Mission Update

Bible Women in Asia:  A Growing Movement

Bible Women in Asia: A Growing Movement

  • A Women’s Division permanent endowment for "Bible Women,"
  • A program that interweaves Bible studies and stories from a person’s own culture to help women think critically
  • Requests from local women concerning issues of concern (e.g., health, AIDS, micro-credit, drugs and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, etc.)
    •

    These are the tools for teaching, evangelization, and helping women grow personally and spiritually. And this formula for success is spreading, touching hundreds of women in Asia.

    In 1999, The Women’s Division revived the Bible Women program by partnering with ProLiteracy Worldwide (formerly Laubach and Literacy Volunteers of America). Women in Asian communities shared their issues and concerns. And the Women’s Division and ProLiteracy responded by translating and providing contextual art to teach women about issues of concern in their community, while interweaving Bible studies and stories. The results have been spreading.

    In 2000 and 2001, the Iban Methodist Women's Society of Sarawak and nine denominations whose students attend the Sabah Theological Seminary began the training. One hundred women attended. As women headed into their communities to spread the word and teach about issues, amazing stories resulted.

  • At one Iban long house visit, 72 people came to be baptized.
  • Women in very distant and rural kampong village in Sabah started a successful poultry business enabling better health and education for their children and families.
  • Last year in Sabah, each denomination enabled 10 of their women to participate and be trained, so an additional 90 more women were trained while the district officers of the Iban Methodist Women made 45 trips to various communities providing Bible studies, and trainings and counseling in health, literacy and micro-credit.

    • In December 2002, forty Methodist Bible Women were trained in Madras (Chennai), India. Participants were urban and rural community workers, nurses, deaconesses. Each shared their current work and how these modules and new teaching methodology would enable many of their illiterate students to learn to read and write as well as think critically and enable change in their families and communities.

    A week later, sixty women from the United Methodist and United Church of Christ in the Philippines gathered to learn the same techniques in the areas of health, literacy, self-esteem and micro-credit. Joining them were eight women from the Pacific representing the Methodist Women of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa and the Weavers Program of the South Pacific Association of Theological Schools. Sixty-eight new Bible Women trainers begin their local trainings in 2003 with a goal of recruiting another 120 women to be trained as well as visiting at least sixty communities.

    Return to...