Expansion in Indonesia

From Joel News: In Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, thousands of new charismatic churches have sprung up. Most of these have a young membership, and there is a growing acceptance of women as leaders.

Indri Gautama, a former businesswoman of Chinese descent, is one of Indonesia's female church planters. She wants to see her nation transformed by Christ and says: "It seems like 60 percent of the disasters happening in the world are in Indonesia. God has allowed this so we will seek Him." Her 1,500-member Apostolic Generation Church that began in 2002, feeds hundreds of the city's poor every week, and it provided significant aid to victims of Jakarta's recent floods. Gautama believes her calling is to train a new generation of Christian leaders. "We have to be willing to take risks. We must adopt a kingdom attitude."

National prayer mobilizer Daniel Pandji says that more than 60,000 churches have been planted in Indonesia in recent years - so many that almost every hotel in Jakarta rents out meeting rooms to congregations that don't have their own buildings. Christians in 500 cities in the country have organized 'prayer altars' where believers are storming heaven for a national revival. "It used to be so hard to gather churches together," Pandji says. "But now we are in a season when churches want to come together for prayer."