A church for what?

The building is astonishingly beautiful. Named Oikumene, this all-wood church built in 2020 on the island of Borneo, in the Indonesian province of North Kalimantan, was commissioned by an interior design office located in Jakarta “to enable Christian prayer for its employees and Christians in the region”.

The building thus testifies to the good financial health of this company which accompanies the urbanization of the country, whose administrative capital is in the process of moving from Java to the center of Borneo in order to escape rising waters. But it’s not all about building a beautiful church. What does it really tell us about the populations for which it is intended, or about the challenges of the territory where it is rooted?

Thus, if its long shape evokes the longhouses of the Dayak people, the building in no way evokes the fate of a small local indigenous community, the Punan Batu Benau Sajau, made up of around a hundred people, and whose natural territory is shrinking to nothing.

Surrounded by palm oil and natural rubber plantations, the building also says nothing about the living conditions of the workers who work there, and whose activity fuels our food and automobile industries. Certainly, the architects chose to use local reclaimed wood, but doesn’t a church have other things to celebrate than successful architecture?