Churches In Indonesia Work To Reshape Lives 20 Years After Earthquake's Devastation
A painting of “The Last Supper” adorns the wall of the Bawolato Church of Christ on the island of Nias. Dennis Cady helped to coordinate relief work and construct the church building after the 2005 earthquake. (Photo by Erik Tryggestad)
GUNUNGSITOLI, Indonesia — A mangled, rusty bicycle stands as a memorial outside the Nias Heritage Museum. Behind it, two colorful concrete signs bear two terrible dates in the island’s history.
The first, painted with bright blue, white-capped waves, reads Dec. 26, 2004, the day after Christmas. That’s when an undersea earthquake created waves 100 feet high and claimed the lives of more than 227,000 people across 14 countries — most of them in Indonesia.
The second sign depicts a brown-and-red mudslide flowing from the hills. Its date: March 28, 2005, the day after Easter. That’s when a magnitude 8.7 earthquake, perhaps an aftershock of the undersea quake three months earlier, struck Nias.
“Everything was rocking back and forth, back and forth,” said Faatulo Telambanua, who preaches for the Bawolato Church of Christ on the island. The quake woke him from his sleep at about 11 p.m.
“It was terrible,” he said. “People were running to the hills.”
But while the tsunami had spared buildings on the island’s higher ground, the earthquake did not.
Dennis Cady was on the second floor of the hillside Wisma Soliga Hotel when the quake started. The stairway collapsed, and then the floor beneath him disappeared.
“We dropped about 19 feet,” he recalled, “and the second floor became the first floor.”
Cady, a longtime missionary to Southeast Asia, had come to Nias to assist in recovery after the first natural disaster.
Now he was in one.
Miraculously, he escaped from the hotel with only a sprained foot. Before catching a medevac flight a few days later, he hobbled around the island, surveying the damage.
“I saw bodies lined up on the sidewalks,” he said. “I saw people digging to rescue those still trapped beneath rubble. Some places I was familiar with weren’t recognizable.”
More than 800 people died, hundreds more were wounded, and thousands were instantly made homeless. The earthquake, the second-most powerful ever recorded in Indonesia, reshaped the island itself. In some areas, the coast moved 160 feet inland. Parts of Nias rose nearly 10 feet.
Twenty years after the dual disasters, Nias is reshaped again.Churches of Christ have dedicated thousands of dollars and hours to relief efforts and medical missions. Christians launched Jochebed’s Hope, a ministry that oversees a children’s home and programs to help islanders get a good education.
Now Nias is home to 60-plus Churches of Christ, more than triple the number that existed prior to 2004. When asked for possible reasons behind the growth, Telambanua put it simply.
“We provided help to people,” he said, “so they wanted to know more about the people that helped them.”
Concrete signs behind a mass of metal and vines note the dates of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004 and the Indonesian earthquake that followed three months later. (Photo by Erik Tryggestad)
Headhunters, slavers, believers
Black-and-white pictures of men with metal mustaches adorn the walls of the Nias Heritage Museum.
They were the island’s noblemen. The museum displays their regal trappings and complex architecture as it traces their history. Raids by slavers in northern Sumatra created a warrior culture. The islanders became headhunters, and the arrival of the Dutch East India Company intensified the slave trade. Then came Protestant missionary E.L. Denninger. Headhunting and slavery were banned.
Now, while Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, the majority of Nias’ 930,000 people claim Christianity as their faith.
Daniel Setiabudi and his wife, Naomi, walk through exhibits of elaborate helmets, weapons and Christian crosses. They’ve come here from Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, where their house, which doubles as a church building and children’s home, is surrounded by mosques.
Here, they’re surrounded by children.
After the museum, they visit the Jochebed’s Hope children’s home. Naomi gets hugs from youngsters while Daniel greets the home’s supervisors, Lingaaro Halawa and Mardianus Hulu.
Halawa proudly shows off his baseball cap, which reads “Better. Faster. First.” It was a gift from James Karl, an elder of the Lake Jackson Church of Christ in Texas and president of Tsunami Earthquake American Relief Services (TEARS) who helped provide relief and rebuilding on Nias.
Karl died in early 2024, but his legacy and his hat live on, said Hulu who describes himself as “the guy who gets food for the kids” at the children’s home.
He does a lot more than that, said Scott Cate, executive director of Jochebed’s Hope. Hulu and his wife never were able to have children of their own. Now they have 34.
