Queensland Synod News

Communities around Queensland will have stacks of fun with Pancake Day this year, as they cook and sell $2 pancakes to help raise money for those who need it most. Over 600 groups and businesses around Queensland will be supporting UnitingCare’s Pancake Day on Tuesday 20 February, to help the elderly, homeless and vulnerable members of the community. All funds ...

The US National Council of Churches, a long-standing critic of US military involvement in Iraq, has criticised President George W. Bush’s call for additional US troops to be sent to the region.  "Sending more troops is not a change in policy, nor is it even a change in strategy; it is more of the same," the NCC said in a ...

A Chinese monk from the Trappist order, the Rev. Nicholas Kao Se-tsean, who is believed to be one of the world’s oldest Roman Catholic priests, has celebrated his 110th birthday with family and friends in Hong Kong. Kao concelebrated a special Mass on 15 January at the Lady of Joy Abbey (Hong Kong), the place where he has lived and ...

Changes to Education Queensland policies for both Religious Instruction and Chaplaincy in state schools will have significant consequences for schools, parents, ministers, church councils and RE volunteers. Uniting Church representative on Education Queensland’s Religious Education Advisory Committee (REAC) and Queensland Churches Together RE/Chaplaincy Committee Rev David MacGregor says this is the culmination of over five years work, and comes within ...

Almost one week after the new archbishop of Warsaw resigned after admitting contacts with Poland’s communist-era secret police, commentators in Rome said the church was reeling from the implications of the affair. The Rome-based La Repubblica newspaper reported that Pope Benedict XVI was "furious" about those who had withheld information from him about Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus. In Warsaw, leaders of ...

Former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are backing a new grouping of Baptists in a centrist organization that will tackle broader social issues and counter a perceived image of the Southern Baptist Convention as an exclusionary church. At the same time the new grouping has invited the Southern Baptists to its foundation convention a year from now. "This ...

The Boonah Uniting Church and community has been shocked by the accidental death of an elderly church member who was knocked over by a car after worship last Sunday. Mavis Bell was getting into a car to be taken back to the Fassifern Retirement Village when it suddenly reversed knocking her to the ground. A well know resident of the ...

Poland’s Roman Catholic bishops have urged the media to respect the decision of a top archbishop to resign due to accusations that he acted as an informer for Poland’s former communist secret police. "The church in Poland needs to look humbly and in truth at its past, present and future," said the statement, signed by the Polish bishops’ conference president, ...

The new Roman Catholic archbishop of Warsaw has refused to resign after two separate commissions stated that he had knowingly collaborated with Poland’s communist-era secret police. "This is a falsification," said the Rev. Stanislaw Wielgus in a statement on 5 January, just hours before he was officially to take office as Warsaw archbishop. "There is absolutely no documentation which proves ...

The general secretary of the World Council of Churches’ has asked God to grant Iraq "the mercy, justice and compassion that it has long been denied" and for an end to the fear and death that marked Saddam Hussein’s rule "and that continue now". "We pray that those who hold power in Iraq now and in the future will create ...