Understanding Politics

with Millennial’s View

Follow-up activity of PMKRI & Mercu Buana groups

To have political awareness of millennial group, campaign about it should be done continuously. This moment is used by a follow-up group called “Productive Milenial” belongs to Rusli, Riki, Marina, and Grace to campaign the importance of politics literacy among milenials. Having knowledge and information from Church and Politics training they followed before, they shared such topic with other student community. Placed at Nemo cafe Nologaten (23/03/2019), it was started at 8.45 p.m with 10 students coming from eastern Indonesia/NTT attended and actively participated on this small discussion.

Mariano Lejap, a team member of Stube-HEMAT Yogyakarta having role as group assistant, explained about the background of the discussion and introduced the service of Stube-HEMAT, a student service that gives empowerment to students through training programs. Many themes are talked over in Stube HEMAT to enlarge knowledge and to enrich students with many experiences.

The discussion had 2 main topic, that is, millenial and political participation; and the relationship between church and local areas political situation. Marina, a communication student of Mercubuana University in Yogyakarta led the discussion and all participants were actively shared their experiences in local areas public space and what they viewed on church and politics. Riki started with the understanding of millenial and their political participation nowadays. Was it still relevant with what Soekarno thought? “Now Millenial tends to have instant process in everything, they are more familiar with online application like kitabisa.com when they want to involve in public space to collect social fund for natural disaster victims or school renovation. They have left old pattern with complicated procedures”, Mariano told.

In church and politics session, Rusli, an agriculture student of Sarjanawiyata University, as the discussion angler, asked the forum with a question. Will churches be involved in such issue of government policy that is rejected by the people because it doesn’t stand with them? Will churches be involved in politics?

Grace, one participant from Atambua, NTT shared that pastors in her region had ever preached containing a persuasion that church members should not vote candidates who are not active in church activities.  While she thought that the assessment of one candidate cannot rely on such issue but the track record of the candidate achievement for people and society. Religious leaders should not be involved in political practice. Otherwise, Yodi, a student of Management in Sanata Dharma University thought that church should be involved in politics based on the example of Pope in Rome who leads church and does governance administration of Vatican. He told further, “If a church wants to involve in politics, it is better that church members do it not the institution. Next, as young generation, it’s better for young millennial to take a part in church activities to decide church policies”.

As a closing session, all participants agree that millennial generation should care of politics and they may participate based on potency that millennial generally has that is identical with technology and information. [ML]