In the 19th century the colonial state took over responsibility for the ? 50,000 Indonesian Prot Christians it had inherited from the Dutch East India Company (VOC). These Christians lived mainly in the Minahasa, the Moluccas, the Timor archipelago, and in the towns of Western Indonesia. They were organized into the Protestant Church in the Netherlands Indies. This church had a hierarchical structure, the ministers being appointed and transferred by the central Church Board (Kerkbestuur) in Batavia (Jakarta), and all costs, except poor relief, were borne by the government. The church had no confession of faith and was not supposed to proclaim the Gospel to non-Christians, as it was an organ of a neutral state. However, the Church Board wanted congr resulting from the activities of the missionary societies to be incorporated into the church, as indeed was done in the Minahasa (? 1875). In the early decades of the 20th century the church started missionary work in its traditional territories (Timor, Moluccas). The government tolerated these activities because it considered them as a preventive measure against Islam. As a result, in 1938 about 40% of Prot Christians in Indonesia belonged to the GPI. At the same time, the spiritual situation of the church improved thanks to an intensification of pastoral care and an influx of new members from the Netherlands. After protracted negotiations, in 1935 the administrative separation of church and state was implemented; in 1950 this process was completed when the Indonesian state relinquished its financial obligations toward the GPI. In 1936 the church adopted a new, more Presb church order, including a brief confessional formula which included the Apostles’ Creed. In these years the congr in the Minahasa (1934), the Moluccas (1935) and Timor (1947) were allowed to form autonomous churches under the aegis of the Church Board; the congr in the towns of Western Indonesia were organized into a fourth church (GPIB, 1948). The GPI remained in existence as an umbrella organization. The Church Board even wanted the mission churches to join the GPI, so that the church would become the ecumenical organization of Indonesian Protestantism. However, history went a different way. The Indonesian churches founded a Council of Churches (DGI, from 1984 onward PGI), and even the bond with the autonomous churches within the GPI decreased to the point of becoming meaningless. The sixth and last General Synod of the GPI was held in 1956. Attempts in the 1980s to revive the unity of the GPI churches under the Church Board met with little or no response. How-ever, the family of “Protestant” Churches, now numbering nine, still constitutes a separate strain within Indonesian Protestantism.
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