Category: Stories & Feature Articles

Breaking the tradition and connecting with God

Post author By revivewa
Post date January 8, 2015

Sunday 2 November 2014

Five people are on the veranda outside Melville Uniting Church hall tie-dying t-shirts. Inside the hall, others are sticking strips of coloured cloth to wooden dolls while another group is painting pictures of stars and wheat. Meanwhile there is deep discussion all around the building about the story of Joseph: about humility, ambition, and favouritism in families.

This is Craft Church, an all age worship experience where art and craft provide the means for genuine engagement with the scriptures, with each other, and with God.

One Sunday each month at Melville Uniting Church, we don’t sing hymns or hear a sermon. We begin together with prayers and the Bible reading, but then we split into groups to talk about the story as we do our different craft activities (a diversity to suit the different interests and abilities) before joining back again for a big group discussion, a closing prayer and a sending out. The basic elements of worship are still there, but they look a bit different.

So how did this come about? Let’s rewind.

Tags Church and Community

Stories & Feature Articles

Dreaming of adventure and growth

Post author By revivewa
Post date January 4, 2015

St Stephen’s School has celebrated the purchase of a new campsite with a community open day inviting students and families to tour the grounds and dream of its future possibilities.

Located in Dwellingup, close to Scotch College’s – another Uniting Church School – Moray campsite, Trinity College’s Camp Kelly and the Nanga Bush Camp, the site is 46 hectares of land with exciting developmental opportunities.

Tony George, Principal of St Stephen’s School, said they chose to purchase the property because of its natural features which will enhance the school’s already existing outdoor education program, including 800m of Murray River frontage, extensive native forest and its access to both the Munda Biddi Trail and Bibbulmun Track.

The camp’s location close to the historic town of Dwellingup will provide students with an opportunity to learn more about the land. Dr Phil Ridden, who has recently written a history of the school, is now writing a history of the site so that visitors might have a better understanding of the connection Australia’s Aboriginal people have with the land.

Tags Schools, St Stephen's School, Youth

Stories & Feature Articles

Bring down your walls this Christmas

Post author By revivewa
Post date December 27, 2014

‘Joshua fit the battle of Jericho…and the walls came tumbling down!’

This song and the story have been in my head since the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The stories about these walls are different: the Jericho wall was built to protect its inhabitants and to keep intruders out; the Berlin wall was built to stop East German people leaving their country en masse.

The stories about these walls are also similar: they were both brought down without violence, by people power, by persistent trust in a future that could be better than the present, by faith, as the Hebrews author puts it.

Yes, Jericho was invaded after the walls crumbled and its population butchered, but that is not the point. The point is that walls can be brought down – no matter how long, high, big or strong they are. The point is that when they do come down, there is reason for celebration.

Tags Christmas, Theology and Spiritual Reflections

Stories & Feature Articles

New preschool underway in Sri Lanka

Post author By revivewa
Post date December 25, 2014

The Uniting Church in WA has been in partnership with the Methodist Church in Sri Lanka since 2012, and in 2013 members of the Annual Meeting of the Presbytery and Synod agreed to support the church through its Interfaith Preschool Project.

The project provides an environment for children to participate in education, free from violence and other trauma induced circumstances which have been affecting Sri Lanka in the after-math of civil war. It also provides nutritious meals to the children who attend: a $10 donation can feed a child for a month.

Rev Dr A W Jebanesan, President of the Methodist Church in Sri Lanka, has recently notified the Uniting Church in WA of the most recent development from donations provided.

Tags International, Uniting Church

Stories & Feature Articles

Paving a way forward

Post author By revivewa
Post date December 23, 2014

All this year, we’ve been reporting updates from Rev David Kriel, Strategy and Mission Planner for the Uniting Church in WA in his work looking towards building strategies for the future. In our final article in the series, David offers some ideas for a way forward for us as a church.

David shared that in this journey, it’s vital for congregations to do some active soul searching.

“For the future it’s a question about faith formation and faith sharing,” he said. “Congregations need to discover who they are as a faith community and how they’re going to share that faith with their neighbours, their community.”

Part of being able to share faith with our communities is to know our communities.

“Congregations need to see who their community is and how they are going to engage in their community; not asking people to come to the church all the time, but getting out and engaging with the community. I think that’s very important,” he said.

Tags Church and Community, Uniting Church

Stories & Feature Articles

Where is our belief, our hope, and our faith?

Post author By revivewa
Post date December 21, 2014

By the end of this year – twelve months since I retired – I will have taken at least 26 services – probably the most since I stopped being a parish minister in 1978. I have loved it as it has given me a different experience of the church. And it has also alerted me to an alarming emerging challenge for the Uniting Church in WA and I think the wider church community here.

Most of the congregations, in my opinion, run the risk of simply becoming ‘retiring villages’.

