The last leg of my 5-week jaunt across South and Southeast Asia is to the Philippines. As second homes go you could do far worse than the Philippines, which is good as it’s my third trip there in almost as many months. There is great opportunity to partner with the Lutheran Church in the Philippines to provide pastoral training both to seminary students as well as existing pastors, and deaconess training support. That’s why I’m here this last week of November. I’m joined by Deaconess Sandra Rhein, our Deaconess program expert for the Southeast Asia Region.
We’re conducting a review course for 20 deaconesses. This is just 1/5 of the total number of deaconesses in this one region of the Philippines alone! Lutheranism is quite strong in the Highlands of the Philippines, in large part because Spanish influence here was not as strong as elsewhere in the Philippines. While Roman Catholicism is still the dominant religion here it is in many ways a thin veneer over a still-robust animism. The Gospel has found fertile ground here.
The topic for this review session is on male/female identities in Christ. One of the ongoing struggles in the Philippines and globally is the influence of liberal denominations (including liberal Lutheran denominations) that aggressively push the necessity of ordaining women in order to realize the equality defined in bad exegesis of passages such as Galatians 3: 26-29. By helping women professionals in the church to understand the Biblical basis of male and female roles and engage in some practical exegesis and explanation, perhaps this temptation can be muted.
It’s a great group of ladies. They all know each other already, and we learned that prior to Covid they used to have two training events a year where all 100 of them would gather. What an exciting possibility we might be able to partner in!
The Nelson Family Indonesia 