Issuu

insights SPRING 2026

n a i t s i r Ch ship in leadernsition tra

Forty years at Ashfie ld

SEASON OF

Change

Be longing, an sacr ed wor k odf the seeing one another

It doesn’t

change God,

it changes me

Walking on Country Parramatta 14 November 2026

10am - 1:30pm

Centre for Ministry, 16 Masons Drive North Parramatta Spend the day with representatives from Gawura Cultural Immersions. Learn more about local Aboriginal country, cultures and communities, including site visits, stories, and bush tucker. Light lunch included.

For more information visit: www.culturalimmersions.com.au

The program will include: Cultural Performance

A Welcome dance taught to everyone

Cultural Tour

A walk around Lake Parramatta Reserve to discuss the cultural significance of Parramatta

Cultural Learning Session

An educational session on cultural frameworks.

Cultural Performance

A Farewell dance taught to everyone

Lunch

Finished with light lunch

Wear: Comfortable clothing and walking shoes. Bring: snack for morning tea, water, sunscreen and a hat.

nswactuca.eventsair.com/walking-on-country-parramatta/registration

Registrations close 23/10/26

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W E LC O M E F R O M T H E G E N E R A L S E C R E TA RY

Seasons of change, yes. And we also need seasons of stability. W

REV. JANE FRY GENERAL SECRETARY

REV. DR PETER WALKER GENERAL SECRETARY THE GENERAL SECRETARY IS APPOINTED BY THE SYNOD TO PROVIDE LEADERSHIP TO THE CHURCH BY ACTIVELY ENGAGING IN STRATEGIC THINKING ABOUT THE LIFE, DIRECTION, VISION AND MISSION OF THE CHURCH.

hen I think about change today, I when. It also seems an important time to be honestly feel we need to acknowledge careful not to succumb to a commercialised that so many in our congregations and form of religion. Larger doesn’t necessarily presbyteries are suffering from change fatigue. mean stronger. Newness doesn’t necessarily This is also true of staff and leaders in the mean greater faithfulness. Our church, and office of the synod. The changes undertaken all churches, are facing challenges. We no through the Presbytery Project will benefit the longer hold the community respect we once mission of the church. Yet I can’t help feeling held. The world is shifting beneath us. We it is now time, once that change is settled, to do need to be a reforming church – no doubt offer each other a season of stability. We pride about it. However, seasons of change that are ourselves on keeping our law ‘under constant not supported by seasons of stability put at review’ (the Basis of Union). Are we over doing risk the benefits of the changes made. Zizek it? Our first responsibility is not to keep church says not changing may sometimes be the truly law and structure in good shape. Rather, it is radical decision now in this world of swirling to listen for the voice of God and then and dislocating change. Not reflexively follow God’s leading as we witness falling for the new but, instead, holding to the good news we have found your ground for a time. U N D ER S TA N D I N G in Jesus Christ. Structures and We are a movement, and that word OUR TR ADITION laws support that calling but D EEP LY, A N D itself speaks of a people who are let’s not allow the tail to wag the T H EN open to being renewed. Indeed, a dog. Seasons of change are best I N N OVAT I N G O N people longing to be renewed. And followed by seasons of stability – THIS GIFT so how can we think wisely and well O F G O D to focus on the importance of our about change in these strange times? local congregations, communities, To me, something important rests in the services and ministries. distinction between invention and innovation. We are surrounded by an often-obsessive Invention is about making something that is drumbeat of change, in every aspect of life. new. Innovation is about renewing something So it is important to be wise when tempted to that is old. Inventors provide us with many launch into something new in the church. Will special and amazing new things. Yet the this change help us to fulfil our true purposes church already has something special and as God’s church? Is it the right time for this amazing. We do not need to invent it. The change? The strongest forms of the church, something we have is the good news of Jesus we often assume, are the largest. And the Christ, to which we seek to give distinctive largest churches seem to be doing new things. expression as an Australian church that hopes They seem good at marketing themselves. to fulfil Christ’s prayer that all his followers They look like a new product. How will we may be one. A church seeking to become a keep up? Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek place where all people have a sense of unity says we now find ourselves in a ‘new world and belonging in Christ. A place where all are disorder’. The permanently accelerating welcomed, loved, encouraged in discipleship, changes in the world of commerce have and supported in leadership. Renewing caused us to think that everything must ourselves in that calling means understanding change. Yet this also brings layers of fakery. our tradition deeply, and then innovating on Changes for the sake of attention, achieving this gift of God which, although old, will shine nothing. through us in fresh ways. That involves times of bold change, yes. However, innovation and Especially now, it seems important for the change are strengthened by times when we church to be discerning about when is the take stock and refocus ourselves again on the time for change and when is the time for mission God has been preparing ahead of us. stability. What to hold, what to let go - and

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FEATURE STORIES

SEASON OF 15

Change

CONTENTS 6

YOUR SAY

NEWS

SEASON OF CHANGE

PULSE

UNITING CREATIVE

LECTIONARY REFLECTIONS

BELIEF MATTERS

ENTERTAIN ME

The Uniting Church in Australia is one of the country’s largest denominations. Our vision is that it will be a fellowship of reconciliation, living God’s love, following Jesus Christ and acting for the common good to build a just and compassionate community of faith. EDITOR Aditee Vora | PRODUCTION/DESIGN Rana Moawad and Sarah Bickham EDITORIAL/ADVERTISING/DISTRIBUTION ENQUIRIES: Insights, PO Box A2178, Sydney South, NSW 1235 | insights@nswact.uca.org.au | www.insights.uca.org.au Insights is published by the Uniting Church in Australia, Synod of New South Wales and the ACT. Articles and advertising content do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editor or of the Uniting Church. Contents copyright. No material from this publication may be copied, photocopied or transmitted by any means without the permission of the Managing Editor. CIRCULATION: 10,000. ISSN: 1036-7322 Commonwealth of Australia 2023.

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M O D E R ATO R ’ S R E F L E C T I O N

One body, many seasons

Spring has a way of reminding us that change is part of God's good creation. Across our gardens and landscapes, signs of new life begin to appear after winter's stillness. Buds appear where branches once seemed bare, reminding us that God is always at work, bringing renewal in ways we may not yet fully see.

S Follow the Moderator on instagram: instagram.com/moderator_ucanswact

REV. FAAIMATA HAVEA HILIAU MODERATOR

cripture tells us, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3). As people of faith, we know that our lives and the life of the Church are shaped by these seasons. There are times of planting and times of harvest, times of beginning and times of farewell and through every season, God's faithfulness remains constant.

Next year 2027 the Uniting Church in Australia will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Our very beginning was itself an extraordinary act of faith. In 1977, three church traditions came together to form one Church, choosing unity in Christ over difference. It was a bold vision that continues to shape who we are today. As we prepare to celebrate this milestone, we can give thanks for the countless ways God has led us through changing times while remaining faithful to our calling to worship, witness and serve.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Paul describes the Church not as an organisation, but as the Body of Christ. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he reminds This season also invites us to us that although we are many honour those whose faithful WE REM AIN members, we are one body. Each service has enriched the life of O N E B O DY I N C H R I S T, C A L L ED person is uniquely gifted, each our Church. As Associate General TO S U P P O R T ministry has its place, and each Secretary Bronwyn Murphy O N E A N OT H ER congregation contributes to the life prepares for retirement, we give of the whole. "If one member suffers, thanks for her wisdom, vibrant all suffer together with it; if one spirit and steadfast commitment. member is honoured, all rejoice together Through seasons of both challenge and with it." opportunity, Bronwyn has served with grace, humility and deep love for the Church. Like That image has stayed with me in recent so many faithful disciples who have gone months as our Church continues to journey before us, she reminds us that while individual together as a pilgrim people into this seasons of ministry may come to an end, the season of change. Across our Synod, we are fruits of faithful service continue to bless progressing towards a three-Presbytery model those who follow. that seeks to strengthen ministry and deepen relationships across metropolitan, regional Spring reminds us that new life does not and rural communities. I acknowledge that appear overnight. It grows because someone like any change there are both challenges has planted, nurtured and trusted God and joys and new structures may evolve, our through every season. As we look to the future, identity as a church does not. We remain one may we embrace the changes before us with Body in Christ, called to support one another, confidence, honour those whose faithfulness to share our gifts generously, and to proclaim has brought us to this point, and continue to God's love together. This journey is not about walk together as one Body in Christ. Whatever becoming a different Church, but about season we find ourselves in, we can trust discovering new ways of living out our shared that the One who has called us together will calling with hope, courage and faith. continue to renew, sustain and lead us into the future as God’s pilgrim people. I was reminded of this recently during a visit to Newington College. As the College embraces its historic transition to co-education, I saw a community confidently stepping into a new chapter while remaining deeply grounded in its values. The culture I encountered was one of welcome, respect and optimism. It was a powerful reminder that when change is guided by purpose and shaped by a commitment to the flourishing of others, it can strengthen rather than diminish a community.

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“A great reflection David on a unique woman with a heart, soul and determination to demonstrate the best. Also demonstrated by

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A NOTE OF THANKS ...

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library dedicated to inspiring a love of reading by gifting books free of charge to children from birth to age five, including Australia. Over 300 million books distributed worldwide.”

personal experience you'd like to share, visit insights.uca.org.au and let us know your thoughts.

ROSS COLEMAN

WE’VE ROUNDED UP THE BEST COMMENTS THAT YOU’VE LEFT ONLINE. If you have a viewpoint on any of our articles, or a

YOUR SAY...

