The church as a digital jubilee community A liberating missiology for victims of online gambling, illegal online lending, and cyber slavery

Abstract

This article formulates the church’s missiological response to three phenomena that together constitute a single continuum of digital debt bondage in Indonesia: online gambling, illegal online lending, and cyber slavery. Data from Indonesia’s Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK) record that funds circulating through online gambling over the course of 2025 reached IDR 286.84 trillion and involved 12.3 million depositors, the majority of whom are low-income earners, while reports from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights document hundreds of thousands of people, Indonesian nationals among them, trafficked into online scam compounds. Existing ecclesial responses remain moralistic and individualizing on the one hand, charitable and episodic on the other. This study is situated within missiology; Richard Osmer’s four tasks of practical theology serve as its procedural framework, and it is conducted as a literature study employing secondary-data analysis. Its theological norm is constructed through an intertextual-canonical reading of Leviticus 25 refracted through the Nazareth manifesto (Luke 4:18–19) and the praxis of the earliest church (Acts 2 and 4), and then transposed paradigmatically into the platform economy as the concept of the digital Jubilee community. The result is a missional praxis in three movements: becoming an alternative economic community, serving victims through transformative diakonia, and speaking prophetically. The article simultaneously reclaims Jubilee from its domestication by prosperity theology and restores it to its socio-structural meaning, and it advances implications, addressed in particular to the Pentecostal tradition in Indonesia, for maturing the spiritual-warfare imagination from individual demonology toward discernment of structural powers.