The Rev Dr Margaret Mayman walks to the pulpit and beams out at her flock inside St Michael’s Uniting Church, a deceptively austere-looking establishment dwarfed by the luxury haunts in Melbourne’s Paris end. The liturgy has ended, but she wants to do something different today, she explains – which is in keeping as a married, openly lesbian minister in Australia’s most progressive church.
Instead of communion, the congregants are invited to come forward with their partners, lovers, friends and family to receive a blessing, from either herself or the Rev Clare Brockett, her wife and partner of almost three decades.
