This paper examines how gendered religious authority is produced, recognized, and reconfigured within a regulated Protestant setting in China. Based on ethnographic research in a grassroots Three-Self church located in a county on the Hunan-Hubei border, the study asks how women negotiate leadership and "spaces of action" through everyday normative practices at the intersection of patriarchal kinship and local religious regulation. Drawing on repeated participant observation, oral history interviews (including the founder's daughter and son-in-law, believers), and textual materials, the paper reconstructs the church's trajectory since the religious revival of the early Reform and Opening-up era. The female founder did not gain authority by openly contesting patriarchal norms. Instead, she cultivated a relational and ethically grounded authority through prayer and healing practices, miracle narratives, and the domestication of religious activities within rural social life. The analysis further traces how the congregation navigates official norms through interactions with the Three-Self system and local regulatory authorities in land acquisition, church construction, registration, and routine organization (e.g., annual meetings). After the founder's death, charisma-based authority increasingly shifted toward institutional forms. Her designated successor,the son-in-law,assumed formal leadership, while women's authority persisted primarily as embodied competence in everyday church work and as a collective memory mobilized to secure legitimacy. This transition reveals a reconfiguration of gender (in)equalities, in which women's normative labor sustains the institution even as formal authority becomes re-masculinized. By foregrounding normative practices and institutional change, the paper contributes to debates on gender (in)equalities in lived religion and shows how authority is continuously enacted and reworked within contemporary regulatory conditions in China.