Story highlights Pastor: 46 members of the Mawar Sharon denomination were on AirAsia Flight QZ8501

In all, 162 people were aboard the plane, which went down Sunday en route to Singapore

Relatives of those on the plane gather for a service near an Indonesian hospital

Surabaya, Indonesia (CNN) The world's fourth-most populated country, Indonesia has about 250 million people. Any of them might have boarded AirAsia Flight QZ8501, never to come home.

Seven crew members and 155 passengers were aboard -- almost one-third from the same Christian denomination.

There was no single reason that members of Mawar Sharon, a Protestant faith with about 45,000 members around Indonesia, got on the AirAsia Airbus plane Sunday, beyond a common desire to get to Singapore in time for New Year's Eve. They weren't heading to one event. They didn't all necessarily know one another, having attended services at different churches mostly around Surabaya, the Indonesian city where the commercial airliner took off.

Still, their religion tied them together. And pastor Lianggone Tejo Bunarto says he hopes that those shared beliefs help their loved ones cope now, as the search for more crash victims continues in the Java Sea.

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As Bunarto says, "We're putting trust in God's hands."

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