Protestant & Catholics in Indonesia in the 20 century:

Tri Harmaji
History of Religions in Indonesia Part II: from c. 1900 to the Present
Protestant & Catholics in Indonesia in the 20 century: Benny Giay, Zakheus Pakage and His Community; Henry Chambert-Loir and Anthony Reid ,eds., The potent Dead: Ancestor, Saint and Heroes in Contemporary Indonesia (Batak and Toraja); Robert W. Hefner, Of Faith and Commitment: Christian Conversion in Java.
In Indonesia Christianity met two kinds of community: Islamic community and traditional community. As many missionaries acknowledge Muslim people are the most difficult to be converted into Christianity while the people of indigenous religion are among the easiest one. This statement is apparently true in these readings. Here we find that Christian missionaries had successful missionary work in the still traditional communities such as Toraja, Batak, and Papua especially in the Me tribe. In these communities actually people are wealthy of tradition, ritual and belief that actually in broader sense are also religion. But it is fact that finally the people were converted to Christianity.
But despite of their conversion they are still willing to preserve their traditions. In many places and times this struggle had been happening. In some of the times when the missionaries still worked and held big authority in and over the communities, the tradition are slowly but surely put off. Some of the practices were totally banned and deeply buried in the ground. The missionaries at that time were very suspicious with traditional belief. They were instead of tried to listen and learn about it, directly they negatively justified the custom as sinful and worthless for Christian belief. In many place like especially in java where indigenous people were mostly Muslim, the missionaries even encourage the Javanese converts to adopt the Dutch custom especially in the dressing matter. It is likely that the missionaries understood Christianity as western culture.
In fact, when the missionaries’ big authority over the indigenous Christian was finally removed, the traditional custom and belief little by little come to one more time emerge. Like we see in Toraja nad Batak communities the traditions are not totally dead in their repressive time and now began to rise again. What is lack in the missionary work at that time that just now is being realized that is contextualization is actually had been found by some indigenous missionary at that time like Zakheus in Me community and Kyai Sadrach in Javanese community. But unfortunately at that time the indigenous theologian and contextualist were precisely being accused as false teachers and their effort to build indigenous Christianity was coercively put down. That time was the time of Christian superiority. Western Christian especially felt that they are superior over the indigenous. Everything indigenous in source is worthless and even dangerous to their work.
The second context of Christianity is Islam. Like Hefner argues Islam is the most difficult context of missionary works at that time. And it seems to me that in many aspects it is still unchangeable to this time. It is why the missionaries in java are mostly stressful of their unfruitful long works. They realized it and begun to direct their activity to the less Islamic identity like in the Tengger highlands. But still missionary in java are unfruitful without external factor of identity crisis in Javanese society during and after java war and communist massacre.