IN RESPONSE TO THE STORY WHAT DOLLY PARTON CAN TEACH US ABOUT GRIEF, GRACE AND GETTING ON WITH IT

IN RESPONSE TO THE POST REV. BRONWYN MURPHY CLOSURE OF MINISTRY SERVICE NSW ACT "Enjoy this new phase in your life. The UCA has been blessed by your faithful leadership." BRONWYN GUY

IN RESPONSE TO THE POST FORTY YEARS AGO, REV. BILL CREWS ARRIVED AT ASHFIELD UNITING CHURCH “Thank you, Rev. Bill - as people knocked, you opened each door and God accompanied every person." DAVID NORLING

IN RESPONSE TO THE POST THE AGING ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM, AND WHAT PUT IT THERE “Thanks for your excellent article Jonny! A clear and significant analysis of a dilemma, context, time and challenge I’m familiar with as a member of the Specified Ministry of Youth Worker! Our time in an under resourced Youth Unit is reflected in your wisdom, thoughts and recounting of a familiar story! There is hope, there is a Pulse… but challenges, lack of willingness and decline are massive challenges! Strength to you! DAVID NORLING

Since 1994, Adrian Drayton has been part of the fabric of Insights Magazine, contributing more than 600 articles across three decades, from its earliest print editions through to the digital publication it is today. Over the years, Adrian has worn many hats within the Synod's Communications Unit, including Internal Communications Manager to the Head of Communications and Marketing, helping guide the Synod's voice through significant change, including the transition from print to online media. As Adrian moves on from the Synod, we wanted to take a moment, in this issue themed around change, to acknowledge the enormous contribution he has made to Insights over the years. His writing has informed, challenged, and connected readers across the Synod of NSW and ACT for more than 30 years, a legacy few can match. We're glad this isn't a goodbye to his writing. Adrian will continue contributing to Insights in a contributor capacity. Thank you Adrian, for so many years of storytelling, service, and steady presence behind the scenes. SYNOD MISSION SERVICES

NEWS

BUILDING THE FOUNDATIONS FOR A NEW

Central Presbytery

Members of the Pastoral Relations Committees, known as PRCs, from across the Central Presbytery cluster came together midJune to consider what a shared committee might look like as three presbyteries prepare to become one. PRCs play a quiet but essential role forming through earlier Zoom meetings, in the life of the Uniting Church. They encouraging participants to reflect support the relationship between honestly on how each of their three closed with participants sharing their ministers and congregations, helping presbyteries had worked. What was the hopes for the new PRC and working both flourish in ministry together. As the principal focus of their committee. How through the practical detail of who, Central Presbytery cluster moves toward did they organise themselves and hold where, what, when and how it would a new, combined structure, the question each other accountable. What took up operate. of how this work will be shared most of their meeting time, and what across a presbytery that is may have been overlooked. Participants reflected warmly on the more socio-economically, A TIME OF experience: Saturday turned to building geographically, and R EFL E C T I O N , a shared plan forward. "This is a great couple of days of interculturally diverse than A TIME OF Working across the three reconnection, getting to know each other any of its three parts alone T H I N K I N G A N D A former presbyteries, the as a new family. An important first step became the focus of the G R E AT T I M E O F group explored what it and makes the idea of a new Presbytery weekend. HOPE might mean to embody the a distinct possibility." Eighteen participants ten signs of a healthy church, "It's been fantastic to meet and get to gathered at Hoskins Memorial discussed strategies for supporting Uniting Church in Lithgow, with thanks flourishing leadership, and looked at how know our potential new colleagues. It's also been challenging to work through to the congregation for their hospitality, groups move from conflict to synergy some of the issues." and were guided by facilitator Rev. by understanding the cognitive and Carolyn Thornley. dialogical behaviours at play within them. "We've come together as members of Case studies were worked through using PRCs from three different presbyteries, Friday was spent considering the nature De Bono's Thinking Hats, a method entering our new presbytery, to talk and purpose of PRCs. Carolyn helped for looking at a problem from several about the possibilities ahead of us. It the group build on relationships already different angles in turn. The weekend has been a time of reflection, a time of thinking and a great time of hope in the relationships that lie at the heart of all ministry. It has been exciting to celebrate that we have gathered together over meals and through our work together as we thought very much of our God spirit is leading us." — Rev. Christine Bayliss Kelly It was, by all accounts, a formative weekend, one that laid the relational groundwork needed for the committees to work well together in the years ahead. Regenerative, rich, and full of hope for the future of the Central Presbytery. Significant work has begun. REV. ANN PERRIN

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175

NEWS

KIAMA LECTURE HALL MARKS A MILESTONE WITH ITS

175th anniversary celebrations

On Sunday 14 June 2026, the Kiama Jamberoo Uniting Church gathered to celebrate something remarkable: 175 years of Methodism in the region, anchored by a building that has stood at the heart of the community since 1851. The Kiama Lecture Hall is no ordinary church hall. Opened in 1851, it is Kiama's oldest church and public building, and at the time of its construction, it was considered the first permanent church in the Illawarra. For over a century and a half, it has quietly held the stories of a community's faith. But that history nearly came to an end when about ten years ago, the building had fallen into disrepair. What followed was a remarkable turnaround. Through a determined community fundraising effort, and with support from the NSW State Government, the Hall was carefully restored. Today it stands as a beautiful, light-filled space, once again alive with activity, used by a range of community groups well beyond its original congregation. It was fitting, then, that the 175th anniversary celebrations began with worship. The service was led by the Moderator, Rev Faaimata Havea Hiliau, and was a joy-filled occasion, bringing

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the community together in a shared moment of thanksgiving. From worship, the celebration moved outdoors, where guests gathered to unveil a new commemorative plaque outside the historic 1851 Lecture Hall. The plaque features an engraving of Eugene von Guérard's 1859 sketch of Kiama, tying the building's present to its visual history. And no milestone celebration would be complete without cake, which was duly cut amid the festivities. The occasion drew a wide circle of guests, including local Members of Federal and State Parliament, Kiama Councillors, past Ministers of the Congregation, and ecumenical friends from across the region. Also among the guests was the President of the Kiama Historical Society, whose research contributed significantly to the day's commemorations. The anniversary wasn't only about looking back with pride. It was also

about ensuring the Hall's history is told with more depth and humanity for future generations. As part of the celebrations, the Congregation installed new explanatory signs near the plaques on the Lecture Hall's walls, designed to bring the human stories behind the names to life. Among those remembered are John Crooks, a Sunday School teacher, Methodist soldiers from World War One including Walter and Frank Farquharson and Wentworth East, along with a Soldiers' Honour Roll. Also honoured is Rev Thomas Angwin, who served as minister in 1864 and 1865. Notably, these plaques were originally hung in the 1862 church building, which was destroyed by a storm in the 1960s, making their survival and rehanging in the Lecture Hall part of the Hall's own quiet story of endurance. A tapa from Tupou College in Tonga, added in 2014, further reflects the church's connections across the Pacific.

NEWS

HISTORIC KINDERGARTEN BEGINS A NEW CHAPTER SERVING

Orange's young people

For more than 100 years, children have passed through the doors of Orange Uniting Church's kindergarten hall. While the sounds inside the building have changed, its purpose has not. The former kindergarten has been transformed into accommodation for young people aged 17 to 24 through a partnership between Orange Uniting Church and Veritas House, ensuring the building continues to serve the next generation. The redevelopment forms part of Veritas House's expansion of youth housing in the Central West, supported through NSW Government funding and a broader program to increase crisis and transitional accommodation. Minister Rev. Andrew Cunningham said retaining the building's connection to young people was an important part of the congregation's vision. "This building was built just over 100 years ago for children, and in its new state it's still being used for young people," he said. "They're a little older now, but they're still people who need support, love and care. It's really good to see the building adapted for that." The project has been more than five years in the making. Working within the constraints of a heritage-listed building, the congregation sought a solution that would both preserve the space and respond to a growing community need. That search led to a partnership with Veritas House, a Central West organisation supporting vulnerable children and young people.

WE WANT TO BE PART OF SUPPORTING THESE YOUNG PEOPLE. WHETHER THAT'S THROUGH COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES OR PRACTICAL THINGS LIKE HELPING SOMEONE LEARN TO COOK The former kindergarten has been redeveloped into seven bedrooms, each with an ensuite, alongside shared kitchen, dining and living spaces. Orange Uniting Church will lease the building to Veritas House, which will provide supported accommodation for young people moving from crisis housing towards independent living. Three rooms will provide temporary accommodation, while four will be used for transitional housing, with residents supported by Veritas House case workers as they prepare to move into private rental accommodation. Rev. Cunningham said the partnership reflects the church's commitment to using its property to serve the wider community.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the congregation established a takeaway meal service for people living in temporary accommodation and others experiencing hardship. The program continues today, providing between 150 and 200 hot meals every Saturday evening. The church also hosts community lunches, a drop-in centre, playgroups and youth programs, creating opportunities for connection beyond the accommodation itself. "We'll respect Veritas House's role and the boundaries around their work," Rev. Cunningham said. "But where we can, we want to be part of supporting these young people. Whether that's through community activities or practical things like helping someone learn to cook, those are opportunities we'd welcome." Rev. Cunningham said the project demonstrates how church buildings can continue serving their communities in new ways. "It's about building relationships with other agencies, and that takes time," Orange Uniting Church works alongside local churches, community organisations and Orange City Council through a homelessness working group, helping coordinate support and connect people with the services they need. For the congregation, the former kindergarten's new purpose is a continuation of its original one. "The building was created to support young lives," Rev. Cunningham said. "More than a century later, it's still doing exactly that." JO MALONEY

"We wanted to ask what we could do that would both make good use of the space and help address the housing challenges facing young people in Orange," he said. The redevelopment builds on Orange Uniting Church's wider community ministry.

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NEWS

A NEW SEASON OF UNITY AND MISSION FOR CARLINGFORD–WEST EPPING UNITING CHURCH It was a busy few years, but in 2025 both congregations voted by majority to form the new entity, Carlingford-West Epping Uniting Church. ‘Interim’ and ‘joint’ have now been eliminated from our vocabulary!

Recently the congregations of Carlingford and West Epping Uniting Churches became the new entity of Carlingford-West Epping Uniting Church and we celebrated at our Inauguration Service with the Rev. Pablo Nunez, Moderator elect, as our guest preacher. As neighbours, we came together in 1988 and signed a covenant between the two congregations pledging communication, support, friendship and prayer. The intervening years saw us flourish in our joined neighbourhoods embracing the many young families who called church their other family and were actively involved in all activities. As time went on and our communities changed we realised we needed a higher level of involvement with each other in order to stay connected, and share our activities and our ministry. After many years of prayer, careful discernment and conversations, our journey intensified. This meant that with the full support of Presbytery and Synod, and even more meetings, submission papers, and engagement with amazing leaders, our communities agreed that it was time to get serious.

