As a higher education institution based on the Christian faith, Universitas Pelita Harapan (UPH) realizes the importance of integrating the Christian faith in all academic practices throughout campus. This is why UPH conducted the Faith and Learning Festival on Friday, November 30, 2018, for educators in Christian institutions to inspire and share the vision and how to practice this integration. With the theme “Transforming Hearts, Transforming Society”, this festival is sectioned off into four main events – the seminar, talkshow, practical showcase, and essay presentation.

The two keynote speakers for this festival are Pastor Yakub Susabda, Ph.D, a counselor and Former Chief of STTRI, and Matthew R. Malcolm, Ph.D., Executive Dean of UPH Faculty of Liberal Arts.

About 200 participants, both from UPH and other Christian educational institutions, took part in this Festival. External participants include those from Sekolah Dian Harapan, Universitas Maranatha, STIE Petra Bitung, GMKI Anugrah, and SWS Indonesia.

UPH Rector, Dr. (Hon.) Jonathan L. Parapak, M.Eng.Sc., the Vice Rector in Academic Affairs, Dr. Gunawaty Tjioe, B.Ed., M.Pd., Ph.D., the Vice Rector in Administrative and Monetary Affairs, Hana Herawati, deans, head of departments, and lecturers also made the time to participate in this event.

The Rector voiced his wishes for this event while welcoming the participants. “We are all brought up in a secular system. Therefore, it is not easy for us to integrate values from the Word of God as well as we wish we could. Because of this I would like to thank the committee and Pastor Yakub Susabda for contributing in this seminar. It is my hope that we can commit to dig deeper and prepare ourselves to integrate Christian values in an academic setting,” he explained.

Pastor Yakub Susabda led two sessions in the Festival and talked about Christian Worldview and Human Minds. He put a strong emphasis on the importance of integrating the Christian faith and learning and also urged all Christian educators to experience the Truth that sets them all free through a spiritual life that is robust and mature.

“The center of this integration is the person. We have to know ourselves and know whether we have experienced a personal relationship with God. When we want to integrate our faith with liberal arts and exacta, we have to really know the talents that God has given us and how those talents contribute well in our lives and help us towards becoming individuals that glorify God more and more. Here is the point where we face the challenge of integrating between faith and learning,” declared Pastor Yakub.

Pastor Yakub continued to explain that our mindset of rejecting integration between faith and academics often is the wall that inhibits us to work out our cultural mandate we have as Christians. Also, one other barricade is the fundamentalist spirit that holds doctrinal truth as an absolute truth and assesses everything based on the concept of this doctrinal truth. One other equally inhibiting factor is the low ability to integrate the values of the Bible as a whole.

This ability of integrating between Christian values and academics should be mastered by educators in schools and universities teaching “secular” disciplines instead of theological ones. Matthew R. Malcolm declared that in a Christian university, educators do not only try to be academicians that can integrate Biblical values and “secular” knowledge, but they also want to help students to be integrators that can clearly see the coherence between God’s truth and the “academic knowledge” they get.

“We can help our students in three ways. First, we can model an attitude that can be explicitly defined in a certain Christian term, because students certainly want to see their lecturers act as role models. Second, we can set a class ethos that flows from a Christian worldview. Third, we should explicitly teach them Christian content during certain crucial points,” Malcolm concluded at the end of the seminar.

Participants were also given a chance to ask questions during the question and answer session. The Festival then continued with the essay presentation session, where some research papers in certain disciplines are put on display and discussed upon. Then, in the practical showcase, there were exhibitions and presentations by lecturers or students on the topic of how to integrate faith and learning. The Festival also features a talk show, addressing discussions and learning through the practical examples of integration already demonstrated in UPH.

It is hoped that this festival can be held again next year and can reach out to more Christian educators so that each can learn from one another and contribute to the advancement of Christian education in Indonesia. (it)