Toba church

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. 

The statistics of the main Toba Batak ethnic church, HKBP, systematically reported until the 1990s, show how the movement to Jakarta took off in the Suharto period. Reported HKBP membership in Jakarta increased twenty-fold in the period between 1959 and 1993 (table 6.2). 

The many schisms from the original Toba Batak church, the inroads of Catholics, Pentecostalists and Muslims, the much more complicated situation in the urban diaspora and the secular tendency of some educated leaders, have also made the ethnie churches less central in defining these identities. It is no longer certain that the leading officials (bupati) of the Toba and Karo homelands will be members of the dominant churches in each place, and official events require that Muslim, Catholic and Protestant figures all be represented when prayers are required. 

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