Margaret Rodgers (deaconess)

David Rodgers was a timber worker, but developed multiple sclerosis, and as a result, the family moved to Dapto, where Margaret and her younger brother Alan attended primary school.

After being accepted for the Figtree Hockey Team, she fell sick with rheumatic fever and was confined to bed, spending more than two years in Wollongong Hospital.

[7] Through the latter decades of the 20th century, St Stephen's maintained a close association with the Movement for the Ordination of Women, and was attended by many Anglicans who found themselves marginalised because of broken marriages, gender identity or liberal views.

[7] She was appointed a diocesan reader,[10] regularly reading services and occasionally preaching, at which times her scholarship and her insight into the Christian Church in other countries that she visited were much valued.

[4] Rodgers regularly wrote columns for Southern Cross, the news magazine of the Sydney Diocese, demonstrating natural diplomacy and great skills at working with the media.

This led to her appointment as the first chief executive officer of Anglican Media, a post she held from 1994 to 2003, and saw, among other successes, the readership of Southern Cross rise to more than 40,000 per monthly issue.

[7] Her funeral was held at St Stephen's Anglican Church, Newtown, and was attended by four bishops with whom she had served, as well as many other members of the clergy and laity whose ministry she had facilitated or encouraged.

[16] In announcing Rodger's death, Archbishop Glenn Davies described her as "a warrior for Christ" and "for many years the leading laywoman of the Diocese of Sydney."

[7] John Sandeman wrote: "Margaret Rodgers by any measure was one of the most powerful people in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, a body which only has male clergy.