Gola Tiruneh shares his journey from being born in Ethiopia to becoming a Canadian citizen and eventually settling in Indonesia. He discusses how he felt called to do missions work in Indonesia, despite initial hesitation from his family. Gola and his wife Esther have been involved in various ministries in Indonesia, including conducting crusades and reaching out to unreached tribes. They focus on preaching the simple gospel and praying for miracles to happen, in order to bring awareness of the gospel to different areas. Gola also expresses his desire to train local missionaries and encourage local believers to be evangelists. He mentions the challenges of working with Indonesian believers, who may have fear or hesitation when it comes to evangelism.
Learn more about Gola Tiruneh: https://ggni.org/
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest with me, Gola Tiruneh from Indonesia.
(00:13):
Now, you were actually born in Ethiopia.
(00:16):
That’s right.
(00:17):
And then you came to Canada, became a Canadian citizen at a young age, and now you are living in Indonesia. Tell me about that journey. How’d you end up here?
Gola Tiruneh (00:29):
Well, yes. I was born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. I left there at a young age. My family has always traveled mainly for my father’s work. And so we ended up in India for a couple of years. It was about 10 years old at the time, and soon after, two years after that, my family decided to move to Canada mainly for education. And I just completed grade eight at the time. And I arrived in Montreal, Canada and had to learn French so I can continue with my grade nine. So I did grade nine in French and grade 10, 11, 12 finished in Ontario. So my family is in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. That’s where I spent most of my time. And
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:32):
Let’s talk about Indonesia. How did you end up coming here to the nation of Indonesia?
Gola Tiruneh (01:39):
Well, it started during my high school years. The Lord started speaking to me through many different ways, through people would point me out of a crowd and start to prophesy over me going to these places, preaching to thousands of people. And that used to scare me actually, when I used to get those kind of words. And then the Lord would speak to me through dreams and visions and I would see myself in front of Asians, people doing ministry. And so it was a process for the Lord to kind of help me along. I did have a desire for missions, but at the same time I also had this fear in me of going so far from family. Indonesia is quite far from Canada. It’s literally the other side of the world. So I remember when I made the decision to go to Indonesia, my family was not for it, majority of my family. And even I was a little bit not sure what was going to happen. I wanted to go to Ethiopia to do missions, but I ended up to Indonesia in 2004 through a Bible school that I went to in Canada, in St. Catherine’s area near Niagara Falls. And ended up here in October, 2004, about 20 years ago now. And within a few months I loved Indonesia. It’s just everything turned out to be totally different than what it was in my mind and ended up staying here and doing.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:27):
Now you met your wife Esther, here in Indonesia. She’s Indonesia. And how long have you been married now? We’ve
Gola Tiruneh (03:34):
Been married for 14 years.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:36):
And your son Benjamin? Yes. Is 10 years old. Is 10
Gola Tiruneh (03:40):
Years old.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:40):
And so how did God bring you and your wife Esther together?
Gola Tiruneh (03:44):
Well, we met in a church, the church that my team was working with when we first came to Indonesia. And she was also involved in her church. She was a full-time ministry in the church. And so we always bumped to each other. And she was also one of the translators for guests that come to speak. So she translated for me a couple of times and that’s how we met. And six years later we got married.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:17):
And tell me a little bit about your wife’s journey. How did she become a believer?
Gola Tiruneh (04:21):
Well, my wife Esther is from a Buddhist background, and she was saved during the Christmas service in her church. Somebody invited her and it was a long process for her also, but she made a decision to be a believer in her teams also during her teams. And then she joined the church. She’s been working in our church since, and that’s what we ended up meeting.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:54):
Indonesia is a very unique nation, 270 million people. It’s the fourth largest nation in the world by population, and it’s the largest Muslim majority nation on earth, even bigger than Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. When people think of Muslim nations, they often think of that part of the world, but Indonesia actually has more Muslims than any other nation. And it’s a nation of islands over 17,000 different islands. That’s right. And so your ministry here, you’ve gone to many different islands to talk about
Gola Tiruneh (05:34):
Jesus. Yes. So we do a few things here in Indonesia. We do crusades, we call ’em festivals, festival of love. And we’ve done those different parts of Indonesia. They’re set up to reach people outside the church in a very friendly way. And we just focus on preaching the gospel very simple and pray for the sick, expect miracles to happen in these events. We have seen wonderful things that God has done, miracles such as deaf ears opening and people that couldn’t walk and being able to walk. And that brings a great awareness of the gospel in an area. And we have had Christians and non-Christians come into our events and to hear the gospel and to experience miracles. So a lot of what I’ve been doing is sowing seeds into areas, unreached areas. I love to go to unreached tribes. That’s another thing that we are doing in Indonesia currently, actually, we’re in the process of researching about 40 unreached tribes. And we are also formulating a strategy through partners to friends here and also overseas to reach these tribes. And so I spend a lot of my time in doing these crusades in villages at small towns and also working with these tribes. We also have a discipleship ministry that we are doing on a weekly basis in our hometown in Sumatra. And also through our pastor seminars, we encourage local believers to go out and evangelize.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:40):
And so this is real cutting edge ministry because you’re going into tribes that may have zero believers in the entire tribe. Exactly. And you are getting to know them, asking questions. It’s actually very valuable research so that people can know where the most need is. Right.
