Reflections on the theological culture of the Uniting Church

Setting and Place Culture has a texture. Before we can begin to unpick the theological culture of the Uniting Church in Australia, we must acknowledge the concrete ways in which we experience the texture of culture. When turning our attention to the theological culture of the Church, then, we should be attentive not only to…

This paper follows on from an earlier paper that I wrote for the Act2 process that the Uniting Church is currently undertaking: “Fostering a culture of ‘an informed faith”. In that paper, I set out how the Uniting Church’s Basis of Union provides us with a stimulus to foster a culture of “an informed faith”.…

Introduction There has been very little written about how to approach homiletics from the perspective of the Uniting Church in Australia by theologians from the Uniting Church. Moreover, Bruce Barber declares, “It is rare to find in books about preaching an identification of critical theological presuppositions of the sermon.” Whilst it could, and possibly even…

Personal history and reflection I have been a Christian for as long as I can remember, having been a regular at Sunday School at my local Baptist Church from a young age. I was born again at an evangelical event in Newcastle at around the age of 13 and I was baptised in a Revival…

The context and ethos of Uniting College for Leadership and Theology Uniting College for Leadership and Theology (UCLT) in the Synod of SA is focused on educating and forming people in the service of God’s mission, understood broadly. The ethos of the College emphasises the integration of theology, discipleship and culture, with a commitment to…

The Basis of Union envisages that the Uniting Church would be a thoughtfully educated church. It commits all its members and ministers to “the knowledge of God’s ways with humanity that are open to an informed faith”—a faith that is contextualised, critically developed, alert to contemporary understandings, and engaged with contemporary society. This “informed faith”…

When presenting a paper at Wesley Uniting Church in Canberra in October 2008, noted North American music-in-worship writer C. Michael Hawn quoted one Albert van den Heuval who boldly claimed: “Tell me what you sing, and I’ll tell you who you are!” Hawn followed immediately with his own comment: “Perhaps through singing more broadly we…

Among the first subjects I studied in my Bachelor of Theology was an Introduction to Christian Worship. One interaction relating to Holy Communion has stayed with me. In describing their experiences of the Lord’s Supper, students from the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) named their appreciation of the ‘open table,’ the explicit invitation to everyone…

“Attention animated by desire is the whole foundation of religious practices. That is why no system of morality can take their place.” The above dictum of Simone Weil is well known yet difficult to employ. For what she invites is a conscious habitation of worlds that are governed by pre-conceptual experience. That is, a deep…

One of the things I noticed when I first joined the Uniting Church was that there seemed to be no interest at all in evangelism. Having come from a Methodist denomination that obsessed over, and reported assiduously on, statistics—number of conversions, number of baptisms, number of new members, number of new churches—this seemed an odd…