ON TUESDAY 20 September, hundreds of Micah Challenge supporters from all over Australia will converge on the lawns of Parliament House to join federal MPs in a queue for a giant toilet, and raise awareness for the 2.6 billion people around the world who still have no access to a toilet. The concerned advocates will be in Canberra for Voices for ...

Not content to confine its muscle to the field it knows best, the Fiji military has moved in on the Methodist Church, attempting to influence Church leadership decisions and interfering in the life of the Church. A recent showdown over the Methodist Church Annual Conference has ended with the Military Government cancelling the Conference for the third year in a ...

IT MAY only be August but the Synod communications team has been hard at work consulting with as many people as possible to help decide on the 2011 Christmas postcard artwork. This year the slogan is: Faith Hope Love (but the greatest of these is love). The back of the card will say “experience Christmas with us” and have a ...

WHEN I was about 19 years old, at the end of the year I dyed my hair bright purple. I wasn’t a rebellious teenager but I never wanted to be just like everyone else my age, I wanted to do something a bit different, and this was it. But I was terrified of what people at church would say on ...

"Norway has today experienced an unprecedented and horrible level of violence against innocent people," said Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, a Norwegian Lutheran pastor and general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC). Dr Tveit, who is currently in Norway, had just left Oslo when he learned of the bombing of a government building and the shooting at a ...

Young Christians aged 18-30 years are invited to apply for a programme addressing the links between environmental and socio-economic justice which is jointly organized by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) in the context of United Nations climate negotiations in the latter part of 2011. “Youth for Eco-Justice” is a transformational training programme for ...

Micah Challenge Australia has commended the findings of the Independent Review of Aid Effectiveness, announced today. A particularly encouraging aspect of today’s announcement is the headline affirmation that “The fundamental purpose of Australian aid is to help people overcome poverty.” “This is good and right” said Micah Challenge National Coordinator, John Beckett. ‘Both the review and the government’s response have ...

STANDING IN a worship service, surrounded by people singing joyful songs to the Lord while feeling like you are in a pit of despair is not an uncommon feeling amongst our congregation members. For June Wood, and many others, it threw her faith and understanding of God into disarray. Diagnosed with depression 20 years ago, Ms Wood’s long journey has ...

Some of the nation’s best known charities, trade unions, academics and environmental groups have called on the federal Government to support a ‘Robin Hood tax’ in an open letter to the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. The 0.05 per cent levy on financial transactions would generate billions of dollars to invest in anti-poverty and climate change programs globally. The levy has ...

On 6 June 2011, The Uniting Church in Australia became a signatory to the following statement: The Australian debate about asylum policy has now degenerated to the point where the central argument seems to be about which inhumane policy will cause the least suffering. Neither indefinite detention in the Pacific nor sending asylum seekers to uncertainty in Malaysia can be ...