SOUTHEAST ASIA — As a teenager, Budi Mulyadi* trained to
kill Christians with a 9 mm pistol.
For months, he aimed it at a target while an instructor
shouted slurs against Christianity. Mulyadi didn’t know anything about the
religion, just that it threatened Islam. Not once did someone explain Christ’s
sacrifice to him.
Yet, almost 20 years later, he serves as a Christian worker.
Today Mulyadi works with American Christian workers to
manage worship sessions for youth in Southeast Asia. He helps local farmers
learn better ways to raise healthy fish and grow their crops. He gives food to
poverty-stricken families.
As Mulyadi works, the jobs and the people he works with
bring him joy and he smiles, but his smiles fade when he talks about his
adolescence. At the age of 14, he lived in an Islamic terrorist camp that
imbued him with wrath and hate.
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Hate “was something that was implanted in my mind,” he said.
“I could just think about Christians and the hate would pop up.”
An obstinate child, Mulyadi ran away from an Islamic
boarding school in his early teenage years. The school merely taught him Muslim
scripture but had too many rules for his taste. He had already run away from
home after a violent disagreement with his father. The 13-year-old had nowhere
to turn. Then he met an Islamic extremist who promised him a new education.
The man took the young Mulyadi to a large compound
consisting of tents and surrounded by trees.
Twenty other boys slept in these
tents at night and trained with knives and guns during the day. They only
stopped for sleep, food and prayer. When their instructors talked to them, they
touted the supremacy of Muslims and the wretchedness of Christians. The
Christians, they said, deserved to die.
“We were told that the Christians were infidels,” Mulyadi
said. “If we would kill Christians, then that would be a free ticket into
Heaven for us.”
At the camp, Mulyadi felt anger and self-righteousness
boiling inside. As he practiced with a gun supplied by the camp, hate filled
him. At times, however, he also felt doubt and confusion. The instructors told
him that Christians should burn in hell, but did he want to send them there?
The boy continued to mull over these questions as his
marksmanship improved and as the gun felt more and more familiar in his hand.
Eventually, the leaders believed, Mulyadi and four other boys were ready to
prove their worth. Without a clear strategy, they sent their students out to
kill anyone they could.
“There wasn’t any specific hit, so there wasn’t any specific
contract,” he said. “If we could find someone that was particularly ‘holy’ —
someone that would really make a dent … then that’s who our primary target
was.”
Once they left the compound boundaries, Mulyadi discovered
he wasn’t the only one with doubts. The other boys had examined themselves as
well, eventually determining they had no desire to kill.
“We were given a task to go kill Christians, and we had to
make a decision — did we want to do that or not?” he said. “And, that was the
point that we broke (and went our separate ways).”
All five boys decided to abandon the jihad. For all the
camp’s brainwashing, they never wanted to kill anyone — no matter how much they
hated them.
Mulyadi went home briefly, but his father’s anger forced him
out on the road again. He eventually landed in a city several hours away and
found a job tending the lawn of a health clinic. He spent the rest of his teen
years living alone in a rented room.
The Damascus Road
As he trimmed hedges year after year, Mulyadi became
interested in general spirituality — not simply what he found in the pages of
the Koran.
During his spiritual search, he found the name of Jesus, a
prophet according to the Koran, and questioned why Muslims never mentioned Him
in their lectures and discussions. He seemed overlooked. Mulyadi picked up a
Bible and investigated.
Then, one night, as he prayed alone in his room, he heard a
voice say, “I will send a Helper unto you.”
Mulyadi didn’t know where the voice came from or who the
“Helper” was, but he turned to Scripture, and after exhaustive reading, found
John 14:16: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper to
be with you forever” (NASB).
From the moment he read that verse in John, the young man
devoted himself to Jesus, a man who had the power to send him a Helper — the
Holy Spirit — and the power to tell him about it 2,000 years after His initial
promise.
“My whole demeanor has changed, and God has filled my heart
with love,” he said. “I’m not an angry person anymore. My temper is gone. I
don’t get mad at people like I did before. Because God loves me, I am able to
love others.”
This love turned Mulyadi into a Christian worker. He loves
the people he once hated. He leads worship for people he once scorned. He
desires to bring people to Christ when he once wanted to punish them for
following the Savior. This is his new passion.
“Until God chooses to take me home, I’m going to be here on
a mission to share the gospel with people who need to hear it,” he says.
As Mulyadi preaches God’s word in scores of villages and
spends time with his family — a wife and daughter — he rarely speaks to anyone
of his time as a terrorist in training. Only after an hour of questioning does
he mention it, and until recently, his American partner didn’t know about that
section of his life. It’s personal.
However, every once in a while, he reunites with the four
other men with whom he left the Islamic camp. They get together and discuss
their work and families, and they discuss God. Although Islamic extremism
filled them with revulsion for Jesus, Christ pursued every one.
All five are Christian pastors.
*Name changed
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