There are a lot more churches led by men than by women in Australia – a statement of the obvious. But the minority of churches that hold to a male-only leadership model are too small to be responsible for the gap in the Protestant sphere.
A new report by NCLS research, “Women in senior leadership in the church” establishes the vastness of a gap between the number of churches that are led by men and the number led by women in Australia in the non-Catholic proportion of Australian Christianity.
“Some 22% of respondents in 2021/22 NCLS Leader Survey described themselves as having senior roles in local churches (i.e. they are the only minister/pastor/priest or the senior person in a team),” NCLS reports. “Given there are more women than men in church life, this shows that women are under-represented in local senior leader roles.”
“In 2021/22 The Salvation Army had the highest proportion of women in senior leadership roles, with more than half of all local leaders being women. They are followed by C3 Churches (a Pentecostal movement) where 40.5% of senior local leaders are women. There are a number of Pentecostal movements that have higher-than-average proportions of women in senior local leadership roles. The Uniting Church is another denomination with a higher than average proportion of senior local leaders who are women (38% vs 22% overall).”
Male-only-leader Church networks such as the Sydney Anglicans and similar parts of the Anglican Church, FIEC, Presbyterians and small Reformed churches make up perhaps twenty per cent of Protestant Christianity in Australia. Yet only one denomination, the Salvation Army, has more women than men in local senior leadership.
This means that much of the gap occurs in avowedly gender neutral churches. The NCLS quote reveals some of those with the greater proportion of women in senior roles in local churches . But some of those ranking lower include Hillsong at 36 per cent, Australian Christian Churches at 19.4 per cent, and Baptists (with Queensland the last state to vote to ordain women in 2024), at 9.8 per cent.
Image: the 30th anniversary of Women’s Ordination in the Anglican Church celebration in Melbourne, 2022.