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THIS IS NOT JUST A CALENDAR CHANGE OR A NEW PROGRAM - IT IS SOMETHING DEEPER. A TURNING POINT, AND A THRESHOLD The two congregations met again in June 2022 with the support of Rev. Geoff Stevenson and Rev. Ben Gilmore to seek a way forward. The Mission Strategy Plan included calling a Ministry Team Leader (based at the West Epping site) and establishing a Church Plant at the Carlingford site. Our prayers were answered by the arrival of The Ministry Team Leader, Rev. Oto V. Faiva, who commenced in September 2023, and Rev. Tennyson Chan as Church Planter commencing in November 2024 at the Carlingford site. We were indebted for the time and expertise of the Rev. Dr Graham Hill who guided us through the process of compiling our Mission Strategy which is summarised in four keys words; connection, community, commitment and Christ. Draft key missional themes and goals for 2025 were prepared by the Interim Strategic Mission Planning Team. The congregations agreed on a vision statement (for the Ministry Team Leader and the congregation to develop into a mission strategy) and began working toward joining as one new entity.

As we celebrated the birth of the Carlingford–West Epping Uniting Church at our Inauguration Service, the Rev. Pablo Nunez titled his sermon ‘Crossing the river, welcoming the King’ and spoke of moments in the life of God’s people when you realise you are standing on the edge of something new. He said, “ this is not just a calendar change or a new program - it is something deeper. A turning point, and a threshold”. He likened the words from Joshua 3 and Matthew 21, as being those kind of moments. Rev. Nunez recognised that God was asking us to take the next step in faith, love, hospitality and courage, to be part of what God will do next in shaping our unity even though we don’t know what that will look like. We are very aware of that threshold where we have been invited to wholeheartedly step forward in faith into a new time, a new season, learning and listening to each other with respect and deepening friendship. As we gave thanks for the faith, dedication, and vision that brought us together from two congregations with a shared desire to serve Christ, we are growing into one community, united in mission and purpose. With our leadership team, Church Council, and so many walking alongside us, we look forward with joy to serving, connecting, and growing together in Jesus’s love for many years to come. Thank you to everyone for walking with us on this journey. Your love, wisdom, patience and prayers have been so important. Thank you for continuing to be our mentors as we continue together in Christ’s name. To God be the glory! ALISON ANDERSON

NEWS

Centre for Ministry

INSTALLS 100KW SOLAR SYSTEM IN STEP TOWARD NET ZERO The Synod of NSW & ACT has installed a 100-kilowatt rooftop solar system at the Centre for Ministry in North Parramatta, as part of its commitment to climate justice and its goal of reaching Net Zero by 2035. The project, delivered by commercial solar installer Todae Solar, comprises 194 high-efficiency panels installed across the main building roof, covering the East Wing, West Wing, Library, and Auditorium sections. Installation began in mid June and the final stage of activating the system takes place this Thursday, 25th June. Once fully operational, the system is projected to supply approximately 33 per cent of the Centre's average daily energy needs from solar, the equivalent of powering 11 homes, keeping 19 cars off the road, and planting 136 trees each year. The project follows a comprehensive strategic review of Synod properties undertaken in 2025 by the Property Services Team, which holds operational responsibility for seven properties across the Synod. The review produced a 10-year capital works plan for each property, with sustainability identified as a priority alongside maintenance and accessibility. Head of Property Services Tim Dryden says climate stewardship was a clear driver. "With Climate Stewardship being a core component of the Future Directions Commitments, sustainability was one area that we wanted to focus on whilst working within budgetary constraints," Dryden says. Three factors made the Centre for Ministry the site selected for this first installation: energy costs exceeding $100,000 per year, energy consumption concentrated predominantly within daylight hours, and a large roof space suited to solar panels. A feasibility assessment confirmed that a 100kW system would reduce

the Centre's external power usage by approximately 27 per cent and pay for itself in around 3.5 years. "This short payback period will lead to net savings within four years' time, meaning that in this instance Property Stewardship and our commitment to Climate Stewardship are in perfect alignment.” Battery storage was assessed but set aside for this phase, given that most energy use occurs during daylight hours. The Property Services Team has flagged further sustainability upgrades across Synod properties in coming years, including potential solar or battery installations at other sites. The Centre for Ministry sits within a Heritage Conservation Area, which required the team to submit a Heritage Minor Works application to the local council before works could proceed. Approval was granted, removing the need for a full Development Application. Site Manager Alex Duric says the site presented a number of practical considerations during planning and installation. "Identifying the appropriate areas of the roof that provide the best exposure to the sun throughout the day, ensuring the structural integrity of the roof to bear the load of the solar panels, complying with local council considering the heritage aspects of the site, and timing the installation to minimise disruption to staff, students and visitors," says Alex. On the broader significance of the project, Duric adds: "To be involved in a substantial project that aligns so closely to the Church's values regarding environmental stewardship and climate justice is extremely rewarding."

The total project cost was partially offset by a government subsidy covering approximately 25 per cent of the gross cost. The net investment is projected to generate savings of more than $560,000 over 25 years, with the system monitored in real time through Solar Analytics, tracking both energy generation and consumption. The government funding that subsidised this project is available to any congregation or presbytery considering a similar installation. The UFS Schofield Loan is also an option, offering up to $50,000 at nominal interest rates for the purpose of installing solar, battery systems and other repairs to Church buildings. For more information visit: unitingfinancial.com.au/unitingchurch-organisations/loans/ schofield-loan Congregations or Presbyteries interested in undertaking similar works are encouraged to contact the Property Services Team at: property@nswact.uca.org.au 02 8267 4300

This installation sits within the Synod's Future Directions commitment to an ongoing and active commitment to the stewardship of the earth - a step from advocacy to action. ADITEE VORA

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NEWS

COUNTING WHAT CONGREGATIONS DO For many congregations, a survey can feel like another job to add to a busy list. But the 2026 National Church Life Survey (NCLS) gives Uniting Church congregations a chance to record what is happening in their churches and communities, and to use that information to plan for the future. The idea of counting people and communities is not new. Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus begins with a census ordered by the Roman emperor Augustus. “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.” Luke 2:1 Joseph travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem to be registered because he was descended from the house and family of David. It was an administrative exercise carried out across the Roman Empire, but Luke places it at the beginning of the story of Jesus’ birth. More than 2,000 years later, the NCLS is also about gathering information about people and communities. But rather than counting people for government records, it gives churches an opportunity to understand their own life and work. The NCLS has tracked the life of Australian churches every five years for more than 35 years. The 2026 survey is the eighth national survey and includes churches from more than 20 denominations. For Uniting Church congregations, the timing is significant. The last NCLS took place during COVID-19, when many aspects of church life were disrupted. Five years on, the survey provides an opportunity to see what has changed.

optional Child Survey gives children aged eight to 14 a chance to have their say, while the Leader Survey looks at leadership development and wellbeing. For many congregations, the Church Activities Survey will also provide useful information. Completed by one administrator or senior leader, the survey records the activities taking place in a congregation. This includes worship, Bible studies and children’s activities, as well as community meals, food programs, school partnerships and other forms of community engagement. “It is just capturing the activities that take place in that congregation,” Linda says. Recording these activities is important because much of the work carried out by congregations happens beyond Sunday worship. Across NSW and the ACT, Uniting Church congregations run community pantries, provide meals, operate bus services, support schools, run playgroups and make their buildings available to other community organisations. The NCLS data will help build a picture of this activity across Australia. NCLS Research is also using the 2026 data as part of a National Impact Audit being developed with NAYBA, which aims to measure the social contribution of local churches and other faith communities.

Linda Barclay, the Synod’s NCLS regional For congregations, the survey provides coordinator, says the survey provides evidence that can help explain their a way for congregations to hear from contribution to local communities. their people and better understand their “If we understand what is happening in church. our congregations, we can start to tell “It is an opportunity to understand what that story,” Linda says. the people who come along to church That information can be useful when are experiencing,” she says. churches are working with local The NCLS includes several surveys. The councils, community organisations Attender Survey allows people aged and governments. It can demonstrate 15 and over to share their experiences, the scale of local activity, identify hopes and views about church life. An

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opportunities for partnerships and support applications for funding. The information can also help congregations understand their own work. A congregation may know it is busy, but recording its activities can provide a clearer picture of what is actually happening. It can highlight strengths, gaps and opportunities, while allowing congregations to compare their activities with wider patterns across the Australian Church. The Attender Survey provides another source of information. Participating churches receive a Church Life Profile and resources to help them consider the results and identify areas for action. The 2026 survey also provides an opportunity to look at how congregational life has changed since the last NCLS. What happened to activities introduced during the pandemic? Have online forms of participation continued? Have new small groups or community partnerships developed? Are congregations reaching different people? The NCLS can help answer those questions with data rather than assumptions. The results will also provide a broader picture of the Uniting Church at a time of organisational change, including the move towards three Presbyteries. Having current information about congregational life will be useful for planning and resourcing. The survey also captures the diversity of the Uniting Church, with participation available in several languages. For Pacifica, Korean, multicultural, rural, regional and urban congregations, taking part helps ensure their experiences are included in the national picture. JO MALONEY

NEWS

Ne wington’s

CO-EDUCATION TRANSITION OFF TO A STRONG START

Nine months into one of the most significant changes in its 160-year history, Newington College’s transition to co-education is proving a positive experience for students, families and staff. In January, 52 girls commenced Kindergarten and Year 5 across Newington’s Wyvern House and Lindfield preparatory campuses, beginning a staged transition that will see girls join the senior campus in Years 7 and 11 from 2028. The College is expected to become fully co-educational by 2033. For a school that has educated boys for generations, the arrival of its first girls was a significant moment. Nine months on, however, the change is becoming part of everyday school life. Newington’s Prep Co-education Coordinator, Meg Edwards, describes the experience as “organic”. “It’s the perfect word to describe what it feels like to have girls in our classrooms and playgrounds today, and how the process has evolved.” She says the transition has been “seamless and felt so natural”, with visitors frequently commenting that it feels as though the girls have always been part of the College. That sense of normality is perhaps one of the strongest signs that the transition is working.

educate young people and what we can do even better.” For Director of Co-education Rebecca Panagopoulos, the significance of the first day was deeply personal. Walking towards Wyvern House in January, she saw a Newington family arriving with both a boy and a girl in uniform. “I actually felt quite emotional,” she recalls. “I think because in that instance it hit me, and I thought to myself… ‘we’ve arrived, we have now come full circle, and here they are’.” Yet, she says, there was also something strikingly ordinary about the scene. “In many ways that scene was also ‘the most normal looking thing’.” The welcome from the Newington community reinforced that sense. “For our community to welcome and embrace our pioneer girls as it did on those two days in January was truly heartwarming.” For Panagopoulos, the transition reflects something deeper about the College itself.

