Gender-Inclusive Leadership: Transforming Toraja Church in Indonesia

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the transformation of Toraja Church’s leadership by showing how the Church’s patriarchal structure was destablized by external forces, and how Torajan agency was developed and how it pushed for gender equality from within. The paper also expands feminist analyses of agency in women’s leadership to include men’s agency. The theory of structural transformation of William H. Sewell Jr. (1992; 2005), and the theory of agency from Sherry B. Ortner (2006), are both employed in analyzing the case study. The data used includes documentary research and in-depth interviews with five male leaders and seventeen female ordained pastors of first and later generations, as well as participant observation from two months of field work in Toraja in 2015. The paper argues that this transformation was the outcome of both external forces from the cultural, political and religious contexts, and the active involvement of human agents. Toraja Church’s transformation represents a long process of interaction and negotiation between patriarchal missionary and local matrilineal cultures.