Gola Tiruneh (08:05):
So that’s my hope, number one, to create an awareness about these tribes. Most of them are very small, maybe like a couple of thousand people in a few villages. So they’re kind of hard to reach. Sometimes it takes days and you have to get on a boat and then get on a motorcycle, go trek into the jungle. But it’s the work that needs to be done. And my heart is eventually to train a local missionaries that will go there and be a witness to them in some form. And we are in the process of doing that. And also we hope it will create an awareness so that maybe there will be other people that will send missionaries there eventually, and so that the gospel can reach to each and every person.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (09:09):
Now in the Bible it says that every tribe and language, every ethnic group will be represented before the throne room in heaven. And so that’s why this type of ministry is so important because if they’re going to be in heaven, they need to hear the gospel. And if we don’t know who has heard the gospel, who hasn’t heard the gospel, we need to ask questions to find out who are the people that we’re missing that we want to take to heaven with us.
Gola Tiruneh (09:44):
That’s true, that’s true. And sometimes you got to go there to see what’s happening, especially these areas where there’s no believers, there’s no churches. Somebody needs to be there and live among the people and have some kind of a gospel representation. You may not be able to preach the gospel right away, but just having someone there will create opportunities for the gospel to be heard of. And my heart is, especially these tribes that are completely a hundred percent nonbelievers, at least we’ll get one or two families and then it will start to kind of snowball from there. And the best thing I have found in my experiences, Indonesians, reaching Indonesians is way more effective than us coming, for example, me coming from Canada. And they know the culture and they also know how to talk to these people. And that’s my heart right now is to raise local people and to motivate local believers to be missionaries.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:09):
And so one of your desires is even to start a training school That’s right. For people that would from Indonesia come to be trained in how to reach different people groups.
Gola Tiruneh (11:20):
Exactly. Yeah. Well, in Indonesia, the work of the evangelist and the missionaries kind of always the last thing on people’s thoughts. Many believers that want to go into ministry want to be pastors, which is great, but it’s mostly done in Christian areas. So there’s a lot of church planting happening, but in Christian areas, and it’s kind of hard for missionaries to go to these places because number one, they don’t know what to do
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:58):
And they stick out.
Gola Tiruneh (11:59):
They stick out. There’s also, of course, the financial thing. So we are trying encourage and motivate people to work in these kind of remote areas. And by God’s grace, we are finding people that have a heart for that. And we are already starting to partner with local people to reach some of these tribes. I’m visiting now.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:25):
Yeah, last night we were eating dinner with a local evangelists, and there was one woman there who said she just came back from a village. She lived there for three days and 35 people. She was having Bible studies with them and very primitive. Then she’s sleeping on the floor and no electricity, no plumbing. So it’s difficult ministry, but it’s extremely valuable
Gola Tiruneh (12:51):
Very much.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:52):
Now, several times you’ve mentioned the gospel preaching the simple gospel, and you’ve seen God work through that. Give me the gospel in a nutshell. What is the gospel that you preach?
Gola Tiruneh (13:07):
Well, the gospel is the good news of what God has done for us through the Lord Jesus Christ. And it’s actually the finished work of what Jesus has accomplished through his death, through his life is death, resurrection. And it is the story of how God redeemed mankind. So it is a simple but powerful story and we just focus in our events to, we don’t so much talk about religious stuff, we don’t compare religions, we don’t do any of that. We just simply speak about what Jesus has done for all people. And we encourage people also to experience this gospel. It’s not gospel of just words, but it’s an action. It’s in power. So I love the book of Acts and some of the things that the disciples did. And so what we try to do is in our events for we help people to experience how good God is through miracles.
