Features

Aboriginal minister Rev Dennis Corowa explains how Indigenous people read scripture. We do it out of 60,000 years of culture. We were and remain the owners and custodians of this land. God was known and active among Indigenous people prior to colonisation by Europeans. The author of Acts would suggest that the presence of Indigenous Australians was not a matter ...

Formed in 1977 on the basis that its faith and obedience are nourished and regulated by the Bible, the Uniting Church has faced increasing tensions over the way its people read and interprets scripture. Many have identified the question of how we read the Bible as the key underlying issue in the recent divisive debates over homosexuality and leadership in ...

When a call went out for nominations for church council members of the Toombul District UC, no one expected two members of the youth group to apply. Thirteen year-old Colleen Heffernan and sixteen year-old Rosie Dennis were delighted and surprised when they were elected to their church council. Minister Rev Jan Whyte said the girls are part of a vibrant ...

Forget about the rule to ‘Love one’s neighbour!’ The truth is, we don’t trust them. According to a report from NCLS Research and Edith Cowan University, only a third of Australians have high levels of trust in the residents of their neighbourhood, researchers found. “Much the same was true for levels of trust toward people of races different from one’s ...

A diverse group of 150 mission leaders and teachers from many Christian denominations met at the Australian Missiology Conference in Melbourne in September, to rethink mission in the light of the rapid changes in Australian society. Keynote speaker and National Director of the Forge Missional Training Network Alan Hirsch predicted that the traditional church will die within twenty years, but ...

McKay Patrol is the Uniting Church’s outback ministry based in Cloncurry.  Patrol Padre Rev Garry Hardingham travels around western Queensland in a twenty-six year old Cessna 182 aircraft known affectionately as MJZ visiting remote properties and townships offering ministry in the name of Jesus and on behalf of the Uniting Church in Australia.  This is one of his stories… You ...

Uniting Church leaders today condemned the Government’s proposed industrial relations reforms and the limited safeguards announced yesterday which do little to protect the rights and conditions of Australia’s most vulnerable workers. Uniting Church President, Reverend Dr. Dean Drayton, said the Government’s ‘WorkChoices’ reform package is more about choice for business than protecting the country’s workers. “We are not comforted by ...

A small crowd of around 40 people gathered at West End Uniting Church in Brisbane on the first day of October to hear the history of the Queensland Uniting Church’s urban aboriginal and islander ministry since the 1970s and to honour and support the work of aboriginal leaders in ministry Aunty Jean Phillips and Mrs Elizabeth Law. Aboriginal leaders Elizabeth ...

Launching The Centre for Progressive Religious Thought in Brisbane in August, Rev Rex Hunt, director of CPRT in Canberra said a “new quest” to discover the historical Jesus had been going on for the past twenty years. The Centre was founded in Canberra in 2002, an initiative of the St James Uniting Church, as a safe place for those who ...

Tayeb Sadeghian arrived at Brisbane Airport seeking political asylum in September 1989. He had no passport, no plane ticket and hadn’t slept for days. Tayeb’s fear at that time was that the Australian Government would send him straight back to Iran where he had been imprisoned for his democratic beliefs. By the day’s end, however, his situation had improved thanks ...