Our Story
An initiative of WATAC (Women and the Australian Church) and the Grail in Australia, the Australian Women Preach Podcast is showcases preaching by Christian women from across all denominations, relevant to contemporary Australian life.
We launched this project on International Women’s Day, Monday 8 March, 2021.
Each Monday the podcast for the following Sunday’s Gospel is available. Listen on your favourite podcasting platform with Anchor.
The podcast showcases the gifts of many talented women preaching the Gospel.
We want to demonstrate women preaching the gospel with theological insight and relevance to our daily lives.
We hope to enrich and renew our listeners’ experience of the Sunday Gospel.
Our preachers are women from across all Christian denominations.
They are women of all ages, from the west to the east coast of Australia, from a range of cultural and professional backgrounds. They share a love of the Gospel and a desire to share its meaning with others.
A goal of the project is to highlight the exclusion of Catholic women’s voices in preaching the Gospel.
Unfortunately, there are some Christian denominations where, despite feeling a deep sense of call to do so, women are unable to preach the gospel during worship services.
In the Catholic church, for instance, church law does not allow women to preach the Gospel during the Mass
We seek to be part of the ongoing process of discernment for the Fifth Plenary Council of the Australian Catholic Church.
In 2021 and 2022 the Catholic Church in Australia will hold its Fifth Plenary Council. In preparation, Catholics in Australia have been asked to pray, listen and dialogue with one another to discern a way forward for the church in this country.
Prayerful and Eucharistic, one of the papers written as a result of the Plenary Council process states,
Our Sunday Eucharist would be enriched if the voices of lay experience and insight were heard more frequently, especially the oft silenced voices of women.
This paper makes the recommendation to ‘provide formal approval and encouragement for suitably qualified lay women and men to break open the Word within the community.’
We strongly believe that this podcast is a gift of hope and renewal for many.
With this in mind the initial episodes, along with those in the weeks leading up to the Plenary Council, are featuring Catholic women preachers.
We model the church we wish to be: inclusive, diverse, and welcoming.
St Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12, that ‘to one is given through the Spirit a word of wisdom, to another a word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing in the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy’ and so on.
Each gift given for the building up of the body of Christ. It is by virtue of our baptism that we are all called to discern our particular gifts and use them for the good of all.
This podcast has been put together by a working group of members of WATAC and the Grail: Tracy McEwan, Patricia Gemmell, Angela Marquis, Rebecca Beisler, Elizabeth Lee, and Colleen Rowe.
St Mary Magdalene Preaching.
“Apostolic Family of Provence” window in St Severin, Paris.