Opinion

I’m amazed by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. None of those ancient imperfect heroes would get a Blue Card let alone Father of the Year. Yet the great ‘I Am’ identifies himself as their God and ultimately they’re the forefathers of the Uniting Church. I’m also amazed that he’s the God of my parents, and now my daughters. ...

I can think of five key people who have been guideposts on my faith journey. Most of these were Uniting Church youth workers. People with energy and passion for connecting with young people and helping them explore their faith in a deeper way. Looking at youth and children’s ministry in the church, it is hard to see tangible evidence of ...

SOME OF you may have seen the movie, Antwone Fisher. It tells the true story of a boy who was given up by his mother when he was born. He was raised in a foster home where he experienced severe and relentless psychological, sexual and physical abuse. He grew up with a deep-seated anger within him that readily and frequently ...

The Uniting Church in Australia, in March 2008, formally committed itself to support the development of a national human rights charter for Australia. While Christian opposition to such a charter is often reported, Christian support remains largely unnoticed and undiscussed. The Christian faith understands life as a gift from God, and that through the life of the Trinitarian God, our ...

This story was first published at www.mercatornet.com on 5 August 2008. When Ronald Reagan died in 2004 after a decade-long battle with Alzheimer’s, pundits across America repeated the conventional wisdom about dementia. The former president was only a "shell" and "shadow" of himself in his later years, they said, and his physical passing was a mere formality, the symbolic loss of ...

FROM TIME to time, I find myself troubled by various throw-away comments certain people make about the church. The common element in all these one-liners is cynicism and negativity. They all express a particular criticism or infer an element of blame for some situation or other in the life of the church. The statement I hear most frequently is that ...

It’s Sunday afternoon, you’ve had lunch and settled on the couch, feet up with Journey. We’ll be spending the next three editions together, so allow me to introduce myself. I’m helping hold the fort while Bruce Mullan takes a break and Mardi Lumsden takes the wheel. My CV: husband and father, UCA member, journalist and broadcaster, occasional elephant hunter. Rather ...

IN JANUARY 1970 I arrived in Renmark, a vibrant community in the Riverland of SA, to commence my first ministry placement. At that time the town congregation met for worship both Sunday morning and evening and the church was full on both occasions. TV arrived in the Riverland some time in 1971. Within six months, while attendances at morning worship ...

When I was a very small child growing up in a very Presbyterian home, once each year the Moderator would come to visit to congregation. I remember it being something akin to a visit from Santa Claus. He (and it was always a “he”) didn’t bring presents, but he wore a particularly distinctive outfit that made a huge impact on ...

God is currently a hot topic with Richard Dawkin’s book The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great; How Religion Poisons Everything on bestseller lists, dismissing God as irrelevant, harmful and non-existent. Their Rottwieler-style attacks are aimed at the traditional theistic God, the all-powerful, all-good, unchanging transcendent Being beyond the universe controlling everything from without and usually depicted ...