The legal entity of the Indonesian Orthodox Church was founded and is still managed in day-to-day affairs by Daniel Bambang Dwi Byantoro, and its history is in many ways inseparable from his own.The GOI was founded in 1991 after missionary work begun in 1988 by Daniel Byantoro, who converted to Christianity from Islam in the mid-1970s and discovered Eastern Orthodoxy through bishop Kallistos Ware's book The Orthodox Church while studying at a Protestant seminary in Seoul, Korea, in 1982.He was ordained a priest by Metropolitan Maximos of Pittsburgh, under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch, at some point between 1985-87 before returning to Indonesia to start putting down roots for the Orthodox Church there.[1] In September of 1996, the Ecumenical Patriarch founded the Metropolitanate of Hong Kong and South East Asia, which became the de facto governing diocese in Indonesia.Through donations from parishes in the US and Greece, the GOI was able to construct their first permanent church building in Surakarta, a culturally important city in the heart of Java.