Pieter Jansz
Pieter Jansz
was the first Dutch Mennonite missionary in Indonesia. He arrived in Central Java in 1851 and began his missionary work. He encountered constraining influences from Islam throughout the area, recognizing the lack of religious freedom to become a Christian. He felt compelled to search for new methods in order to evangelize; in which he developed a theory that Christians should be evangelized in colonies, as a solution. He was also known for his ability to translate the Bible into various languages which allowed the Javanese people to have access to the Bible.
Education
Pieter Jansz was born in Amsterdam on September 25, 1820. His theology was Protestant orthodoxy with a bias toward Pietist expressions. Within a three-month period in 1848, he lost both his father and his newlywed wife, Johanna Elisabeth van Ijzendoorn, through death. These tragedies affected him deeply and caused him to contemplate his future. As a result, he applied as a missionary candidate to the Doopsgezinde Zendungs-Vereeniging or the Dutch Mennonite Missionary Society. He later got remarried, to Jacoba Wilhelmina Frederica Schmilau and they had ten children, of whom their son Pieter A. Jansz was a successor of his father in the missions field. Jansz was an elementary school teacher in Delft. During his years of teaching he published textbooks and didactic stories for children. In preparation for his missionary assignment Jansz received private tutoring at the Royal Academy of Delft in order to become acquainted with the Javanese and Malayan languages, as well as with the geography and ethnology of the Dutch Indies. The last years of his life he spent at Kaju-Apu, at the home of his son-in-law, missionary Johann Fast, where he died 6 June 1904.Missionary work
August 1851 Pieter Jansz and his wife Jacoba Wilhelmina Frederica Schmilau sailed to Jakarta to begin their missionary work. On November 15 they arrived as the first Mennonite missionaries of the Enlightenment period. Upon their arrival Jansz primary focus was to find an opening for a teacher rather than a missionary. As a teacher he would not be limited by the regulations the Dutch Indies government imposed on missionaries, especially in Java. Also the DMMS was convinced that education was the best way to raise the cultural and moral level of the native population and to make them receptive to the gospel. He worked as a private tutor on the property of Margar whom built a house for Jansz, in Japara,Margar Soekias was a land owner. who was a Christian patrician of Armenian background.
Jansz and Soekias began to collide because of a disagreement about promises on the subject of sugar and rice, and Jansz was forced to leave. Later on he opened a school for the Javanese children but had very little success in evangelizing because he had no help; this resulted in him leaving the school and becoming a full-time missionary.
On April 16, 1854 he had succeeded in baptizing five Javanese people which started the first congregation of the native population in the area of Jepara. They joined a European congregation that already existed in Jepara, to become the Javanese Mennonite Church, which then formed part of the Protestant church in the Dutch Indies. Jansz's congregation grew slowly for two specific reasons: he was a very strong believer of coming to faith before baptism, and he pushed believers to become baptized. The second reason for the slow growth is because the area in which Jansz was working had a strong Islamic influence which continues to this day. Because there was a slowness of growth within the church, he wanted to adopt new methods. In doing so he wrote a book called Land Reclamation and Evangelism in Java in which he emphasized Christian communities or colonies where converts could find support and protection. Jansz strongly believed that evangelism had to be performed by the Javanese Christians because he was a Westerner who simply could not bridge the gap between himself and the villagers.