Second Sunday of Easter - John 20: 19-31
Juliette is a second-generation New Zealand-born-Samoan woman, ordained in the Uniting Church in Australia since 2015. She is currently serving in Melbourne in Congregational Placement. Juliette hails from Samoan heritage whose parents individually immigrated to New Zealand in the 1950’s, raising Juliette and her siblings, "faa-Samoa" (the Samoan way) in the home in NZ, and educated in Western schools.
Worshiping in different denominations in the Samoan and English languages from an early age, and notably in her teenage school years, led Juliette to a sense of questioning both Samoan and Western cultural understandings of identity, about Women, and particularly Samoan women in the Church, conscious from her learned Samoan cultural upbringing in NZ, that respect and a pastoral relational approach towards understanding, hopefully sustains relationships but not compromising Juliette to be her own true self.
The questions on faith, identity, the Holy Bible (written by men), Women and the Gospel, and Women in the biblical scriptures, and specifically Samoan culture regarding Women, has never subsided. Interwoven in all these facets of her life and faith journey as a young teenager, and as a working Christian woman who eventually married and had two children in New Zealand then one in Australia, Juliette takes seriously that she was/is charged with the responsibility of nurturing her own children, and next generations, to not be afraid to question and challenge their faith, Samoan heritage and cultural interpretations and more, in their new home in Australia.
Over the years many faith and theological questions, and unsatisfactory questions of Gospel and Samoan cultural understandings niggled at this bi-cultural Pasifika woman, a woman of colour, and spilled over into her twenty plus years in the Banking Sector in three countries she worked in.
Her faith questions and faith understandings, as they grew and changed, shaped how she related to people and her leadership style, in both her Christian and secular life (before ordained ministry) and, in taking up her calling, to now serving part-time in the Uniting Church in Australia in a congregation.
Juliette loves the God she serves and the Uniting Church who welcomed her questions about faith, the Gospel and Culture, including Samoan cultural questions, and a door into studying Theology in Melbourne, through the former United Faculty of Theology. This is now Pilgrim Theological College, one of the Colleges of the University of Divinity, in Melbourne, Australia.
Juliette gives thanks first to God, her late parents and siblings, her husband and children, and extended family, and to the Churches in Aotearoa, Vailoa Aleipata in Samoa, and here in Melbourne, noting with love her Pasifika Uniting Church Sisters who paved a way for her in diaspora. All have shaped and continue to shape who she is today. She remains committed to the importance to read from her Samoan cultural lens, her womanist and theological lenses, and in the contexts of her lived experiences, to re-interpret stories in the Bible and offer them as gifts to the Church and God’s people. She is forever grateful to God through her Mentors, Theological Educators throughout her years of study, and looks forward to God’s unfolding pathway, challenges, blessings, and life’s intersecting corridors which leads to her firm belief in her ministry and life, that Christ’s life, death, and assured resurrection, is life-giving.
