First Experience with Village Festivals

Last week Steve and I went with another missionary here, Gola, and helped out with some village festivals he had planned. A village festival is (I discovered) amazingly easy to put on. You rent a jambur (pavilion), rent or borrow a basic sound system, find some singers, a couple musicians, and that’s basically it. From there you can get creative, with skits, or showing movie clips to bring into your message, or …. Heck—interpretive dance if you wanted to. It’s really up to you. The festivals from last week, we did 4 villages in 4 nights.

A couple days before we went to the villages and handed out flyers so they knew we were coming.

This is how the nights generally went:

Sing a couple songs to draw in villagers. Have people give testimonies of what God has done in their lives. More songs. Main speaker. Main speaker’s job is to share God’s undiscriminating love for all people, regardless of gender, position in life, their past, current situations, or religion. That God is not mad at us, because Jesus has put away our sins. And that through Jesus we can have relationship with God. That God is not waiting for us to make ourselves better or nicer before He can accept us, but that He already accepts us because Jesus took sin and death and punishment on his body in our place. Then we pray for the people there, for whatever prayer requests they have.

Gola was the main speaker for two nights, our friend Olivia spoke one of the nights, and then Gola let Steve be the main speaker for one of the nights- which was very nice of him! Steve and I also took turns giving testimonies on the nights. Here are some pictures from the different nights, and then after the pictures there is a funny story, so keep scrolling.




Haha. I am pretending to be an angry person here. Unfortunately, this is the best picture of me quality-wise.

Ok. So on the very first festival night, we borrowed a church bus and drove down to the little village. As we were turning to go to the jambur (pavilion), the bus driver drove the bus off of the road (in most instances, I could totally understand this; Indonesian village roads being horrendous. However in this case there was absolutely no excuse). It took hours and hours and HOURS to get the bus unstuck. Here is a picture:

Also, because I don’t feel like devoting an entire blog post to the weather, I’ll just throw it in here.

It is COLD! At least it was last week in Berastagi and surrounding areas. I was wearing my sweatshirt AND a rain coat and my jeans and shoes and I was still freezing! I laughed before when I would see little gloves and toques for sale, but I understood last week. Brrr….

Medan, however, remains to be unforgivingly hot.