Title | : | Theology of Success and Spiritual Capital: the Study of Success Theology of Church Bethany Indonesia – Surabaya from the Perspective of Spiritual Capital in the Context of Indonesia |
Author | : | Cindy Quartyamina Koan (CRCS, 2008) |
Keywords | : | Indonesia Bethany Church, Theology of Success and Spiritual Capital |
Abstract | ||
Indonesia Bethany Church is a manifest of a successful church organization especially in Indonesia even in South East Asia. The root of that success is Abraham Alex Tanuseputra’s life story. He is the founder of the Bethany church as one with Successful Bethany Families motto. The success gave the appearance merely not within spiritual services but expands to physical world services such as finance, education, medical, entertainment, occupation include the economic activities for instance advertising and trading. Those services become the magnet which successfully attracts the Christian’s interest. The alteration from many Christian to be the Bethany’s parishioners is the indicator of Indonesia Bethany Church succeeds.
Deliberating about the success of Indonesia Bethany Church, immediately guide to theology of success as a doctrinal and practical foundation for all Bethany’s activities. Bethany’s theology of success reveals that God desired every Christians lives successfully means having whole excellent thing not the reverse yet somehow, increasingly into abundantly life. That is the successive lives which noticeable and measured as well embrace spiritual and material world. Spiritually pointing to obey the desire of God then materially develop into wealthy. Eventually, realization of the success depends on the success of material world where the stipulation is that every parishioner must be struggling to accomplish the wealthy life. Furthermore, Response to this, I would like to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the teaching of the theology of success by using the concept of Spiritual Capital from Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall. Principally, the terms spiritual and capital do not refer only to religions and merely physical capital. Furthermore, it is about divine values, motivations and principals that are convinced as true and able to produce a broad good impact for humanity and nature. In brief, Spiritual Capital tries to create economic activities without being self-oriented and make encounter between spiritualism and capitalism or economy. Indeed, we cannot deny that success is every person’s whish, therefore any theory which are including in the theology of success play big important role in creating the welfare for human, living beings and nature which not individualistic. For this reason, theology of success should be a theology that concern toward the reality of social lives whereas every parishioner are part of society. |