For Deputy, Preparatory Schools and ELC “As a school we have always been Benjamin Barrington-Higgs, the change changing, adapting and improving in line has brought something else: energy. with our community’s needs.” “Great change brings great energy, and She describes it as “a very exciting time when you spend time walking around for the College and our community”. our Preps, going in and out of the classrooms as I do, you clearly see that’s The early experience suggests that the exactly what’s happened with co-ed; it’s change has not diminished the College’s brought a new energy.” identity. Instead, it has created an opportunity to consider how its traditions He says the change has also encouraged and values can be carried into a new the College to reflect on its approach to chapter. education. “Change also brings renewal and dynamism, and co-ed has really made us look at, and think about, the way we

GREAT CHANGE BRINGS GREAT ENERGY, AND WHEN YOU SPEND TIME WALKING AROUND OUR PREPS, GOING IN AND OUT OF THE CLASSROOMS AS I DO, YOU CLEARLY SEE THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT’S HAPPENED WITH CO-ED; IT’S BROUGHT A NEW ENERGY. The Christian understanding of community is not one of sameness. The Apostle Paul’s image of the body of Christ reminds us that a community is made up of different people, with different gifts and different contributions. Its strength comes not from everyone being the same, but from recognising the value of each person. The girls who arrived this year are not simply being added to an existing community. They are already influencing it through bringing new perspectives, relationships and experiences. The next stages of the journey will take place when girls join the senior campus in 2028. JO MALONEY

That is particularly significant for a school shaped by its Christian and Wesleyan heritage.

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U N I T I N G C H U R C H A D U LT F E L L O W S H I P ( U C A F )

Fellowship News IN MEMORIA M: BRIAN COWAN The NSW/ACT UCAF Committee were saddened to hear of the passing, in June, of Brian Cowan, a Committee member with his wife Betty since 2012. Brian was from Bathurst and, as a representative of Macquarie Darling Presbytery, was very active and involved in many of the Gatherings and events held. Prior to Covid-19 they would be up early to catch the train to Sydney for meetings held at 222 Pitt Street. Brian always had lots of imaginative ideas, and many came to fruition. Together they travelled to many Gatherings in their own Presbytery, including Nyngan, Mudgee, Parkes, Orange, Molong, Spring Hill and others in NSW. We will miss him. Our sympathy goes to Betty and family.

UCAF SYNOD PR AYER GATHERINGS Our monthly UCAF Synod Prayer gatherings have been well received by the Committee. In July we welcomed members of Maitland Uniting Church, with special emphasis on the prayer needs of this church community as their previous five congregations came together as one. In August we will focus on St Stephen's UC in Pitt Street, Sydney.

If you would like to share your fellowship news or have any questions, please contact Judy Hicks: judyh_rnh@hotmail.com

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HUNTER PRESBY TERY ADULT FELLOWSHIP The Hunter Presbytery Adult Fellowship Committee met in June and has decided to continue meeting together as we become the Northern Presbytery. Morisset has agreed to hold the Retired Ministry Persons lunch in October. This is always a very special time for many as they share fellowship together over lunch. Sadly, numbers are declining, but the chatter and camaraderie remain.

NORTHERN PRESBY TERY RETREAT The Northern Presbytery will hold its retreat at Yarra Holiday Park from 17th–19th September. The special guest speaker is Moderator Elect Rev Pablo Nunez, and the theme is “Open Horizons, Courage, Creativity and the Future of the Church.” This is a great opportunity to meet and share together. For more details email: iancarolyn@gmail.com

W YOMING UC FAITH COMMUNIT Y Wyoming UC Faith Community had a wonderful “Christmas in July” event. People of all ages came together for a funfilled day of creativity, laughter and fellowship. Quizzes, Christmas movies, baked damper on the outside fire pit and toasted marshmallows were all part of the day's activities.

WORLD DAY OF PR AYER The World Day of Prayer Committee NSW have given permission for the NSW/ACT UCAF Committee to hold a Zoom World Day of Prayer service in March 2027. This will give the opportunity for those unable to attend services personally, because of work commitments or distance, to take part. More details to follow.

COMMITTEE STOCK TAKE A stocktake of all the Committee's sales items has been collated by Secretary Laraine. Small cartons of items have been made up to give to members at our next face-to-face meeting, to sell in their churches as Gathering events decrease.

STA MP COMMITTEE The Stamp Committee continues its great work and appreciates your used stamp donations and stamp albums. The sale of these goes towards providing grants to special projects in your congregations.

APPRECIATION CERTIFICATES Appreciation Certificates for members of your congregations aged 80, 90 and 100, who have been active and involved, are available by contacting Secretary Laraine Jones at: iancarolyn@gmail.com

JUDY HICKS

SEASON OF

Change

There's a particular kind of stillness that settles over a garden just before spring, that quiet, uncertain pause when the old growth hasn't quite let go, but something new is already stirring beneath the surface. It's an apt image for where we find ourselves this issue. Change has a way of arriving quietly and then, all at once, reshaping everything around it. Across the pages that follow, you'll meet people living through exactly that kind of change, in ministry, in leadership, in community, and in the everyday rhythms of church life. In this edition, you will hear from a young leader unflinchingly naming what our movement has lost, and what it might yet become. You'll meet a woman who spent nearly three decades inside institutional change, offering hard-won wisdom without an ounce of nostalgia. You'll read about supervisors, lay leaders, and rural ministers holding communities together in a season the structures around them haven't quite caught up to. You'll encounter a Rabbi and a community kitchen that turned grief into an unstoppable act of care, and a reflection on prayer that reminds us: real change rarely begins in policy. It begins somewhere quieter, and closer to home. What ties these stories together isn't agreement. You'll find hope here, and grief. Confidence, and real uncertainty. Some of these voices will challenge you. Others will comfort you. That, perhaps, is the honest shape of change itself, rarely tidy, rarely resolved, but always asking something of us. As you move through this issue, we invite you not to look for a single answer to what change should look like for our church, but to sit with the range of experiences, questions, and convictions on offer. Because in the end, change was never really about arriving somewhere new. It's about who we become, together, along the way.

Stories

P16-17

Never Once Wished to Be Anywhere Else. Even on the Hardest Days

P20

A New World Needs a New Church

P18-19

Christian Leadership in Transition

P21

When the aged care system changes, dignity must remain

The Aging Elephant in P22-25 the Room, and What Put It There

It Doesn't P28-29 Change God. It Changes Me

You Don't Fight Darkness With P32-33 a Broom. You Light a Candle.

Forty years at Ashfield: Rev. Bill P34-35 Crews answering one door knock at a time

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SEASON OF

Change NEVER ONCE WISHED TO BE ANYWHERE ELSE. EVEN ON THE HARDEST DAYS

Talking to Rev. Bronwyn Murphy about change is a bit like asking a river about water. She has spent almost three decades watching the Uniting Church shift shape again and again. She talks about change the way you talk about weather you have lived through rather than read about.

he started at United Theological College in 1995 and took her first placement in Yass in early 1998, in what was then part of the Canberra Region Presbytery. She remembers it as a gorgeous four years, but also her first real lesson in ministry: the invitations came easily because she was the minister, not because she was Bronwyn. Whether people invited her back was a different matter entirely. "You might get an invitation," she says, "but you won't get invited back if you haven't got something to bring to the table."

The Church she walked into was still full of ministers, still visible in daily community life. She remembers being invited into council chambers to open monthly meetings in prayer, and a Christmas banner strung across the main street proclaiming the reason for the season. The Royal Commission had not yet landed in its fullness, and leadership was still predominately male led, even as a new, largely female cohort was already coming through the ranks behind them. Change, she says, was underway well before the institution caught up with it. "Time is like breathing – If it's not changing, it’s dying," she says. "Expecting time to stand still in the Church is a good definition of insanity."

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From Yass she moved to Narromine, splitting her time between the wonderful local congregation and resourcing something between eleven and thirteen congregations across the region as a Presbytery Resource Officer. She loved the rural parishes deeply, and she watched something else shift there too: the nature of volunteering. The generation shaped by the duty and sacrifice of the Second World War gave way to her own generation, and then to her children's, each less driven by obligation and more by whether a cause felt meaningful to them personally. She is equally frank about what the Church has had to reckon with over these years: a serious and painful loss of public trust and respect, much (but not all) of it earned through real harm done inside religious institutions and defended in the name of a faith it never actually represented. She speaks about this without flinching, and with real conviction in how the Uniting Church has chosen to respond. "I know from the inside now that our Church will not ever sweep something under the carpet to protect its own reputation," she says. "The minute you do that, you've betrayed the Gospel and forfeited your reputation.” 2012 saw her move her family to Sydney to serve as the Adult Lay Educator and rural ministry consultant. The irony of appointing someone to serve the rural church then locating them in the city was not lost on Bronwyn! Changes continued to shape the church as it reduced its commitment to lay education from a unit to a single person plus volunteers. She notes that while not all change is welcomed by all people, God continues to turn up and amazing things still happen.’ Church has never been about us and what we want.’ By 2018, when she was appointed Associate Secretary under then General Secretary Rev. Jane Fry, that instinct for honesty had become central to how she understood leadership. In the years since, she has served alongside two Moderators and two General Secretaries, providing a steady hand through no small amount of institutional upheaval, including the current shift toward a leaner Synod and stronger, better resourced Presbyteries and Congregations. She does not pretend that transition is painless. The Synod, she says, spent years helping Presbyteries that were growing weaker, not realising that the help itself was part of the

problem. "We've got to ensure they've got the resources to do the job, because they've got the capacity. They've got the ability. They just haven't got the people and the dollars." Under General Secretary Rev. Dr Peter Walker, the Church is now continuing the move toward a three Presbytery model, and Bronwyn is unambiguous that the change is necessary, even as it comes with real grief attached, including redundancies for people who have given nothing but their best. She carries that cost alongside Peter, whose leadership she trusts completely. "I'm so grateful to know that the Church is in such strong hands going forward, with leadership that knows what faith means, but also understands what service means, and knows that this is God's Church. We don't own it."

difference. I hope I will still catch up with people in Presbyteries and congregations. But I will miss the staff so much.” Her own sense of calling, she says, was never modelled on one figure so much as shaped by a handful of people. Along the way, she names her mother, whose gift was loving people without judgement, "she just loved," and Bruce Irvine, a former lay Moderator and farmer from Narromine, whose plain spoken honesty taught her what real wisdom looks like. "He was my truth teller," she says. It is a conviction that seems to hold up even under direct questioning. Asked, near the end of the conversation, whether she had any regrets after nearly three decades of ministry, she did not pause. "My whole ministry has been just an absolute privilege. I didn’t always get things right, but even on its hardest day, I've never wished to be anywhere else."

