ABSTRACT

In order to study homiletics from the perspective of gender in sermons written by living Australian women, a sermon collection was made. The studied collection consisted of thirty-eight sermons, written by twenty-one women, from six denominations, and four states of Australia. Each woman had a maximum of two sermons so that no one voice would dominate. This thesis focuses on the language and content of the preaching of Australian women in the '90's, as a descriptive task, and to offer a prophetic critique of current practice of Australian women's preaching in the light of the issue of gender, to encourage a more life-giving future.

The key areas were gendered images of God, text choices, themes, ideological frames, and hermeneutics. Using grounded theory, which involves studying material from the most detailed to the more abstract in order to generate a theory to explain the results found, I began with gendered images of God. In order to handle the large amount of data flexibly and to provide statistical data, I used the Qualitative Solutions and Research's Non- Numerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorizing (NUD*IST) computer software. It was found that feminine imagery for God occurred in nearly 1% of all 9367 text units in the collection. But they were limited to the work of eight women from the Anglican, Uniting Church, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic denominations, both lay and ordained preachers, who usually had some university theological education. There were no regional differences observed. When the elements of feminist hermeneutics were added, a United Methodist woman was included in this group. Only one woman, from the Uniting Church, used entirely feminine language for God, (including Sophia Christ), throughout her sermons.

However masculine language for God occurred more than twelve and a half times more often than feminine language. Even excluding references to Jesus, masculine language for God the creator, God the Spirit and God the entire Trinity was more than eight and a half times more common than feminine language. This was despite nine women who preached entire sermons without any gender pronouns for the Spirit. It is suggested that this was due to the influence of patriarchy in the Australian churches in the '90's.

When feminine text choices, feminine perspectives to texts, ideological frames, 'women's experience', autobiographical experience, and nine hermeneutical tools were studied, it was found that the women's usage followed US patterns proposed by Carol M. Nor--n, Christine Smith and Robert R. Howard. There was a range in the influence of patriarchy and in the use of tools resulting from the influence of feminist theology.

Using all the factors studied, the women could be grouped into six groups, in relation to the influence of patriarchy. The theological stance of the women was the assumed explanation. However as that is gradational and difficult to measure, it was proposed that the combination of certain key factors could approximate their theological stance, and help predict a preacher's imagery use, text choices, themes and hermeneutics. The key factors identified were university theological education, the level of that education, and denominational affiliation. Secondary features were education date, overseas influences and ethnicity.

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