Kiai Sadrach

It is a photograph of two men on two chairs. One is a Dutch missionary, Jakob Wilhelm. The other is a Javanese Christian teacher from the village of Karangjasa, in the south of Central Java. His name is Sadrach. The chairs are the same height. The two men sit side by side.

Around 1885 the photograph appeared in a Dutch missionary magazine. Wilhelm himself had asked Sadrach to sit on a chair of the same height. Among European missionaries it caused an uproar. A missionary who showed a Javanese man as his equal: for many, that went too far.

That chair tells the story of Sadrach in miniature. He was a Javanese man who became a Christian and stayed Javanese. According to the Indonesian theologian Sutarman Partonadi, whose doctoral thesis on him was published as a book in 1990, he brought thousands of Javanese people to the Christian faith. That was more than the Dutch mission had converted in fifty years. And he, of all people, was called a heretic by that same mission.

It began with a poor boy called Radin.

A BOY WITHOUT A SURNAME

He was born around 1835 in a village near Demak, on the north coast of Central Java. His parents were poor farmers. The sources disagree about the exact year: 1835 is mentioned most often, but 1837 and 1840 also appear. His name was Radin, a single name, as with many Javanese people.

In those years Java was a colony of the Netherlands. Authority lay with the governor-general in Batavia, today’s Jakarta, and with his residents and assistant residents in the regions. Most Javanese were Muslims. Their Islam was blended with older Javanese traditions of mysticism and inner knowledge, which the Javanese call ngelmu. A kiai was an Islamic teacher with authority, someone who gathered students around him.

As a young man Radin traveled between various pesantren, Islamic boarding schools, in East Java. One of the sources, which relies on the work of the French historian Claude Guillot, places him in Jombang between 1851 and 1858. After that he went back to Semarang, the great port city. He lived in the Kauman, the quarter around the great mosque, and added the name Abas to his own. Radin Abas: this was how he showed that he was a serious Muslim.

A CHRISTIAN VILLAGE IN EAST JAVA

At some point in those years Radin Abas came to Mojowarno. This was a village in East Java that had been built by Javanese Christians. The sources I have been able to read do not say exactly when he was there or what he saw.

Another encounter mattered more. Kiai Ibrahim Tunggul Wulung was a Javanese Christian teacher on the slopes of Muria, a mountain north of Demak. He had founded Christian villages there himself, with Bondo at their center. Tunggul Wulung was not a missionary from Europe. He was a Javanese man who spoke about Jesus in a Javanese way. According to the sources, it was this man who persuaded Radin Abas.

What moved a young Muslim teacher to become a Christian? We do not know it from his own lips. As far as is known, Sadrach left no writings describing his conversion. An Indonesian blogger does mention a handwritten book of some two hundred pages that is said to be kept by his descendants in Karangjasa. I have found no one who has studied it.

BAPTISM IN BATAVIA

Radin Abas went to Batavia. There he worked as an assistant to Frederik Lodewijk Anthing, a Dutch lawyer and former government official who preached the gospel among the Javanese as a layman. On April 14, 1867, Radin Abas was baptized in Batavia. He chose the name Sadrach.

It is a name from the book of Daniel. Shadrach was one of the three young Jews at the court of Babylon who were given a Babylonian name and stayed faithful to their God. Why Radin Abas chose this name in particular is not stated in any source I read. So I leave it at the fact that he bore it.

After his baptism he went back to Tunggul Wulung and became leader of the congregation in Bondo. He did not stay long. One historian mentions a second marriage of Tunggul Wulung as a possible cause.

MRS. PHILIPS IN TUKSONGO

In 1869 Anthing sent him south. In Tuksongo, near Purworejo in the residency of Bagelen, lived Christina Philips-Stevens. She was an Indo-European woman, of mixed Dutch and Javanese descent, who on her own initiative preached the gospel to the Javanese around her. She taught them the basics of the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the Twelve Articles of the faith and the Lord’s Prayer.

Sadrach became her student and soon her helper. From around 1870 they traveled the villages together. According to the Dutch researcher Max Rooyackers, the group of Christians around her doubled in about a year. In 1871 sixty-five Javanese were registered.

Around that time Sadrach settled in Karangjasa, about twenty-five kilometers (fifteen miles) south of Purworejo. The sources differ on the year: 1870 or 1871.

