Features

A NUMBER of Uniting Church chaplains and lay volunteers have pioneered a new program for Queensland prisons. Kairos Prison Ministry Australia was given approval to conduct a six month pilot comprising the Kairos five day short course and the ongoing fortnightly journey of discovery within the Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre, Queensland’s primary remand centre with a capacity for 890 prisoners, ...

Science, religion and the search for truthIT IS OFTEN assumed that the history of the relations between science and religion is one of unremitting conflict. The prime examples are Galileo’s condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633 and the religious opposition elicited by Darwin’s theory of evolution on its inception in 1859. While this view continues to exercise a great hold ...

SCIENCE FICTION may be a thing of the past in future. According to physicist, physician and futurist Dr Richard Swenson the stuff of movies and novels five years ago is reality today. The author of Balance and The Overload Syndrome was keynote speaker at the 2010 Christian Management Australia conference in Brisbane in June. Quoting Albert Einstein, Dr Swenson pointed ...

The Uniting Church in Australia has congratulated Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Ms Julia Gillard. Acting President of the Uniting Church National Assembly, Rev Gregor Henderson, said he welcomed Ms Gillard’s election as a major step in Australia’s commitment to gender equality and hopes she would serve as a role model for young people to show that Australia really does ...

Australia runs on volunteers. These are the people who doorknock for the Leukemia Foundation, help at the Lifeline Bookfest, organise Meals on Wheels and so much more. In a Productivity Commission report released in February the Australian Government’s independent research and advisory body found that 4.6 million volunteers worked with not-for-profits (NFPs) with a wage equivalent value of nearly $15 ...

ANDREW LEE, a farmer in Fernlees, near Emerald, is one of the stars of Mission Stories, the Queensland Synod’s new DVD discussion resource. Mr Lee takes us behind the scenes of a three week trip to Papua New Guinea with teenagers and their parents. On returning to Queensland after a two year stint in Papua New Guinea, working alongside local ...

LIKE EASTER less than a month earlier, Anzac Day is a cultural marker for thousands of Australians. For some, either (or both) of these dates can provide a focus for life’s deepest meaning or purpose. Captain Alamoti Lavaki is serving in Afghanistan as the Uniting Church padre for the current Reconstruction Task Force. Capt Lavaki sees cultural connection for those ...

A NEW study by the Pew Research Centre, a non-partisan “fact tank” in America, called Religion Among the Millennials has found that despite fewer than 20 per cent of people aged 18 to 29 attending regular church services, about three-quarters of them believe in an afterlife – about the same rate as older generations. In our growingly secular society the ...

Journey looks at Brian McLaren’s second question that is transforming the church: the question of biblical authority. THEOLOGIAN AND Brisbane based Uniting Church minister Rev Peter Lockhart said the Basis of Union boldly states that the Uniting Church “has received the books of the Old and New Testaments as unique prophetic and apostolic testimony, in which it hears the Word ...

I’D ONLY been in town a few days and here I was driving to a house I had never been to, to meet a family I didn’t know, to arrange the funeral of a person I had never met. I asked myself, “What on earth am I doing?” The urge to turn around was quite real. Yet at the same ...