Tag: Uniting Church

Transforming Worship is a national gathering for preachers, worship leaders, musicians, artists, poets, and others to explore how worship shapes our lives and our world.

For the first time in 30 years, Adelaide will host a national worship conference for the Uniting Church, as part of the Uniting Church in Australia’s 40^th anniversary celebrations.

National director for Formation, Education and Discipleship Craig Mitchell hopes this event will reflect the breadth and richness of worship in the Uniting Church.

“Together at Transforming Worship, we will explore how God forms us in faith and transforms us for discipleship and mission,” Craig said.

“This conference will embrace the depth of our worship traditions and also attend to the contemporary world where we live as disciples.”

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Uniting Church in Australia. Here, Stuart McMillan, president of the Uniting Church in Australia, shares a message to the church, inviting church members to celebrate this milestone. 

2017 is a special year for the Uniting Church in Australia. Together we mark 40 years since church union.

At the inauguration service on Wednesday 22 June 1977 the first President Rev Dr Davis McCaughey, the primary author of our Basis of Union, remarked that church union ‘meant absolutely nothing, unless it drives us back to the fundamental questions – where do you come from, where are you going, and who are you?’

To the great sorrow of her family and friends, Hazel Creagh died unexpectedly on Wednesday 8 February.

Born into the Mather family on 4 July 1939, Hazel grew up in the Leederville Congregational Church and married a young farmer, Jim Creagh. When they later moved to the city, Jim and Hazel joined the Presbyterian Coolbellup congregation. In 1974, Coolbellup became part of the Hilton-Cockburn joint parish, in which Hazel and Jim were important leaders. Hazel participated in a course for lay preachers held locally under the Theological Hall Faculty’s oversight. Around the time of the union of the churches in 1977, she became a member of the Presbytery of Peel and the Synod’s Board of Ministry, convening the latter’s group overseeing the Division of Nurture. In 1978, she became a Presbytery representative on the Joint Presbyteries’ Settlements Advisory Committee.

The Uniting Church in Australia has established a National Historical Society. Those who are already engaged, through state Uniting Church Historical Societies, through the teaching of religious/church history or through regional or local church history groups and programs, welcome this move and look forward to what it will contribute to the important processes of understanding, recording, debating and celebrating our history and allowing that history to inform our future journey as a pilgrim people on the way.

To formally launch the new national society, and also to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Uniting Church (not to mention the five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation) a  conference is being planned for 9-12 June 2017 (the Queen’s birthday long weekend). The conference will be held at Pilgrim Uniting Church in Adelaide, starting at 5.00pm on Friday 9 June and finishing by 12noon, Monday 12 June.

It will feature major contributions from specially invited keynote speakers and panel discussants; short papers presented by conference participants, including academics, non-academics, local historians, archivists, former missionaries, members of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress (UAICC), clergy, laity and anyone interested in and engaged with Uniting Church history; workshops and field visits; and plenty of opportunities for networking.  

The Uniting Church is responsible for preserving records so they are available for consultation in the future.

Uniting Church records should be maintained as part of general operating procedures.

Records that are no longer in use by congregations should be sent to the Synod Archives at: 91 Edward St Perth WA.

It is particularly important to preserve items such as Baptism registers, Marriage registers and Original Signed Minutes of all committees.

More than 1000 retired Uniting Church ministers have had their retirement incomes slashed by Federal Government superannuation changes that came into force on 1 January.

Changes to the tax treatment of defined benefit super schemes mean more than 80% of retired members in the UCA Beneficiary Fund are losing thousands of dollars a year, principally because it will now be harder for them to receive the Age Pension. The scale of lost income varies with initial feedback suggesting most losses in a range of $5000 to $8500 and some as high as $10,000 a year.

Retired ministers, and in many cases their widows, are struggling to adjust to their change in circumstances with the Uniting Church Beneficiary Fund fielding reports of financial hardship. One late Minister’s wife describes herself as “being forced into a survival situation again” at the age of 76, while other former ministers are reportedly considering selling out of retirement villages they live in.