Rhenisch mission

The next serious challenger to that integrity was Christianity. After some abortive forays by British and American Protestants in the early nineteenth century, a systematic mission to the Toba Batak was inaugurated by Ludwig Nommensen (1834-1918) and his colleagues of the German Rhenisch mission in 1862. He laboured particularly to have a Batak New Testament published as the first significant work in a... 

The Rhenisch mission to the Toba Batak succeeded in part because as a German body it was conceptually separate from Dutch colonialism, and indeed preceded colonial control in the Toba Batak heartland. Between 1860 and 1900 the majority of Toba Bataks accepted Christianity, in a form which centred around the printed Batak versions of the Augsburg Confession and the Bible. Although there were areas of great tension between Batakness and Christianity, the second generation of Christians was able to conceive the uniform style of worship, belief and church governance developed by the Rhenisch mission as a part of the Batak identity, and the language used by the mission as a classic form of Batak expression. In 1927 the mission was reconstituted as a Batak church, the HKBP. 

Those we now call Karo or Karo Batak were declared an objective of Dutch missionary work for political reasons, because of their proximity to the Muslim and anti-Dutch Acehnese (Kipp 1990). The expansion of the Rhenisch mission in that direction was therefore not encouraged by colonial authority, the work being entrusted to the Dutch Missionary Society (NZG). Karos appear to have accepted the broad exonym Batak in the nineteenth century, but the Dutch mission favoured a distinctive term, to reflect the very different language in which they preached, to cater to Karo sensitivity to Toba domination, and to emphasise that the German mission should keep out of its sphere (Kipp 1993 28-38 Steedly 1996). 

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