I was North Metro Regional Pastor for 3 or 4 years. In that time I visited all the congregations and worshipping communities in the region at least once. I have also been a member of the Pastoral elations and Placements Committee (PR&PC) twice in the last 10 years. One of the things I did as regional pastor was to arrange for a bus tour of the northern regional development.

Tags Our People and Agencies

Stories & Feature Articles

Santa’s workshop for WA families

Post author By revivewa
Post date December 15, 2014

Who knew that Santa’s Workshop was nestled away in the northern suburbs of Perth? They call themselves the WUCMen, and each Wednesday they gather in a shed in the semi-rural area of Gnangara and make wooden toys for UnitingCare West’s Christmas Appeal – The Target and UnitingCare Giving Box. The toys are then distributed to families in WA to spread hope, joy and love to people at Christmas.

A group of Men from Wanneroo Uniting Church wanted to start a men’s group for church members, but wanted to spend their fellowship time doing hands-on projects rather than sitting around chatting and listening to speakers. And so the WUCMen was formed – standing for Wanneroo Uniting Church Men.

Keva Barnard, a WUCMan, said that the group consisted of men from various backgrounds who just wanted to use their time doing practical things together.

“We’re interested in working, so we formed this group,” Keva said.

Throughout the year, the group make wooden toy cars, pull along trolleys and building blocks, usually donating around 20 toys a year. Some of the toys also get donated to Princess Margaret Hospital for Children.

Tags Church and Community

Stories & Feature Articles

The church of the future: Oh the possibilities

Post author By revivewa
Post date December 13, 2014

You’ve heard it before, we all know it’s happening: the Uniting Church is in steady decline. Despite the good intentions of many who try to encourage us to change our ways so we can thrive again, the truth is the church is currently heading towards a gloomy situation.

Dr Keith Suter, futurist, well respected Australian social commentator and Uniting Church member, has independently researched and completed his third PhD: The Future of the Uniting Church in Australia, as a labour of love through the University of Sydney. Using the ‘scenario planning’ method, which Revive has previously featured in relation to work of the Uniting Church in WA’s Strategy and Mission Planning Commission, Keith has come up with four ‘possible’ futures the Uniting Church in Australia could head down.

To clarify, a possible future is different to a predicted or preferred future, in that it may not be a scenario which we all want and it’s not the only option available to us. Instead, Keith has put forward a number of realistic scenarios that could or could not play out depending on how we manage the organisation from here on.

Tags Uniting Church

Stories & Feature Articles

Kids are not the future of the church

Post author By revivewa
Post date December 9, 2014

What? Children and young people are our future, right? Well, if you simply mean that they’ll be on the Earth after we’re all dead, then yeah, the kids around now will be adults in the future.

But no, children are not the future of the church.

Why? Because children and young people are our present. They are here right now giving life and witness to the church.

Richard Telfer, First Third specialist for the Uniting Church in WA, recently returned from an Intergenerational Faith Formation Symposium led by John Roberto in Connecticut, USA. He believes this phrase is holding us back from being a truly intergenerational church.

A multi-generational church is one which has members from different age groups who mostly stick to themselves, not really interacting with others outside their own age group. A crossgenerational church is one where the dominant age group invites other age groups to participate in their activities.

An intergenerational church probably doesn’t know it’s intergenerational. It has members from different age groups who naturally learn from each other and grow together.

Tags Youth

Stories & Feature Articles

Seeking God’s shalom for the world

Post author By revivewa
Post date November 22, 2014

For followers of Jesus, when it comes to speaking up for the rights of the marginalised, our voice should be as bankable as the presence of dreadlocks and bongo drums at a G8 rally. Proverbs 31:8-10, Psalm 82:3, Isaiah, 1:17 and Luke 4:18-19 are just some of the Bible verses that make our responsibility clear. However, in my opinion, it is not the verses that are compelling, so much as the vision for life that lies behind them.

Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann suggests that in the pages of the Hebrew scriptures we see God’s chosen people, the Israelites, constantly faced with ‘either or’ decisions. In other words, they can live according to the standards and values of the world around them or they can live according to God’s alternative reality – life with God at the centre where justice, humility and mercy are valued. This alternative vision for life finds its full expression in the person of Jesus. He demonstrates what life to the full looks like; life with God at the centre which he invites us to join in. This is the crux of the Gospel. American theologian, Ron Sider says, “The vast majority of New Testament scholars today, whether evangelical or liberal, agree that the central aspect of Jesus’ teaching was the Gospel of the kingdom of God.”

We don’t talk about kingdoms much these days, so the term can lack meaning, but the concept is pretty straight forward. A kingdom literally means a ‘king’s domain’ – it’s where the king’s values, attitudes and ways of doing things hold sway. So what does God’s domain look like? The short answer to that question is, shalom.

Tags Theology and Spiritual Reflections