Alongside Rev. Punam Bent stepping into Bronwyn's role, the Synod has also welcomed a second Associate General Secretary Rev. Glen Spencer, focusing on mission and education, rounding out a stronger leadership I'M SO GRATEFUL TO KNOW team around Peter. It is also, Bronwyn says, part of why she chose this moment to step away. As the Presbyteries go through change, she believes Synod leadership should change with them, freed from old baggage, so the next chapter can start afresh. "Let's not bog it down with all the baggage of the past," she says. Change, in her view, is not something to survive so the Church can get back to how things were. "Change gives us an opportunity to clean house, to work out what things are constructive and what things will grow the kingdom".

As for what comes next, Bronwyn is looking forward to something she has not had much of in years: time. Time with her husband, her three daughters, her son in law, and her two granddaughters. She is picking her sewing back up, getting back into the garden, and she and her husband are planning six months on the road around Australia in a small hybrid campervan the following year, cooking and living outdoors, seeing Australia properly at last.

THAT THE CHURCH IS IN SUCH STRONG HANDS GOING FORWARD, WITH LEADERSHIP THAT KNOWS WHAT FAITH MEANS, BUT ALSO UNDERSTANDS WHAT SERVICE MEANS, AND KNOWS THAT THIS IS GOD'S CHURCH. WE DON'T OWN IT. Her closing thought is less a

farewell than an instruction, delivered in the same unflinching tone she has used throughout. Every congregation named in the New Testament is gone now, she points out. Every one of them had a season, and every one of them ended. "There isn't a church alive that isn't going to die," she says, "but there isn't a church alive that won't be reborn in some other way, somewhere." That is not a tragedy, in her view, it is simply how it has always worked. Her Advice to ageing congregations to stop trying to control what comes next, to just hold the door open, and let the next generation build the room themselves.

REV. BRONWYN MURPHY

Underneath all of it, Bronwyn keeps returning to one idea: good news. She wonders if the Church sometimes forgets that this is what it actually carries. "We're so busy trying to run an institution that perhaps we forget or overlook that we are people of good news, whose job is to make the world a better place." For her, that is the whole point of a congregation, not a building to maintain or a Sunday routine to protect, but a calling. "Congregations have a calling to live the good news, to help people find transformation in how they live their life, and to realise the difference that God can make." Ask her what she will miss most, and the answer comes without hesitation: the people. Particularly the Synod staff, whose dedication she says she did not fully appreciate until she worked alongside them daily. "They will bring me to tears with how hard they try to make a Jesus shaped

Bronwyn has spent her whole ministry talking to other people, holding space for change, and while it hasn’t been easy, it has been a privilege. She has been surrounded the whole way by people worth loving and worth serving, in a Church she dearly loves is still worth believing in. "So, I'm a lucky girl," she says. ADITEE VORA

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SEASON OF

Change

CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP IN TRANSITION Transitions reveal what we collectively believe about the church. My role of late has involved navigating transitions on many fronts, which has led me to reflect on what Christian leadership in transition really asks of us.

REV. BEN GILMOUR ACTING DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION

hen life is stable, leadership can feel like maintaining a healthy rhythm: worship planned, rosters filled, budgets tracked, needs met. But in seasons of structural change, cultural volatility, and declining participation, leadership becomes a more theological craft. The question shifts from what do we do next? to who are we, and whose are we, as we walk into God's future?

Transition tempts us toward two shadow options: an anxious preservationism that confuses faithfulness with maintaining yesterday's forms, and an anxious innovationism that confuses faithfulness with novelty or "the silver bullet that will solve everything." The Uniting Church's deeper posture is neither panic nor nostalgia — it is discernment in motion: a pilgrim people walking, listening, repenting, learning, and responding.

THE CULTUR AL SHIFT UNDERNEATH For much of the post-war era, congregations operated within a broader ecosystem of voluntary associations — clubs, unions, sporting groups, churches — where membership carried social belonging. That ecosystem has weakened. Robert Putnam's work on "social capital" documented a broader decline in civic participation. In Australia, ABS data shows a long decline in Christian affiliation over 50 years alongside rising "no religion," and NCLS data shows long-run declines in weekly attendance, steepest in 1991–2001. This is not cause to catastrophise, but to be clear-eyed about our context.

This is why Christian leadership in transition is rarely about starting from scratch. It is about honouring what is past and passing as a gift, while midwifing a new creation that shares the "DNA" of the past as the next movement in God's story. Our inherited stories, prayers, patterns, buildings, and communities are held and valued in the memory of God. The task is not to preserve everything unchanged, nor to reinvent everything as if there were no past. It is to discern what the Spirit is doing with the whole people of God — building IT IS ABOUT on accumulated wisdom while adapting HONOURING WHAT IS faithfully to changed conditions.

THE PAR ADOX OF VITALIT Y

PAST AND PASSING AS A GIFT, WHILE MIDWIFING A NEW CREATION THAT SHARES THE "DNA" OF THE PAST AS THE NEXT MOVEMENT IN GOD'S STORY

The most vibrant congregations share a paradox: their strength flows not only from gifted individual leaders, but from the cultures, practices, and systems those leaders foster — structures that outlast them. Faith-based transition language treats change as an occasion to slow down and discern next steps rather than reach for quick fixes. Transitions surface identity, trust, mission, vocation, and capacity — often all at once. They are not simply operational. They are spiritual, relational, and institutional, because the church is all three.

A UNITING CHURCH FR A ME:A PILGRIM PEOPLE , CONTINUALLY RE-FORMED In the Basis of Union, the Uniting Church understands itself as a pilgrim people — continually re-formed by Word and Spirit for faithful worship, witness, and service in changing contexts. Education, formation, property and financial stewardship, and leadership development are not peripheral; they are integral to that vocation.

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Affiliation has become a personal choice rather than an inherited duty; individualism frames meaning-making as self-authored rather than received; consumer logics shape belonging as something to sample, compare, and leave; institutional trust has thinned. Christian Smith's work argues that for many, traditional religion has become culturally "obsolete" — less plausible, less compelling within the deep culture shaping everyday imagination. We are not facing a staffing problem. We are leading through an ecosystem of social change.

In response, many churches default to an "attractional" reflex — better branding, tighter programs, sharper messaging. Our Synod's vision of a contemporary, courageous, growing church is useful. But attraction also quietly trains the church to organise around preferences rather than formation. When "church" becomes a product and belonging a customer experience, leaders end up exhausted and communities fragile, because customers leave when preferences shift. The Uniting Church instinct pushes elsewhere: the church is not a vendor of spiritual goods but a community gathered by Word and Sacrament and sent in witness and service. The question is not only what will draw people, but what will form disciples — communities capable of worship, witness, and service even when numbers are smaller and resources tighter.

REORDERING OUR LIFE IN RESPONSE TO GOD Nationally, Act2 has been a significant process of discernment, explicitly framed as reordering our life in response to God's call — refusing purely corporate logic, insisting structure is always theological. In the Synod of NSW & ACT, the move from 12 Presbyteries to 3 reshapes oversight, support, and the practical ecology of ministry across the Synod. This brings real pressures and opportunities: clustering and collaboration become more possible, though often emotionally complex; new expectations around innovation and fresh expressions can rise precisely when capacity is constrained; innovation competes with grief, as trying new things while honouring what has been faithful can feel like a tightrope; and formation and leadership development need rebuilding around a shared, not heroicindividual, ethos. Transitions like this are often misdiagnosed as technical problems — change the structure and it will work. In reality they are adaptive and spiritual challenges, requiring new learning, re-formed practices, and renewed identity.

TR ADITION AS GIFT, NOT MUSEUM Many leaders feel caught between "we must try new things or we will die" and "we must preserve what we've always done or we will lose ourselves." But the church's deepest tradition is not a set of frozen preferences — it is the living transmission of the Gospel through tested practices: Scripture, prayer, sacraments, communal discernment, justice-seeking, pastoral care, teaching. The real question is not whether we will have tradition, but which tradition will form us: the church's, or that of consumer modernity, individual self-expression, or particular cultural practices — while staying open to the Spirit's movement across all of them.

LEADING BEYOND SELF-EXPRESSION A leadership style increasingly common in late modern culture treats identity as achieved through authenticity and personal alignment — "my vision, my platform, my tribe." In a culture of high offence and quick polarisation, self-expression leadership is hard to sustain: disagreement feels like invalidation, conflict becomes intolerable, accountability feels threatening, burnout follows. Leadership grounded in gift and vocation bears more weight — it holds tensions longer, stays patient when change is slow, and remains resilient. This is the inner craft of Christian leadership: to locate the self within the Body of Christ, sharing in the life and mission of our triune God, rather than curating an audience.

