This Christian church has banned women elders. It’s a dangerous move

July 26, 2026 — 1:30pm

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The setting could hardly have been more symbolic. Last week’s general assembly of the Presbyterian Church of NSW and the ACT met in the Audrey Keown Theatre at Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Sydney, a school that has spent more than 140 years educating girls for lives of leadership.

Inside those walls, an assembly that was roughly 90 per cent male voted 136-61 to ensure that women could no longer hold one of the church’s highest local leadership offices: elder.

Few venues would better expose the contradiction.

PLC has a proud history of producing women who have helped shape Australian society, including Justice Carolyn Simpson, appointed to the Supreme Court of NSW, and Professor Susan Dorsch, the first woman appointed to a professorship in the University of Sydney’s faculty of medicine.

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Yet within the PLC theatre, the Presbyterian assembly voted that women were biblically unqualified to govern the very institution that helped educate them.

Supporters describe the motion and the result as an expression of complementarianism: the theological belief that men and women are equal in worth but assigned different God-given roles within the church and family. This language is carefully chosen. “Different roles” sounds reassuringly........

© Brisbane Times