Meeting God at the Foot of Mount Sinabung on Karonese rituals in terms of the Christian faith

Mount Sinabung started to erupt on September of 2010. This event shocked the Karonese living around the mountain. Therefore, they held various rituals to limit bad luck combined with offering sacrifices according to traditional Karonese traditional practices, in the hope that Mount Sinabung would finally calm down. Despite the official prohibition declared by the church, many Karonese Christians still carry out suchrituals. The Karonese people, are an ethnic group from North Sumatra, Indonesia, and they have a very rich tradition of Christian faith, particularly in Protestant denominations. The rituals, for them, are however based on ancestral inheritance, and they believe that rituals can be a way to bring the almighty to provide help for the problems people may face in various situations of often dire stress. Through this paper, the author intends to contemporary literature review to find answers on how Karonese Christians should respond to natural disasters, such as the eruption of Mount Sinabung, especially bearing in mind the role of Christian rituals within a contextual theology approach. Contextual theology utilized local culture to view the problems faced by people in this study. This paper asserts that Christian rituals can indeed assist Karonese Christians in responding to natural disasters by providing spiritual, emotional, and communal support that aligns with their cultural and religious beliefs and practices.