WHAT RESILIENT LEADERSHIP LOOKS LIKE Several postures emerge: slow, prayerful discernment rather than panic-driven activism; building systems that outlast personalities — shared leadership, transparent decisions, training pathways; formation before strategy, since strategies collapse without discipleship depth; truth-telling with tenderness, naming decline and grief with grace rather than cynicism; shared ministry across the whole people of God rather than harder recruiting; treating tradition as a living resource rather than an obstacle; and staying tirelessly invitational — fostering communities of "come and see" alongside wider mission for the common good. Questions worth holding: What are we grieving in this transition — and what are we refusing to grieve? Where have we confused vitality with preference or performance? What practices would still sustain discipleship if our numbers halved again? What are we building that could outlast us, and what still depends on heroic individuals? In Act2's call to reorder our life, what might we need to release so we can receive anew? We are all, in different ways, in Christian leadership in transition together. REV. BEN GILMOUR

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SEASON OF

Change

A NEW WORLD NEEDS A NEW CHURCH Staring into the season of the rural and coastal church it’s hard to understand what the season is, except to know that the season has changed. Surrounding this changed season for the church, is our changed world, society and community.

ne of the many missional authors I’ve read over past years has this succinct word to say about change. “If you have a new world, you need a new church. You have a new world!”Her instinct to walk alongside rather than rescue did not arrive fully formed. It grew out of a childhood shaped by her family's involvement in short-term foster care. From a young age, Bec understood something that takes many people much longer to learn. "I had this really profound understanding that lots of people don't get a good start in life," she says, "and so the problems that people end up having are not of their own making." Where once Presbyteries related primarily to the many ministers who were in the many congregations, now it is true that in most churches, especially in the rural and coastal areas, there are few ministers. However, we have remarkable lay leaders and surrounding them is still a church that struggles to change even though the season has. This season of change within our life urges us to consider a lived practice where we don’t consume our lay leaders with meetings, where we don’t expect their ministry just to replicate the past, where our education and training reflect our genuine missional context and where we actively consider how we encourage, practically, lay leaders in all their gifts of ministry. The richest times of ministry for Saltbush are when, through Saltbush Gatherings, Lay Leader’s Retreats or simple being with congregations, we sit beside people from all across the state and both listen to their stories and enter into Christian community together. But within these times there is, without exception, the voice of weariness and burden. Perhaps those words from the Gospel of Matthew are difficult for us to imbue: “Come to me,

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all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest….”. Perhaps those words are hard for us to espouse, when the very body that embraces the Christ is often the body that imposes the burdens. Our lay leaders often find themselves as the keystone of their church community and without many ministers, they are the people relied on by the organisational demands of their Presbyteries. They are often key figures in their own local communities and towns and for some communities, seen as the Christian presence, the incarnational presence, in times of struggle and pain. They are the leaders who seek to support others in their faith journeys and when there is a human need. Our latest Saltbush Gatherings over the past couple of months have been in Lake Cargelligo and Gloucester, drawing people from far and wide, and our Saltbush Lay Leader’s Retreat at Galong, which again brought together people from literally all four corners of NSW. These were such wonderful times of both encouragement and hospitality, but also of reality, as people shared stories of life and faith and the weight of expectation, distraction and the seasons of change in which they find themselves. Embracing our lay leaders, irrespective of numbers or location and striving to explore life and faith together and the place of Christian community in 21st. Century amongst our seasons of change is fundamental to the ministry of Saltbush. We are thankful for our times together over these past months and already thankful for the times of encouragement and Christian ministry to be shared together throughout the years ahead. REV. MARK FAULKNER

The Saltbush team model a different practice of being in ministry across both a broad church and a big land, primarily with our rural and coastal Christian communities. We work across the Synod of NSW and ACT to encourage and connect in diverse ways, individuals, groups and congregations. We strive to be grounded in our relationships, our understanding of mission and our practice of ministry. The Saltbush team members are Rev. Tim Jensen, Rev. Natasha He and Rev. Mark Faulkner. You can find out about Saltbush at: saltbush.uca.org.au

SEASON OF

Change

WHEN THE AGED CARE SYSTEM CHANGES, DIGNITY MUST REMAIN Change is a part of every stage of life. It shapes who we are, challenges what we know, and often asks us to imagine something better. Australia's aged care sector is experiencing all these stages at once.

hen the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety exposed serious failures across the system, it prompted a national reckoning about how we support older Australians. The findings were confronting, but they also created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a system that better reflects the dignity, rights and respect everyone deserves as they age.

That journey is one we’re travelling today. Like any season of change, it brings uncertainty. Change can be uncomfortable and can challenge established ways of thinking and working, and yet, it is also how renewal begins. One of the most significant outcomes of this renewal was the introduction of the Aged Care Act 2024 which came into effect in 2025, replacing legislation that guided the sector for nearly three decades. Much has changed since the previous Act was introduced in 1997. Expectations have evolved, communities have changed, and Australians are living longer, more diverse lives. The new Act seeks to recognise this reality by placing older people at the centre of decisions about their care and support. At the heart of the Act is a simple but powerful idea: older people are not passive recipients of care, and are instead individuals with rights, preferences, aspirations and life experiences that deserve to be respected.

UnitingCare Australia strongly supports this vision and has long advocated for an aged care system that recognises the inherent value and worth of every person as they age. After all, respect, choice and dignity should not be considered aspirations for older people – they should be the baseline.

a nurse providing clinical care in a residential aged care setting, or an office worker managing the behind the scenes work that makes care possible, this workforce is balancing two important responsibilities at once: delivering care while adapting to a system transformation.

As agencies founded in the Uniting Church in Australia, UnitingCare providers are grounded in the belief that every person has worth, regardless of age, circumstance or vulnerability, and a rights-based approach to aged care reflects that belief.

In many ways, providers have become both navigators and guides on this aged care journey - helping older people and their families make sense of a new system while adapting to the changes themselves. Much of this work happens quietly and without complaint, but it is important to recognise that this is causing friction.

However, passing legislation is only one part of reform, and the next challenge is turning principles into everyday experiences for the people who rely on care. Across the UnitingCare network, providers are navigating what this transformation looks like in practice. This work is complex, not because aged care providers are resistant to change, but because meaningful change is rarely simple. New systems bring new reporting requirements, compliance obligations, technologies and ways of working. While these measures aim to strengthen the aged care system and improve outcomes for older people, they also require significant time and effort from a workforce already occupied with supporting older Australians each day. Whether it is a support worker helping someone remain independent at home,

This raises an important question: how do we move forward through this period of change, recognise its challenges, and preserve the human side of care? There are no simple answers. Meaningful reform is complex and change on this scale inevitably brings pressures for providers, government, workers, older people and families alike. But it also presents an opportunity to work together to build something better. The new era of aged care has begun, and the real work now lies in turning the promise of reform into meaningful outcomes for people to experience greater dignity as they age. For faithbased providers, that remains both our challenge and our calling. UNITINGCARE AUSTRALIA

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SEASON OF

Change THE AGEING ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM, AND WHAT PUT IT THERE There is something frustratingly ironic about being a “young person” and leader in our church.

n the one hand, our movement supports young leaders once they have been identified through programs that are often spearheaded by the killer team at Pulse. But on the other hand, the historic and systemic decision making at the heart of our movement has at best naively undervalued or at worst actively undermined the role, importance and inclusion of emerging generations.

This is not a reflection of the state of current youth groups, camps, and lay leadership development. Instead, try to imagine the historic trajectory of our church. Zoom out. We are aging and shrinking. If we are honest, we must stop referring to ourselves as one of the three major Christian denominations in the country. It simply is no longer true, and nobody else has been referring to us as such for a long time.

I have no doubt already provoked a few different responses for you regardless of your age. It is an uncomfortable subject to broach, because it is easy to fall into the trap of the “in or out” binary defined by being “young” anymore. I want to discard that binary rhetoric for something more holistic and productive, and I hope to prompt a conversation that isn’t bogged down by the fruitless game of generational whack-a-mole we seem locked into at the expense of the actual faith development of young people. There are irrefutable facts that must be accepted as true at scale before our movement can be prepared to move towards a future in which young people are truly given the opportunity to flourish and be an integrated part of the church’s present and future without tiptoeing around for fear of accidentally breaking a window or two.

HERE ARE SOME STATS. According to Assembly via the 2023 Act2 Project’s report In Response to God’s Call, the average age of Uniting Church attendees is 68, with 57% of attendees over the age of 70. 62% of attendees reported to be retired. While the 2013 report indicated a median weekly attendance of 35, in 2023 that number dropped to 28. According to the NCLS, 24% of Australian church attendees across all denominations are between the ages of 30 and 49. By comparison, that number in the Uniting Church is roughly 15%. Only about 8% of UCA attendees are under the age of 30.

This is how it always has been, 22 insights

We are shrinking, and we are aging. Fast. Here’s another fact. In the late 1990s, the UCA’s specified role of ordained youth worker was dissolved. I suggest this is the most important and least acknowledged moment in the short history of our movement. It has shaped the fabric of our church in ways that only accelerated through the 2020s and into the 2030s, and yet it seems to have been obscured by the hazy mists of our nostalgic yearnings for a church of the past. Many don’t even know about it. It’s like we lobotomised ourselves and don’t remember that we once had a fully functioning brain, happy with our restricted capacity. This change in ordination structure meant those already in the process of formation for the specified youth worker role were offered pathways to become either ministers of the word or deacons, and definitively removed the option for future youth work candidates to pursue ordination. No stipend, no housing, no financial incentive to follow a calling to work in ministry with a focus on young people. I am one of a huge number of people who found a way into church leadership through youth ministry. I have worked in two different congregations over eight years, and have been employed casual, permanent part-time, full-time, and eventually in a specified ministry of pastor role. I have given a significant percentage of my adult life to lay ministry outside of employment, volunteering countless hours on top of paid ministry hours. I am also one of an equally significant number of people who have come out on the other side of this and chosen not to pursue youth ministry - or indeed ordination - long term. There are an increasing number of people bucking this trend, but there is a huge number of people who probably would have made wonderful ministry agents in youth ministry, but have either stepped away temporarily or moved on entirely. I often get asked why this is. Why didn’t you pursue your calling to youth ministry? When are you going to do a period of discernment? Often in a condescending tone, usually coupled with an air of disappointment. Disappointment with whom, I often can’t tell. One of the biggest problems that our movement has to confront is the fact that it simply isn’t a viable career path. For young people in their twenties and thirties, the fact that there is no longer an option to pursue specified ordination in youth ministry means that it simply is not a career that allows for things that many in older generations take for granted, like housing stability. When it comes down to it, the lack of housing allowance and stipend associated with ordination is enough to cap many people’s time in paid lay ministry at 30. Unless you can generate a second income - whether through a partner or a second job - it is an increasingly impossible vocation for young people to pursue outside of ordination.

