Mission: Indonesia 2024
Ticket to Paradise
By Gary Fallesen, Climbing For Christ
Jon Trottier was a brother in Christ from our home church in Rochester, NY, USA. He was a supporter of the ministry and, apparently, a big fan of what God was doing through Climbing For Christ.
When Jon passed from this life to glory, he left behind a legacy gift that has helped Climbing For Christ’s work in several countries. We decided to remember and honor Jon in one of those places: Indonesia.
Welcome to “Jon’s Paradise” villas and restaurant.
In 2017, God gave C4C Indonesia leader Budi a vision of building a tourist location on the island of Lombok near the slopes of Mount Rinjani, the second-highest volcano in Indonesia. He called it his life project – the Sembalun Project.
We first visited Lombok and climbed 12,244-foot (3,726-meter) Rinjani in 2012. During the trek, I said something that changed Budi’s perspective on doing ministry.
“Gary said, ‘Why are we climbing to the summit?’” Budi recalled at his church in Jakarta. “He said, ‘What will we see – a pretty sunrise?’ Hmm (Budi thought). Gary told us, ‘Serve our porters.’ That changed me.”
It was a page from our “people, not peaks” playbook. We don’t exist to climb mountains, but to climb to people in the mountains. That’s our mission. Service, not summits.
Budi took my cue and spent our time on Rinjani sharing with and loving on one of our porters. The friendship that began then is deeper today – with that porter working on the Sembalun Project. It has been our prayer that this porter would become one of the first of the Muslim Sasak people to accept Christ.
This has happened through relationship and prayer.
The next time we were there, in 2017, was when God put the Sembalun Project on Budi’s heart.
When Budi told me about it a few years later, the Spirit leapt within me. I asked him how C4C could help. We then partnered with him on the construction of a villa and restaurant on land he had purchased with his own savings.
Indonesian tourism has dubbed Lombok “the island of 1,000 mosques.” The smallest town or village has at least one mosque, and cities or larger towns have mosques on every corner. The Sasak people, which number 3.4 million, are the majority population on Lombok and they are 99.98 percent Muslim. The Sasak are considered a “Frontier” unreached people group – with “virtually no followers of Jesus and no known movements to Jesus,” according to the Joshua Project.
Outside the Rinjani gateway village of Sembalun is where Budi has constructed an imaginative platform for outreach into the Sasak community. He also hopes to reach his neighbors, a Hindu community of people who moved to Lombok from Bali.
Budi is a Christian in a Hindu community on a Muslim island in the largest Muslim country in the world.
Climbing For Christ helped Budi build two A-frames through financial support ($10,000 USD) and prayer. We were the first to stay in those beautiful structures, which will be used for tourism, give jobs to locals, and be a base for outreach.
“If you just show up here people will want to know what you are doing. ‘Why are you here?’” Budi explained. “Now we have a reason to be here.”
This is business as ministry and a way for Budi to grow relationships with both his Hindu neighbors and the Sasak people of Sembalun. His church already has a presence on the island, and Budi has many ministry connections, including Muslim background believers, who can make this project work.
We are honored to play even a small role in this potentially fruitful project. I have known Budi since God first sent me to Indonesia in 2007. He and his family have visited our house in the United States – also known as C4C’s Home Office. I took him with me to Thailand in 2017 for the Abide Bear Fruit gathering of Vision 5:9, a network of ministries that serve among Muslim people, after we were encouraged to bring workers from the global south. Our relationship runs deep, like those of our other Kingdom workers and ministry partners. It is a joy to serve alongside him and his family.
In 2022, my wife Elaine and I spent time with Budi at the Sembalun Project. We walked Budi’s property, which is more like a jungle trek than a stroll around someone’s land. He pointed out the various fruit trees – coffee, cocoa, vanilla, avocado, coconut, banana, orange, lime. He’s planted two dozen Malaysian durian trees. The durian is a stinky fruit that only a Budi could love. Some places in southeastern Asia (hotels, public transportation) have banned the fruit because of its lingering odor.
Budi’s property, which measures 57-by-187 meters (187-by-614 feet), borders national park land for Mount Rinjani on one side and a deep ravine on another. He has one neighbor, a Balinese man who frequently shows up bearing fruit he has climbed a tree to chop down.
We paused in the middle of a group of trees and Budi said this was where he envisioned a restaurant/café with a berugak (open-air seating that is common here). Again, we helped him build this dream into reality. Another $10,000 USD was contributed to the project.
This is where “Jon’s Paradise” came to be. I told Budi how our brother Jon had blessed Climbing For Christ and that I wanted to honor him. I suggested the name.
“That’s wonderful,” Budi said. “Me, Wendy (his wife), and (son) Jotham were praying and got the name ‘Paradise.’ That’s OK to be Jon’s Paradise.”
Our prayer is that all of these Sasak and Balinese people would come to a relationship with Jesus and one day meet brother Jon in the real paradise – heaven. 
Mission: Indonesia 2024 is scheduled for November. This will be C4C's 10th trip to Indonesia since our inaugural mission there in 2007. This story originally appeared in The Climbing Way (Volume 63, April 2024).
Leaving a legacy
We praise God for those He uses to support Climbing For Christ financially. That support doesn’t have to end in this life. You can leave a legacy for eternity. Climbing For Christ can be designated as a beneficiary of your IRA/retirement account and/or life-insurance policy. That’s what Jon Trottier did to bless us. Contact your financial planner if God puts this on your heart. And thanks from those of us at C4C.
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