Rev. Dr Rospita Siahaan has recently been appointed to strengthen relations with churches across the region
(LWI) - The bustling city of Pematangsiantar, not far from the equator in Indonesia’s North Sumatra province, is a world away from Geneva, in the shadow of the Swiss Alps, where The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) headquarters is located. But it is in Pematangsiantar where Rev. Dr Rospita Siahaan was born, has lived most of her life and near where she is now setting up office as LWF’s new Regional Secretary for Asia.
As the youngest of 12 siblings, whose father, a policeman, died when she was eight, Siahaan witnessed her mother, newly widowed, working all hours to make ends meet and to put food on the table for her children. “My mum was a housewife, but when my father died, she did all kinds of jobs to survive and to look after us,” she recalls.
That hard work ethic rubbed off on Siahaan who was a star student, both at school and in her catechism classes. It was also from her mother that she learned to pray daily and become an active member of the Protestant Christian Batak Church (HKBP). “My mum also taught us to pray when we arrived in church. Still today, I feel this as a kind of special moment of encounter with God, as you enter into His presence, a habit which my two daughters have inherited,” she reflects.
Path to ordination
At 15 years old, she first felt a calling to the ordained ministry, but her mother was not keen, given the significant costs involved in five years of seminary training. Her vocation, Siahaan, says, “was not some kind of prophetic vision, a thunderbolt or a dramatic Damascus moment, but rather a conviction that God was calling me and would therefore provide for me too.”
At the start of her second year in the HKBP Theological Seminary, she met a visiting pastor from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America who arranged for a full scholarship to cover all her costs. Due to the strength of the dollar during that time of financial crisis in Indonesia, she also had money left over to support her mother as well. This experience affected her deeply: “in my preaching, I often talk about how God works through ordinary lives, not just moving mountains or parting the waters, but also doing ordinary things through ordinary people,” she says.
After graduation, she served as an intern pastor for two years and was ordained in the capital, Jakarta, in December 2003, along with dozens of other young candidates in HKBP, one of 13 LWF member churches in Indonesia and the largest Lutheran community in south-east Asia. The following year, she married one of her seminary classmates and the first of the couple’s daughters was born.