MORE AND MORE YOUNG PEOPLE ARE FINDING THAT THEY ARE ONLY ABLE TO COMPROMISE ON THEIR THEOLOGY FOR SO LONG BEFORE THEY ARE UNABLE TO SUSTAIN MEMBERSHIP IN A CHURCH THAT REQUIRES SUCH COMPROMISE. I just turned 28, which means that I have never known a Uniting Church with ordained specified youth ministers. Listen: I have never known a Uniting Church that values and prioritises young people. There is a gaping demographic hole in the centre of our movement that threatens to swallow the entire thing whole. The statistical trajectory shows no signs of this trend reversing. For all the broader reports of cultural swing back to spirituality and church attendance amongst young people, it isn’t reflected internally. I feel like screaming when external influences are invoked as causes - what else could it have possibly been, other than the decision to remove our Next Gen workers from our roster of ordination? How could anything else be even remotely as important? We dissolved the leadership sowing into emerging generations, and are then surprised twenty years later to discover that those generations never emerged. What did we think was going to happen? The last generation of “young people” with a connection to a time before this fundamental change are growing older and rarer. I have no memory of a time before, or a previous era to which we might return someday. For everybody roughly my age and younger, this is how it has always been, and this is how we assume it always will be. There is no connection to a historical church that has built up decades of goodwill. This is simply the way our church is, and it has not prioritised our wellbeing or that of generations already arriving after us. Let me say it again, because this is important: this is how it always has been, and this is how we assume it always will be. While this might be uncomfortable to hear, this is a very common sentiment amongst our next gen members. We look towards other movements and see a demoralising gap. We see flourishing youth and young adult ministries that our friends deeply connect to, that provide life and structure to their discipleship. But we also see an alarming trend towards fundamentalism and extremism in these churches, and desire to see a place in which progressive theology can reach a similarly wide-reaching and youthful audience. Inside this conundrum is a sparkling opportunity. The UCA has something life-giving and vibrant to offer everybody, young and

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SEASON OF

Change

This is how we assum old, but especially young people who do not accept the sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia that grows in other traditions that are more superficially attractive. Good social media presence, loud music, and a room full of actual young people go a long way, but they cannot cover a fundamental position that does not allow for the safety and ultimately salvation of all. More and more young people are finding that they are only able to compromise on their theology for so long before they are unable to sustain membership in a church that requires such compromise. It is not an opportunity to reclaim some sort of past glory, some outdated image of a church that served a generation wonderfully but is no longer culturally relevant. It is not an opportunity to make us feel better about ourselves by achieving vain self-actualisation. It is in recognising that people of all ages are fed up with wanting a Biblically robust and theologically progressive church and not finding it. The ship of the past has sailed, and none of our young people are interested in it. Our opportunity is in telling a better story about the present and the future that brings hope, life and joy. The gap between that vision and where we are today is vast. For many, this reality is the source of deep pain and grief. So many faithful disciples have gone ahead of us and paved the way for our movement to disciple people over the years, and that it has come to this is a tough pill to swallow. But I will remind you once again that it is a pill that our young people didn’t have a choice in swallowing. Thankfully, our faith is not one of rationality and logistics, and it is not a faith of census data, systemic shortcomings or budgetary restrictions. We worship a God of abundance, and a

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God who longs to see the law of Love infect all people. Young and old. So where does that leave us? When we decide to collectively divert our eyes away from a facsimile of a past church and towards the thing that God is urgently calling us towards, whatever that may or may not be, how do we decide what to do next? There is a very real version of our future that involves many churches shutting their doors permanently. Of course that is something that we should be trying to avoid at all costs (to point out the bleedingly obvious), but sometimes things must die for the new to be born in its place. I am not saying that the Uniting Church needs to die for us to be able to find a way forward. I know plenty of people who would happily stand behind that statement, but I am not one of them. I don’t think it is particularly helpful, and is usually said by people who seem to conveniently disappear when an alternative solution is actually required. I am suggesting that we have to be prepared to allow parts of our church to die and be pruned away for the overall health of the church to flourish. We are going through an intense period of collective change and transition. The 3P Project has forced a great many of us to reckon with the reality that our church is changing, and we do not know all of the outcomes . For many this is terrifying, and understandably so when jobs and vocations are involved. But remember what I said earlier? This is how it always has been, and this is how we assume it always will be

me it always will be What an incredible opportunity to discover what God has in store for us next. Because God is at work. Her pursuit of reconciliation and flourishing will continue long after denominations have come and gone. Regardless of the UCA’s involvement in the mission of God, that mission will continue. God doesn’t require us to get our collective shit together to be at work - God continues to do what God always does and always will do, and the Gospel will transform people with or without the UCA. We have an opportunity to loosen our grip on things that no longer bring life and reach out to new and vibrant things that will happen with or without us. I am more than aware of all of the preconceptions and assumptions about the attitudes of young people, and the last thing I want is for anyone to bemoan another “shouting at the clouds” think piece without any substance. Forgive my use of the young/old binary to illustrate this, but in my experience it is often the case that whenever these concerns are raised by “young” people in the presence of “old” people, they are dismissed. Perhaps because of the widening gap between the two parties in the conversation. But for whatever reason, there is a false equivalency that is consistently drawn between a criticism of the structural integrity of the Uniting Church and a disconnect with Christian faith and discipleship itself. They are not one and the same, and it is an insult to the intellectual and theological integrity of our young people to imply as such. If we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of a turf war between young and old then I am genuinely worried about our movement’s future. I do think that the ship has well and truly sailed on being able to return to whatever the UCA used to be. It simply is no longer feasible given our gutting of next generation ministry in

removing the possibility of ordination from those leaders. We are reaping the harvest of seeds sown thirty years ago. There is plenty already happening in our churches that show that there is more than enough life and energy to carry us through to the 2030s not with a limp, but with a skip. The implied continued evolution in the name of our movement should give us hope. We are not done uniting. It is not a matter of conjuring up the right policy, document or planning group. It is a matter of changing culture. It is a matter of altering the very DNA of the Uniting Church in Australia. This will not happen overnight. If this is to occur, it will only do so gradually, slowly, and at a cellular level. We cannot hope to achieve an overhaul of thirty years of cultural decline with a change in policy, much like we cannot grow a local youth group by employing a uni student part time for a year without any plan of continuing that ministry. We need to look much further ahead. We need to change our perspective, and we need to commit to the long, hard journey of aligning our DNA with that of a God who does unimaginably extravagant things. In accepting the reality of where we are today, we can let go of what we might have been. There will be grief involved in doing so, but we will then be able to finally look ahead. Not to preserve a memory of what our movement could have been, but to serve the reality of who we are today. The alternative is the thing we fear is already uncomfortably near. JONTY CORNFORD

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UNITING WORLD

FROM THE COWSHEDS TO THE COUNCIL CHAMBER For generations, a Dalit* community near the India-Pakistan border had no land, no vote, and no say over their own lives. Then one small classroom changed everything: first for the children inside it, then for the whole village. For generations, the landlords of Dogar village decided everything. They decided who worked their fields, and whether they would get any wages or just a few groceries and were told to be grateful. They decided where the town’s wastewater drained, and decided to let it run straight through the homes of the Dalit families, breeding the malaria and infections that took children and mothers before their time. They even kept alcohol flowing into the community to keep people compliant. And they decided who could go to school. Rarely the Dalit children. Their sons and daughters were sent to work in the cowsheds instead. That was simply how it was, for as long as anyone could remember. In 2009, a partnership between UnitingWorld and the Church of North India's Diocese of Amritsar opened a single study centre in Dogar. Forty children walked in that first year, one from each of the poorest families in the village. What happened next wasn't only an education story. It was the beginning of a radical redistribution of power. Diocese staff didn't stop at teaching children to read. They began training parents to

understand their rights, organise their neighbours, and do something that would once have been unthinkable: stand for election to the Panchayati (local village government). Jacob was one of them. "When I saw what education could do for children, I knew I wanted that same chance for everyone here," Jacob says. "So when we won, we opened every door we could: safe and permanent housing, ration cards for poor families, registering families for government schemes they had been shut out of for years." Mandeep, who was also elected, has watched changes happening for the women around her too. "Our Dalit brothers and sisters had never once held office. Now we have, and our women are stepping out: joining groups, working, having a say in their own households, in ways we never could before." In the 2024 Panchayati elections, in a village of some 1,500 people, Dogar's Dalit community didn't just win a seat on the council. They won every single one. The change since has been immediate: neighborhood roads built, waterlogged land cleared, concrete homes replacing shelters that used to flood, every household finally linked to the government schemes they didn’t know they were entitled to.

Dalit is a term derived from Sanskrit meaning “broken”, “oppressed” or “downtrodden” referring to people historically marginalised in Hindu caste society. The majority of Christians in India are from a Dalit background.

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Fifteen years ago, one classroom held forty children nobody else would teach. Today, that same community determines its own future. It shows what happens when a community is resourced to educate and organise itself. We want to see more change like this, more good news reaching the poor and oppressed. The work isn’t finished, and it's far from guaranteed. Rising food and fuel costs across the region are forcing families who climbed out of bonded labour to make impossible choices again: pulling children from school, sending them back to work to survive. The long and hard season of change Dogar has lived through could still turn back, without people willing to keep it moving forward. UnitingWorld supporters across the UCA made this remarkable story possible. Will you help write the next chapter? MARCUS CAMPBELL UNITING WORLD

For more information visit: www.unitingworld.org.au/ goodnews to support this life-changing mission with our partners in India.

WHAT YOU ACTUALLY GET Getting listed takes minutes, costs nothing to start, and there's no lock-in contract holding you to anything. Once you're live, your committee gets:

YOUR HALL DESERVES A SPRING CLEAN TOO

GIVING YOUR HALL NEW LIFE

Spring has a funny way of getting into everything. The days get longer, the garden bursts into life, and somewhere between the first warm afternoon and the urge to finally clean out our bottom drawer, we start thinking about fresh starts.

Every congregation knows the value of its hall: the working bees, the playgroups, the community lunches, and yes, the quiet stretches when it sits empty between bookings. Spring is a good moment to ask a simple question: is our hall doing everything it could for the community?