An Indo-European woman with no church ordination and a converted Javanese Muslim stood together at the beginning of a movement.

A CHURCH CALLED A MOSQUE

In 1871 the community in Karangjasa built a church. The building had the shape of a Javanese mosque, and that is also what it was called. A student at Universitas Gadjah Mada describes it as very simple, with a thatched roof, bamboo walls and an earthen floor. According to the same source, the congregation was called together with a kentongan, a hollow wooden or bamboo drum used in Javanese villages, instead of a bell. The leader was called imam.

The growth was great. Between 1870 and 1873 an estimated two and a half thousand Javanese were baptized. Congregations sprang up in Karangjasa, Banjur, Karangpucung, Kedungpring and Karangjambu.

How did he do it? Sadrach worked the way a kiai worked. He entered into public debate with other teachers, sometimes for days on end. The agreement was that whoever lost would become the student of the winner. If Sadrach lost, he would return to his former teaching. Rooyackers names four traveling teachers whom he defeated in debate in this way. The first to be baptized was a Kiai Ibrahim; after him came a Kiai Kasanmetaram.

In 1876 Christina Philips-Stevens died. She had been ill for years. From then on Sadrach stood alone. Around that time he married and took the name Surapranata. A source from the New Apostolic Church says that the Javanese only called him that from 1899 onward.

SMALLPOX, AND THREE WEEKS IN A CELL

Then the Dutch mission arrived.

In 1882 a missionary named Bieger arrived in Purworejo. He came on behalf of the mission and was expected to lead the Javanese Christians in the area. Those Christians already had a leader. Open conflict followed.

That same year Sadrach was arrested. The charge was that he was obstructing vaccination against smallpox, a campaign of the colonial government. According to the Indonesian theologian Emanuel Gerrit Singgih, the charge came from the head of the local administration, W. Ligtvoet. An Indonesian journalist writes that the missionaries were behind it. I cannot establish who is right. The sources also say little about Sadrach’s own position. Singgih writes that he had biblical objections to vaccination.

What happened is certain. Sadrach spent three weeks in the prison of Kutoarjo. After that he was placed under house arrest for three months. He had to serve that house arrest in the home of Bieger, the missionary with whom he was in conflict. Then the governor-general released him, because the evidence was not convincing.

A source from the New Apostolic Church relates that his followers at that time said they would follow him even to death. That story comes from within the movement itself.

How would you react if you had to live for three months with the man who wanted to take over your work?

“PANDITA MARDIKA”

After Bieger came another missionary, Jakob Wilhelm. He chose a different path. Wilhelm saw Sadrach as his equal and worked together with him. He led the congregation in Karangjasa with Sadrach’s support, not against him.

From those years comes the name the community gave itself: golongane wong Kristen kang mardika, the group of free Christians. Wilhelm called himself pandita mardika, free minister. The word mardika means free. Singgih reads it as a statement about identity: these Christians did not want to be the Christians of the colony. Another source writes that they did not recognize the ministers of the Indies Church, the Protestant state church, because those ministers were paid by the colonial government.

And then, around 1885, Sadrach sat down on that chair.

I have to be honest here about what I do not know. What Wilhelm and Sadrach preached together in those years, how their services sounded, what exactly Sadrach taught his people: on all this I have only read summaries by historians. Partonadi himself, the thesis that knows the most about him, I have not been able to open.

A REQUEST FOR BREAD AND WINE

One tension remained. In the Protestant churches only ordained ministers were allowed to baptize and to administer the Lord’s Supper, the meal of bread and wine in which Christians remember the death of Jesus. Sadrach had never been ordained. According to the sources, he asked repeatedly whether his congregations might receive the sacraments from their own leaders. This was refused every time. The Netherlands Missionary Society never ordained him as a minister.

For the mission this was a question of order and pure doctrine. For the Javanese Christians in Bagelen it was a question of whether they were allowed to take part as full members. European missionaries also felt that there was too much that was Javanese and too little that was Christian in Sadrach’s congregations. The word that came up often was syncretism: a mixture of religions.

Was that judgment fair? Historians do not agree. Singgih calls Sadrach a pioneer of what he calls the dialogue of life with your neighbor. He reproaches the missionaries for being unable to see the Javanese side of him without finding it suspicious.

