The Junia Award highlights women who are active in the leadership of their local Seventh-day Adventist church, chaplaincy, administration or religious education especially as pastors, evangelists, theologians, chaplains, or religion teachers. The award seeks to champion groundbreaking new roles for women and roles that are unique in their division. It is also intended to show the worldwide church that women have been accepted as holding up half the sky in a wide array of cultures in the Adventist Church.
The 2025 Junia Awards are given to 26 women from all Divisions of the SDA World Church. We would like to present all of them to you here, but will concentrate on one from our Inter-European Division. You can see all the others on the homepage of the Association of Adventist Women by clicking on this link: https://www.associationofadventistwomen.com/team-3-2
For the Inter-European Division (EUD), the Junia Award goes to: Milu (María da Luz Oliveira Ferreira) Cordeiro. After her degree in Theology from the Theological Seminary in Collonges, France, Milu began her pastoral ministry in 1997 in Portugal. During her 18 years of ecclesiastical responsibilities, she had the opportunity to attend an evangelistic course at the Amazing Facts ministry in the United States of America, conduct an Evangelistic Campaign in Mozambique, and a National Campaign "For a Full Existence". In addition to the 18 years of ecclesiastical ministry, she served another 10 years (2012 to 2022), as Departmental director of the Area of Families of the Portuguese Union. Today, she carries out her pastoral ministry in two local churches in the North of Portugal and collaborates with the Adventist TV “Novo Tempo Portugal". As the wife of a pastor and mother of two children, she finds her greatest joy in the family and in ministry.