Rev. Dr Rospita Siahaan, LWF Regional Secretary for Asia. Photo: LWF
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.
LWF Regional Secretaries, from left to right, Rev. Dr Ireneusz Lukas, Rev. Sonia Skupch, Rev. Dr Rospita Siahaan and Rev. Dr Samuel Dawai. Photo: LWF/A. Hillert
If God chooses us, then I believe God will always help us to handle the challenges.
Rev. Dr Rospita Siahaan, LWF Regional Secretary for Asia
After completing a master's degree in New Testament studies, she received an offer for a fully funded place to study for a doctorate at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Hong Kong. With two young daughters, she was inclined to turn down the offer, but her husband persuaded her “to place her trust in God” and allow him to take care of their two children. “My husband does not preach about gender justice, but he is a real gender justice champion,” she laughs.
During those years, she had the opportunity to travel to the Holy Land, to the United States and to Denmark, where she was invited to speak at LWF conferences on biblical hermeneutics. Those were important learning experiences, as she discovered more about the global communion of churches and met two German professors, one of whom became a supervisor for her PhD and another who invited her to conduct a research project at the University of Münster.
After more than two decades working as an ordained pastor and eight years of teaching at the HKBP theological seminary, Siahaan is excited about the challenges of her new job. Her responsibilities include oversight of more than 50 member churches in 17 countries, from Australia and New Zealand to the church in Jordan and the Holy Land. “I like meeting and talking to new people and especially I like to learn from them, to discover information or learn about their cultures. I have so many good news stories about first encounters with wonderful people in different countries that have always gone beyond all my expectations,” she says.
“Of course, there are difficulties too,” she acknowledges, “and I don’t want to underestimate the challenges of religious and cultural diversity in our region, but I know that the blessings will be greater for me. If God chooses us, then I believe God will always help us to handle the challenges,” she concludes.