DECEMBER 1891, PURWOREJO

In 1890 or 1891 the Reverend Frans Lion Cachet traveled to Java. He was a Dutch minister and came as a delegate of the synod to inspect the mission work. One of his tasks was to investigate Sadrach.

In December 1891 he gave his verdict in Purworejo. According to Guillot, he told the missionaries that they had to separate themselves from Sadrach, because Sadrach would poison their work. A resolution was drawn up stating that Sadrach was a heretical teacher. Wilhelm signed it. The Indonesian historian Tedi Kholiludin writes that he did so reluctantly, and that the resolution was in essence Lion Cachet’s.

On March 3, 1892, Wilhelm died.

Lion Cachet wrote a thick book about his journey, Een jaar op reis in dienst der zending (A year of travel in the service of the mission), published in 1896. It is available in the Digital Library of Dutch Literature (DBNL). In the chapter on the village of Gintoeng he mentions Karangjasa and, using quotation marks, speaks of “den ‘Goesti’ dáár”, roughly “the ‘Goesti’ there”. Goesti is a Javanese title for a lord or prince. I read it as a mocking reference to Sadrach, but that is my reading.

I find this a hard chapter to write. Lion Cachet traveled for a whole year in the service of the mission. He will have believed he was protecting the church. And he passed judgment on a Javanese brother after one visit, in a language and culture that were not his own. Both things are true.

CHOOSING IN 1893

In 1893 the Christians in Bagelen had to choose: Sadrach or the mission. According to a source from Universitas Gadjah Mada, there were 6,374 members at that time. About one hundred and fifty of them went with the European missionaries. The rest stayed with Sadrach.

These were not the only numbers that circulated about him. At one point Partonadi mentions 7,552 followers, against at most two thousand converts made by the mission in fifty years. Guillot gives more than seven thousand for 1898. A church source mentions five thousand or fifteen thousand. At his death there are said to have been twenty thousand. All these figures come from different counts and different years, and they cannot be checked. At the very least they show that it was a matter of thousands.

APOSTLE FOR JAVA

Sadrach had a community, but no church that recognized his leaders. He found one in an unexpected corner.

In Magelang, not far from Purworejo, an Apostolic congregation met under the leadership of Liem Cu Kiem. The Apostolic movement had arisen in Europe in the nineteenth century. It believed that God was once again giving apostles to the church, as in the New Testament. Its work in the Dutch East Indies had begun around 1880. Anthing, the man Sadrach had once assisted, had according to the New Apostolic Church joined it himself and had come to Java as an apostle in 1881. He died two years later.

Sadrach attended services in Magelang. In 1899 he was ordained an apostle in Batavia by the apostle G.J. Hannibals. From then on his followers called him the apostle for Java.

Whether he fully shared the teaching of that church, or was mainly looking for the room he was not given elsewhere, is a question the sources I read do not answer. The New Apostolic Church still counts him as part of its history.

A GRAVE UNDER THREE ROOFS

Sadrach grew old. According to a source from the New Apostolic Church, he may have stepped back in December 1922, though according to others he led services until shortly before his death.

He died in November 1924 in his house in Karangjasa, next to the church that was called a mosque. He was about eighty-nine. Most sources give November 14; one source gives the night of November 14 to 15, and the New Apostolic Church gives November 19. According to the English Wikipedia, his family and the regents of Kutoarjo and Kulon Progo, Javanese administrators, attended the funeral. He was buried in Karangjasa, in a grave with a triple roof, a cungkup, as the Javanese build for someone they honor.

His adopted son Yotham succeeded him. He did not have his father’s presence, writes an Indonesian journalist. In 1933 a large part of the community rejoined the mission. Partonadi speaks at that point of ten to twenty thousand members.

AT THE SAME HEIGHT

Singgih calls Sadrach’s life a tragic story. I understand why. A man who brought thousands of Javanese to Christ was called a heretic by the church of those who baptized him and had to find a place outside it.

I also find it a story about patience. Sadrach had been through prison, house arrest with his opponent, the verdict from Purworejo and the break. He went on living in the same village, among the same people, for more than fifty years.

Perhaps you know the feeling of others deciding whether your faith is really genuine. Sadrach did not write a book about it. He left no complaint behind. We have a photograph.

Two men, two chairs. The same height.