“You would be hard-pressed to find a harder worker who cares more about the kids than he does,” Cate said of Hulu.
Who was Jochebed?
Cate’s father, Steve, served as a missionary in Medan, Indonesia, along with Colin McKee. In 1972, they baptized a man from Nias, Talisokhi Laiya, who invited Steve Cate to visit his village.
The trip involved a ferry ride and three days of hiking. It also resulted in the island’s first two Churches of Christ. In the next 20 years, that number grew to 10.
Dennis Cady first visited Nias in 1995, also at Laiya’s invitation, and made regular trips to train church leaders until the tsunami, when he and Steve Cate turned their attention to relief work.
In 2017, Scott Cate and his wife, Tracey, took over his father’s work. That includes Connor’s House, a children’s home in Jakarta overseen by Daniel and Naomi Setiabudi. That same year, in Africa, South Sudan became an independent nation and Cady began to focus his ministry, the Starfish Foundation, on efforts there.
Dennis Cady speaks with children on the island of Nias during one of his many visits after the 2005 earthquake.
In 2016, Cady invited the Cates to take over Jochebed’s Hope. The couple agreed and appointed Daniel Setiabudi as overseer and Suma Goelo, a Christian who lives on Nias, as coordinator for ministries on Nias.
Initially, some of the children helped by Jochebed’s Hope were orphans of the natural disasters. Many, however, had living parents who were forced by poverty to give up their children.
The ministry’s name is a bit of a mystery, Cady said. “I have asked many church groups who Moses’ mother was, and few have known. It was Jochebed.”
The second chapter of Exodus tells the story of Jochebed, who made the desperate choice to hide the infant Moses in a basket in the Nile to save him from the slaughter of Hebrew children by the Egyptians.
“She did not give up her son because she didn’t love him but because she did love him,” Cady said. “I told the early Nias kids that story many times … that their parents did not bring them to us because they don’t love them but because they do love them.”
Reshaping futures — in Indonesia and America
After some final hugs at the children’s home, the Setiabudis and Gulo visit two dormitories in downtown Gunungsitoli. The buildings house about 60 youths who come from rural areas across the island to attend school in the capital city.
Cady launched the program after speaking with church leaders about their biggest needs. Often, village children lack access to quality education or must leave school early to provide for their families, the leaders told him. The program gives students food and housing as they study.
At the boys’ dormitory, students smile and laugh as they line up against the wall, eagerly introducing themselves and talking about their dreams. They want to be teachers, lawyers, police officers.
One student said he just wants to be famous.
A few blocks away, at the girls’ dormitory, the students express similar dreams — to become psychologists, doctors, nurses, businesswomen. Some say they miss their home villages, but they enjoy being together as they study, cook and lead devotionals.
Jhonni Laiya, the caretaker at the boys’ dorm, is a graduate of the program. He was one of 12 children in his family. Since completing his degree, he’s returned to his village and served as a preacher.
The program makes a difference, said Hutton Cate, the son of Scott and Tracey and grandson of Steve Cate. Hutton first visited Nias in 2019 and has made several trips back.
He’s gotten to know the students. He’s even sat in on a few parent-teacher conferences.
“I got to hear teachers tell me firsthand how well our kids do,” he said. “They always had these gifts, but moving into the city at such a crucial time in their development has afforded them so many opportunities to exercise and grow in their gifts that they wouldn’t otherwise have had.”
Hutton also spends time at the children’s home, where the bell for breakfast rings at 6:15 a.m., “and if I’m not out within five minutes, then I’ll have three middle schoolers knocking on my door shouting, ‘Brother! Brother! Makan!’ (the word for ‘eat’),” he said.
There’s a nightly prayer gathering at the children’s home. Children take turns reading Scripture, praying for the group and leading hymns. It’s “a window into the spiritual growth and leadership of each of the kids,” Hutton Cate said.
Two disasters, two decades ago — and the church’s response — reshaped the island of Nias.
Now, the island is reshaping lives, including Hutton’s. An English major at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tenn., he had no plans to pursue ministry.
“Spending two months on Nias, combined with reading, prayer and conversations with trusted mentors, led me into a conviction that I was called to ministry,” he said. “After my return home, I immediately applied to seminary and never looked back. Everything since then has flowed through that sense of calling.”
This article was first published in The Christian Chronicle.
Erik Tryggestad is president and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org. Follow him on X @eriktryggestad.