“Never Once Wished to Be Anywhere Else. Even on the Hardest Days.”

Talking to Rev. Bronwyn Murphy about change is a bit like asking a river about water. She has spent almost three decades watching the Uniting Church shift shape again and again. She talks about change the way you talk about weather you have lived through rather than read about. 

She started at the United Theological College in 1995 and took her first placement in Yass in early 1998, in what was then part of the Canberra Region Presbytery. She remembers it as a gorgeous four years, but also her first real lesson in ministry: the invitations came easily because she was the minister, not because she was Bronwyn. Whether people invited her back was a different matter entirely. "You might get an invitation," she says, "but you won't get invited back if you haven't got something to bring to the table." 

The Church she walked into was still full of ministers, still visible in daily community life. She remembers being invited into council chambers to open monthly meetings in prayer, and a Christmas banner strung across the main street proclaiming the reason for the season. The Royal Commission had not yet landed in its fullness, and leadership was still predominately male led, even as a new, largely female cohort was already coming through the ranks behind them. Change, she says, was underway well before the institution caught up with it. "Time is like breathing – If it's not changing, it’s dying," she says. "Expecting time to stand still in the Church is a good definition of insanity." 

From Yass she moved to Narromine, splitting her time between the wonderful local congregation and resourcing something between eleven and thirteen congregations across the region as a Presbytery Resource Officer. She loved the rural parishes deeply, and she watched something else shift there too: the nature of volunteering . The generation shaped by the duty and sacrifice of the Second World War gave way to her own generation, and then to her children's, each less driven by obligation and more by whether a cause felt meaningful to them personally. 

She is equally frank about what the Church has had to reckon with over these years: a serious and painful loss of public trust and respect, much (but not all) of it earned through real harm done inside religious institutions and defended in the name of a faith it never actually represented. She speaks about this without flinching, and with real conviction in how the Uniting Church has chosen to respond. "I know from the inside now that our Church will not ever sweep something under the carpet to protect its own reputation," she says. "The minute you do that, you've betrayed the Gospel and forfeited your reputation.”  

2012 saw her move her family to Sydney to serve as the Adult Lay Educator and rural ministry consultant. The irony of appointing someone to serve the rural church then locating them in the city was not lost on Bronwyn! Changes continued to shape the church as it reduced its commitment to lay education from a unit to a single person plus volunteers. 

She notes that while not all change is welcomed by all people, God continues to turn up and amazing things still happen.’ Church has never been about us and what we want.’ 

By 2018, when she was appointed Associate Secretary under then General Secretary Rev. Jane Fry, that instinct for honesty had become central to how she understood leadership. In the years since, she has served alongside two Moderators and two General Secretaries, providing a steady hand through no small amount of institutional upheaval, including the current shift toward a leaner Synod and stronger, better resourced Presbyteries and Congregations. 

She does not pretend that transition is painless. The Synod, she says, spent years helping Presbyteries that were growing weaker, not realising that the help itself was part of the problem. "We've got to ensure they've got the resources to do the job, because they've got the capacity. They've got the ability. They just haven't got the people and the dollars."  

Under General Secretary Rev. Dr Peter Walker, the Church is now continuing the move toward a three Presbytery model, and Bronwyn is unambiguous that the change is necessary, even as it comes with real grief attached, including redundancies for people who have given nothing but their best. She carries that cost alongside Peter, whose leadership she trusts completely. "Working with Peter has been wonderful," she says. "I'm so grateful to know that the Church is in such strong hands going forward, with leadership that knows what faith means, but also understands what service means, and knows that this is God's Church. We don't own it."  

Alongside Rev. Punam Bent stepping into Bronwyn's role, the Synod will soon welcome a second Associate General Secretary, this one focused on mission and education, rounding out a stronger leadership team around Peter. More details on that appointment will be shared soon. 

