From the 15th century Halmahera belonged to the sphere of influence of four regional sultanates, among which Ternate was the most important. Christianity arrived after 1520 with the Portuguese and Spanish. In 1534 thousands of inhabitants of Halmahera were baptized. However, the wars between the Portuguese and Ternate destroyed these congr. Around 1600 the Prot Dutch arrived. They established a church in the Central Moluccas but left Halmahera to Ternate. Not until 1866 did a Dutch missionary society send missionaries to the island. Until 1900 the mission was characterized by a very negative attitude towardadat(customary law) and a careful selection and preparation of individuals to be baptized. This policy and the opposition of Islam from its center in Ternate caused progress to be extremely slow. After 30 years of missionary work there were 150 Christians on Halmahera. But in 1896 a group movement toward Christianity started. The young missionary, Hueting, let himself be guided by it to a new approach. In 1938 there were 17,000 Christians. As on many Dutch mission fields in Eastern Indonesia, Halmaheran Christianity was ill prepared for the events of World War II. The population of Halmahera, including the Christians, had a particularly hard time as Halmahera was an important Japanese base; they had to labor for the Japanese; meanwhile their villages were bombed by the Allies. An independent church was established with the name of Gereja Protestan Halmahera. After the Allies reconquered, Halmahera church independence was renegotiated with the missionaries. In 1949 the GMIH was constituted as an independent church with a membership of 30,000, and, not much later, all Dutch missionaries had to leave, since during the conflict between the Indonesian Republic and the Netherlands, Halmahera was on the front line. After 1965 government pressure on the adherents of the ancestral religion to choose one of the state-recognized religions resulted in increased church growth. The church has a hospital, several homes for the elderly, and a considerable number of schools from kindergarten to university level. It publishes a tri-monthly magazine,Buletin GMIH. It considers September 6, 1949, as its birth date.
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