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Albert Street Lecture Series: Rev Janet Staines



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Our ‘Albert Street Lecture Series’ presents quarterly lectures held and recorded from the Albert Street Uniting Church. These lectures serve the Queensland community of the Uniting Church in Australia and allow space for public theological reflection as we think together about the past and future of the UCA and critical issues of our time.

The Cooperative invites you to join us on Thursday 24 March at 7pm for the next lecture in our Series. To come along in-person, please register here: https://thecooperativehub.com/events/asls-janet-staines/

We are pleased to have Rev Janet Staines, Minister of Chermside Kedron Community Church, present to us from her thesis “To lead the People: resignifying gender in the UCA”

Below is an abstract from Rev Janet Staines’ research:

The premise of this paper is to wrestle with the ongoing disparity that exists between the theological statements of the Uniting Church and institutional practice. While the issue of gender in terms of theological legitimacy has, by and large, been resolved, women continue to be underrepresented amongst senior leadership roles in the Queensland Synod. In its forty-five years since union the Queensland Synod has had only one female Moderator. Women are underrepresented as Presbytery ministers and lead ministers in congregations and teams, whilst making up 60% of congregational membership. I want to note that this is not the case amongst the community services offered by Uniting Care Qld and Wesley Mission Qld, where many senior leadership roles are filled by women.

This paper will critique the continued absence of women from leadership roles and some of the impacts because of this failed integration. If I had more time, I would first present the ways that gender has been constructed in the church by referring to Joan Acker’s work[3] which identifies how organisations gender their members proactively through a range of processes. So, I want to first assume that the Uniting Church is not gender neutral and that given its pre-union structures and cultures, is a gendered vestige of its historical development. Although I will tell some experiences of women prior and during church union, that identify the masculinities that have defined the church’s governing and formation processes. But rather than staying with this critique of how gender is done, I want to focus on how gender is undone, which I think offers a helpful approach to moving forward. Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I will seek to interrupt the authorial ontology of gendered leadership in the church through identifying resignifying practices. What follows is an exploration of the negotiations and accommodations that are inherent for women to position themselves as both woman and leader when normative notions of leadership and femininity are radically conflicting. I want to locate changes away from women’s responsibility towards organisational structural change. In this way I will highlight the work women in leadership do to construct and negotiate identities within an enduring male dominated discourse and the ways the church can take responsibility for this work by implementing structural change action.

[1] “The Basis of Union” 1992 (ed), The Uniting Church in Australia, Para.14.

[2] “Why does the Uniting Church in Australia Ordain Women in the Ministry of the Word?” 1990, Social Responsibility and Justice Committee of the Assembly Commission in Mission, The Uniting Church in Australia.

[3] Acker, J 1990, “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations”, Gender & society: official publication of Sociologists for Women in Society, vol.4, no.2, pp.139-158.
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