ICC Note: The recent demolition of a large Protestant church on the outskirts of Indonesia’s capital last week has sparked defiance from Christians upset with years of discrimination and persecution. Members of the HKBP Setu church watched in horror as their church was torn down by heavy machinery last week while Islamic protestors clapped and cheered. The demolition is the first of its kind in the city of Bekasi, an industrial area that is known for highly active radical Islamic political groups. But protests outside of Christian churches have been common place for years and Christians have often found themselves forced out of their buildings and threatened by local Islamic leaders. 
3/26/2013 Indonesia (UCANews) – Members of a Protestant congregation in West Java have vowed legal action and to mark Holy Week as best they can, following the demolition of their church by authorities last week.
About 400 members of the Batak Protestant Church (HKBP) in Setu, Bekasi district, were forced to attend Sunday worship in a field at the weekend.
“We will keep holding prayers, including on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, outside our demolished church,” Reverend Torang Parulian Simanjuntak, a pastor at the church said on Monday.
He questioned the legality of the demolition and called for an explanation by local authorities as to why the bulldozers were sent in.
“We will file a lawsuit soon against the Bekasi district administration,” he said.
However a local government official said last week, before the demolition took place, that renovation work started last October to enlarge the church was illegal and that action would be taken.
The demolition on Thursday was the latest incident in a long-running dispute between the church and local authorities over a building permit for the structure.
Local authorities say the church was built illegally in 1999 without a permit and that an application submitted 12 years later in 2011 was invalid.
Authorities say the application lacked the required number of signatures from local Muslims approving the structure.
In Indonesian law 60 signatures are required in order to qualify for a building permit.
“We got 85 signatures from villagers but the village head said only 12 were valid. We, again, collected 89 signatures, but this time the village head said only 44 were valid,” Simanjuntaksaid.
“We see that this was an effort taken by the village head to ignore what is written in the law,” he added.
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