Pastor brings diversity

Lilia Felicitas-Malana, who began her ministry in a rural church in the Philippines, now helps the Orofino-Peck United Methodist Church in North Idaho identify its assets and needs.

One asset is the diversity that her presence as a Filipino brings to the community.

“When my husband, a truck driver, and I moved to Orofino a year ago, our four children doubled the size of the Sunday school,” she says.

Another asset is that the church building recently became more handicap accessible, with a sloped entry and the addition of an elevator to better serve those who have had knee and hip replacements.

Members refer to themselves as the “wounded knee and hip” church. Seven members had surgeries replacing those joints, Lilia says of the 55-member congregation, most of whom are aging.

The church raised money for the $50,000 elevator and also used funds from the sale of the Methodist church in Peck, a small community six miles west, after it merged with the Orofino church in 1988.

After the elevator was installed, two more people began attending services, including one woman in a motorized wheelchair with a service dog.

“She was so happy when she learned about the elevator,” says Felicitas-Malana, who grew up in a Methodist church in the Isabella Province in northern Luzon.

After “accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior” at age 16, she became active in church, singing in the choir and teaching Sunday school in the congregation of 40 people.

While some had urged her to consider ministry, she had her mind set on medicine. However, when she and her brother both were eligible for a government college scholarship and only one in a family could receive one, he took it.

Then a “good Samaritan” offered to finance her education at a Bible school to learn Scripture and help in children’s ministry.

She saw it as God’s way to set her on the path into ministry.

“We have our plans, and God has plans,” says Felicitas-Malana, who has been in ministry 21 years.

She had spent 15 of those years in the Philippines when she had the opportunity to serve a Filipino-American congregation in Seattle and study at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry for a Master of Divinity (which she has not yet finished).

For four years, she helped start the multiethnic, multigenerational Seattle church, an outreach of Beacon United Methodist Church. Then she was appointed for two years to serve a church in Tieton, near Yakima, before being assigned just over a year ago to Orofino-Peck, a community of 3,200 with 20 churches.

Felicitas-Malana sees her gifts in ministry as pastoral and apostolic. By apostolic, she means reaching out to unchurched people so they know there is a God and can find their way to live faithfully.

“I challenge church leaders in every message that that’s what we do because we enjoy God’s love and grace – share it with others,” she says.

As a pastor, she says, her primary role is to listen.

“I love visiting people and listening, whether they are well or sick,” she says.

As the first ethnic pastor in Orofino, Felicitas-Malana brings the gift of her diversity, expressing the reality that “we are one. Color does not matter. We can do ministry together. Diversity makes it brighter.”

There are some big differences between the Philippines and her new home.

“Doing outreach in the Philippines is different,” she says. “There we bring the Good News to villages, teaching children and adult Bible studies, feeding spiritual aspects of people’s lives.

“Here outreach means more of a program for the church to help the community.”

For example, members help support and volunteer to run FISH Inc. – Friends In Service of Humanity – an outreach of the church that collects and sells clothes, and uses the proceeds to provide food, clothing or medicine for people in need.

The congregation also supports missions through the regional and national United Methodist Church.

Recently, Felicitas-Malana taught confirmation for five youths. When she asked how they would spend their summer, they said they would be on vacation.

She told them that in the Philippines, Sunday school is year-round.

She asked them what they might do in the summer to show they are Christian. They agreed to do something for elderly people, like offering to do an hour of yard work, house cleaning, walking a dog or other projects.

Church members were asked to submit their needs so the youths could sign up to help them.

“They decided that they could show they are Christian by helping and realized that to have faith and be Christian is both a blessing and a responsibility,” Felicitas-Malana says.

“A successful congregation depends on the congregation’s knowing their gifts and responding to the community.”