(14:21):
And so there’s a scripture that says, come taste and see how good the Lord is. So let people have a taste of how good our God is and what he has done for us and how powerful it is. And especially, we always have miracle testimonies that we try to bring up interview people during our events and so that people will see that God is actually doing something. This is not just a story from 2000 years back, but this is happening now. And that brings an impact to the village or a small town or even the churches in that area. It would encourage them to believe and to continue to do the work that way.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:12):
So right now we are in the city of Kupong, and tonight the gospel festival begins. We went by to look at it last night, and it’s this beautiful plaza area right next to the ocean. And there were lots of vendors out there selling food even before the festival begins. There’s lots of people there, lots of kids running around. They had games and toys for the kids. And so what are you expecting to see God do here in Kupong this week?
Gola Tiruneh (15:44):
Well, I believe there is going to be through what is going to happen. People are going to have a clear representation of what the gospel is. And I’m believing for miracles. I’m believing for people to experience miracles that will lead to ’em opening their hearts to the gospel. So we’ve had events where deaf ears have opened people deaf from birth and things like that. And that causes people to attention, to put their attention to the gospel. It is kind of like the story of when Philip went to Samaria and preached the gospel and says, when people saw the miracles, they put attention to his words. And that’s what I’m expecting, that they will be a moment where people will realize, okay, this is real. Jesus is real, and what is my response to this? And so by the end of those three nights, my prayer is that people will realize, okay, this is not just religion. This is actually happening now and I need to respond to this.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (17:06):
Now, one of the things as an evangelist I think we’re called to do is to challenge the church as a whole to focus on evangelism. What response have you seen from the churches here in Indonesia? Do they have a heart to reach out to the loss? How are you encouraging them to focus on people who are
Gola Tiruneh (17:33):
Lost? Well, it is mixed response, right? So it is a challenge sometimes working with believers because of some history of maybe things that have happened in the past. And there’s a little bit of fear, hesitation to do evangelism. So most believers tend to just stick to their group or to their churches or their communities. There’s a few tribes in Indonesia that were reached by missionaries like 150 years ago. So they’re mainly Christian. So most of the believers in Indonesia are from this few tribes that are
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:23):
Been, but there’s many tribes here.
Gola Tiruneh (18:24):
There’s many tribes, and it’s from the 217 million, maybe 15 to 20% is Christian, so the rest of them are still yet to be reached. So it’s hard for believers at times because of may be fear or they don’t know what to do or how to approach other nonbelievers. So our festivals actually in a way help that to show them, okay, this is how you do it, or let’s do it together, and kind of helps build confidence in them to go out and do more outreaches. So really, our festivals are always been done in partnership with local churches, and that helps also to bring in enthusiasm, especially when they see, when the Christians see the miracles. Also there’s something that happens and say, wait, we can do this too. We can also preach the gospel. So that’s what we hope will happen also through these events, that it will revive the church and inspire the church to do evangelism in that area.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (19:39):
Well, it’s absolutely amazing the work that you and your wife Esther are doing here in Indonesia. If you’re listening and you have a heart for Indonesia, I’d encourage you to get connected with Gola. If someone would like to support you or their church would like to adopt you as one of their missionaries, what’s your website? How can they find out more information about you?
Gola Tiruneh (20:03):
We do have a website. Our ministry is a registered charity in Canada. It’s called Global Good News Initiative. The website is gg.org, gg ni.org, and you can go there and you find all the information you need, and you can be a partner through our charity in Canada. Yeah,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (20:29):
And are there opportunities for people to come to Indonesia to do evangelism or to work with you?
Gola Tiruneh (20:36):
Yes. Yeah. We always welcome people that have a heart for Indonesia, and we can do what we can and what is possible for us to do so that we can open doors also for people. So I’ve worked with different ministries in the past and we’ve had, yeah, we had a good experience also partnering with people.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (21:05):
That’s awesome. Well, let’s finish by praying for Indonesia, but instead of praying in English, you’ll pray in Indonesia, and let’s just pray for God to bless this nation.
Gola Tiruneh (21:21):
Okay, let’s do that. Alright. Hallelujah. Han Sadia, Indonesia, then Indonesia, they are. And Jesus sai. Amen.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (22:44):
Amen. Well, thank you Gola so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. Yes,
Gola Tiruneh (22:49):
Thank you for having me. God bless you. Thank you.