It is also, Bronwyn says, part of why she chose this moment to step away. As the Presbyteries go through change, she believes Synod leadership should change with them, freed from old baggage, so the next chapter can start afresh. "Let's not bog it down with all the baggage of the past," she says. Change, in her view, is not something to survive so the Church can get back to how things were. "Change gives us an opportunity to clean house, to work out what things are constructive and what things will grow the kingdom". 

Underneath all of it, Bronwyn keeps returning to one idea: good news. She wonders if the Church sometimes forgets that this is what it actually carries. "We're so busy trying to run an institution that perhaps we forget or overlook that we are people of good news, whose job is to make the world a better place." For her, that is the whole point of a congregation, not a building to maintain or a Sunday routine to protect, but a calling. "Congregations have a calling to live the good news, to help people find transformation in how they live their life, and to realise the difference that God can make."  

Ask her what she will miss most, and the answer comes without hesitation: the people. Particularly the Synod staff, whose dedication she says she did not fully appreciate until she worked alongside them daily. "They will bring me to tears with how hard they try to make a Jesus shaped difference. I hope I will still catch up with people in Presbyteries and congregations. But I will miss the staff so much.”  

Her own sense of calling, she says, was never modelled on one figure so much as shaped by a handful of people and one early realisation. At nineteen, she came to understand that in God, a person is never defined by their mistakes, that grace holds space for you until you are ready to grow into it. "You're not defined by your mistakes," she says. She found that liberating, and has spent her ministry trying to offer other people that same freedom. Along the way, she names her mother, whose gift was loving people without judgement, "she just loved," and Bruce Irvine, a former lay Moderator and farmer from Narromine, whose plain spoken honesty taught her what real wisdom looks like. "He was my truth teller," she says. 

It is a conviction that seems to hold up even under direct questioning. Asked, near the end of the conversation, whether she had any regrets after nearly three decades of ministry, she did not pause. "My whole ministry, which is shy of 29 years, has been just an absolute privilege. I didn’t always get things right, but  even on its hardest day, I've never wished to be anywhere else." 

She is warm and unreserved about Punam Bent taking on the role next. "Anyone can learn this job," she says. "What you can't learn, is your love for the people. And Punam loves." She expects Punam will sometimes have to say hard things and enact hard decisions, but believes she will do it with genuine care for the people affected, which is, in Bronwyn's view, all that really matters. 

As for what comes next, Bronwyn is looking forward to something she has not had much of in years: time. Time with her husband, her three daughters, her son in law, and her two granddaughters. She is picking her sewing back up, getting back into the garden, and she and her husband are planning six months on the road around Australia in a small hybrid campervan the following year, cooking and living outdoors, seeing Australia properly at last. 

Her closing thought is less a farewell than an instruction, delivered in the same unflinching tone she has used throughout. Every congregation named in the New Testament is gone now, she points out. Every one of them had a season, and every one of them ended. "There isn't a church alive that isn't going to die," she says, "but there isn't a church alive that won't be reborn in some other way, somewhere." That is not a tragedy, in her view, it is simply how it has always worked. If a congregation is dying, her advice is not to panic and try to reverse it, but to leave a good legacy and trust that God will do something new. Ageing congregations cannot make themselves relevant to twenty-year-olds by trying harder to be twenty-year-olds. What they can do is stop trying to control what comes next, hold the door open, and let the next generation build the room themselves. 

Rev. Bronwyn Murphy's Closure of Ministry Service will be held on 27 August, with her last day as Associate Secretary on 31 August, after eight and a half years in the role and nearly 29 years of ordained ministry. Rev. Punam Bent takes over from her.

She has spent her whole ministry talking to other people, holding space for change, and while it hasn’t been easy, it has been a privilege. She has been surrounded the whole way by people worth loving and worth serving, in a Church she dearly loves is still worth believing in. "So, I'm a lucky girl," she says. 

Join us at St Stephen's or online on 27 August for Bronwyn's Closure of Ministry Service 

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