project. During this visit, we shared a little bit about our current project: opening a refurbishing motorcycle business. We have not done much on this project. We share this start-up story mainly to show our passion to serve God through them and Papua.
In this visit, FICA was represented by Christian Darmahkasih, Joe Budi, Maria Pallo, Gideon Setiawan, and Leonard Winardi. The meeting was attended by 17 students. Our contact to this fellowship is Anis Labane. We also talked with many leaders including Tommy Pagawak, Jesse Sokoy, Justin, Marlyn, Bertha, Tanio, and others.
On Saturday we met with Jim Slining from Tillers International and attended a wonderful dinner at The Jung’s residence in Grand Rapids, Michigan. On Sunday, Joe and Gideon worshiped God at ICC church in Detroit. Our contact at ICC Detroit is Eddy Chandra. The total cost of the trip was $1238.56. The majority of the cost was for travel, which was $1182.56. We spent $56 for food.
In Christ,
FICA Staff members 2017