There's real psychology behind it. More daylight genuinely lifts our mood and energy. Spring cleaning isn't just a cliché; it's a very human response to wanting to clear space for something new. We get outside more, catch up with people we haven't seen all winter, and say yes to things we'd have put off in July. Spring is nature's way of nudging us toward a fresh start. So, here's a thought for your church hall committee: if spring is the season for shaking things up, why not let that include your hall?

For many halls, the thing standing between "empty on Tuesdays" and "fully booked" isn't the space itself; it's the admin. Answering enquiry calls, juggling a paper diary, sending invoices and chasing up payments. It adds up, and it's rarely the reason anyone joined the committee in the first place. That's the gap Vennu was built to fill. Vennu is a free platform that connects church halls with the people looking to hire them: dance schools, support groups, birthday parties, weekend workshops, the lot. It's already helping congregations across Australia turn quiet space into income, connection, and a bit of new energy. Sonia Z, who recently booked Berry Uniting Church's Main Hall through Vennu, described the whole process as simple and seamless from start to finish, and said the space was exactly what she needed.

• Real-time enquiry and booking tracking, so nothing gets lost in someone's inbox • Secure online payments, paid straight into your nominated account • A polished listing with photos and all the key details • Easy tools for managing changes and cancellations, no lengthy email chains required • Automated recurring bookings for your regulars • A live availability calendar, visible any time of day or night • A bit of digital marketing muscle to help new people find you • Friendly support, seven days a week Less time spent on admin means more time for what matters. And every booking is really a small opportunity: someone new walks through the door, meets your community, and gets a glimpse of what your congregation is all about.

A LITTLE RENEWAL GOES A LONG WAY Spring has a habit of asking what's lying dormant that could actually be thriving. For a lot of halls, that's not a metaphor; it's a free Wednesday morning that could host a playgroup, a choir practice, or a community meeting instead of an empty room. Listing your space on Vennu is a small step in the same spirit as the season itself: low effort, genuinely useful, and full of possibility.

READY TO GIVE YOUR HALL A FRESH START? This spring, do for your hall what everyone else is doing for their gardens and drawers: open the doors, and see what grows. Listing on Vennu is free, takes minutes, and just might be the start of a much busier, much more connected hall. VENNU

Visit vennu.comW.au, call 1800 549 811, or email support@vennu.net to get started.

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SEASON OF

Change

IT DOESN’T CHANGE GOD, IT CHANGES ME Richard Attenborough’s 1993 film Shadowlands is the story of the famous children’s author C.S. Lewis (known as ‘Jack’, 1898 – 1963) and his marriage to American poet Joy Gresham (nee. Davidman, 1915 1960).

oy had corresponded with Lewis (back you’ve been praying, Jack. And now God when writing letters was still the is answering your prayers.” primary means of communication!) “That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray and they had struck up an unlikely because I can’t help myself. I pray acquaintance that had grown over time. because I’m helpless. I pray because the In the first place, their marriage is one of need flows out of me all the time, waking convenience so that Joy can remain in and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It Britain. But when Joy is diagnosed with changes me.” cancer, they both come to realize that they bear a deep and abiding love for Prayer doesn’t change God. It changes one another. me.

Joy’s prospects are not good. It is a pressing and anxious time where the familiar and haunting questions around pain, suffering, death, life, and God, swirl about in a tangle of emotion and fear. Unexpectedly, following treatment, Joy goes into remission for a period; a ray of light shafting into the bleakness. And at this point there is a beautiful and telling exchange between Lewis and the college chaplain Rev. Harrington around the transformative nature of prayer: “Christopher [an atheist friend] can scoff’, said Harrington, ‘but I know how hard

Our world is changing rapidly these days. It feels like very little stands still. I recently played my 20-year-old son the ‘dial-up internet’ sound, now a relic of a bygone era. He responded the way I might have on encountering a hand cranked butter churn: ‘What’s that?’ AI now dominates our world, so much so that Pope Leo’s recent (and first) encyclical carried the subtitle: ‘On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence’. The Pope is asking significant theological and Christological questions of life and faith in the light of the emerging

phenomenon. In the face of online criticism, it was reassuring to find that, having been put through the necessary filters, it was determined the encyclical itself was not the product of AI. One outlet led with the headline: ‘Pope: a man of his word.’ Not all change is created equal of course. Observed across different domains, a vast range of nuances emerge. Sometimes it can be positive and lifeaffirming, sometimes less so, sometimes smooth and navigable, sometimes disruptive and difficult. There’s a whole publishing industry devoted to ‘change management’, awash with theories, flow charts, and prescriptive guides seeking to provide principles and approaches for effective organisational reform. We’re aware that the church more broadly and the UCA in particular are in a time of transition just now. Structures and institutions should be reformed when they are no longer fit for purpose. The church of today speaks into a very different context than in 1977 at Union. As the Pope’s encyclical suggests: ‘[The Church] recognizes today’s questions and challenges as the current setting in which to carry out her particular vocation of listening, dialogue and service, and of being responsive to everything concerning the lives of contemporary men and women.’ (Para. 19) Perhaps, though, there’s a more basic sense in which the Christian faith embraces change. Of course, much of Christian theology and practice presupposes transformation of various kinds. Repentance (metanoia) literally means ‘change of mind’. Historically, we have used the language of conversion

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to describe the process of coming to faith in Christ with Paul’s experience on the Damascus road a kind of archetype. The life of discipleship has been framed as a pilgrimage – a journey in which nothing stays static. The Judeo-Christian tradition has consistently deployed a prophetic voice in the cause of liberation and freedom. There’s yet another facet – as evidenced in Paul’s exhortation to the Romans:

and us. This is how we are (trans)formed as followers of Jesus. Through prayer, through worship, we learn to discern the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect…together. For many years the Christian Century has published essays from well known theologians on How My Mind Has Changed. In the collected edition of 2011, British feminist theologian Sarah Coakley wrote of what she calls Prayer as Crucible. She describes how:

“Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, “…a practice which I first took up as a so that you may discern what is the will young theologian in my early twenties of God—what is good and acceptable has disconcertingly changed my mind and perfect.” about almost everything – God, theology, philosophy, politics, race, and feminism.” The temptation here is to assume that what this means in the first place is Coakley is here describing a something like the acquiring of more transformative phenomenon of faith knowledge about God. Transformation wrought through the crucible of prayer. comes through knowing more. I think, A crucible is a testing place, a refining though, Paul is speaking from a prior, place, sometimes a painful place, but deeper horizon that has something more where new settlements may emerge. integrated and confessional in view. Just While Coakley focuses especially on before these words he writes: contemplative prayer, silence, and stillness, perhaps each of us has our “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and own ‘crucible of prayer’. Perhaps we each sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to have our own place and practice before present your bodies as a living sacrifice, God where we might be transformed. For holy and acceptable to God, which is all the talk of change in the church and your reasonable act of worship.” beyond – much of which is important and necessary – change that leads to The renewing of our minds is set within deeper participation in Christ begins in a context of worship, of the presentation the quiet recesses of a thousand hearts, of our bodies (and so our whole lives) at bedsides each night before sleep, in as living sacrifices to God, and as a holy small groups before study and sharing, people. In and of itself this statement in services of divine worship across presupposes community, relationship, our church, at the forefront of protests trust – in God first and foremost, and for justice, and in the ordinary ways of with each other. It may not be stretching ordinary Christians day by day: where our things too far to summarize this as need flows out endlessly, the desire for fundamentally a context of prayer – the relationship, where we’re helpless and embodied praxis of acceding to God. in need. Being transformed (changed) by the renewing of our minds flows from the It doesn’t change God. It changes me. confessional, communal, Christ-centred REV. DR MICHAEL EARL patterns of prayer and worship – it doesn’t change God, it changes me…

THROUGH PRAYER, THROUGH WORSHIP, WE LEARN TO DISCERN THE WILL OF GOD – WHAT IS GOOD AND ACCEPTABLE AND PERFECT…TOGETHER.

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SO YOU’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT BECOMING A SUPERVISOR? For more information visit: nswact.uca.org.au to learn about: • What is Professional Supervision? • Growing a New Generation of Supervisors • Professional Supervision resources 8th October Information Session

Supervision is a requirement for everyone in ministry within the Uniting Church, Ministers of the Word, Deacons, Pastors, and Pastoral practitioners.

t’s time set aside regularly with a professionally trained person to reflect on your ministry. But for some, supervision raises a further question: could this be something I offer to others?

DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES?

If you’re a good listener, able to step back and reflect on your own ministry practice, you should consider becoming a supervisor. There are many challenges in ministry, like conflict within a congregation, or the demands and impact of pastoral issues on the person providing them. Supervision gives people a place to bring these things, work through them, and decide what to do next. Anyone seriously considering training would need at least five years in ministry, along with regular experience being supervised themselves. If you’ve felt the benefit of supervision firsthand, if you have empathy, good listening skills, and a heart for accompanying others, this may be worth exploring. If you have a heart to offer others what has been offered to you, this may be something God is calling you to do. That’s exactly how I came into this work nearly 20 years ago; others saw gifts in me I hadn’t fully recognised myself, and encouraged me to train. I’ve now worked in this space for 16 years, alongside part-time ministry placements, and it’s been a genuine privilege. HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM MENTORING?

If you’ve mentored someone in ministry, supervision may feel like a natural next step, but it works differently. Mentoring is a more equal, experience-sharing relationship, where there is sharing from one to the other, from the more senior and experienced person to the one who is training or new to a role or ministry. Supervision is different. The supervisor focuses on what you bring, not sharing from their own experience but enabling you to reflect on your own ministry experience, and helping you find your own answers to the challenges you face.

JOIN THE INFOR M ATION SESSION

If you’re curious, I’d warmly invite you to a Zoom information session on 8 October (scan QR code below). You’ll hear about the four subjects that make up the Graduate Certificate in Professional Supervision (Pastoral), offered through UTC and Charles Sturt University, along with practical guidance on how to apply through the CSU portal. There’s also good news on cost: UME Scholarship funding is currently available, refunding 50% of course fees per subject on successful completion, an initiative introduced around four years ago to make the course more accessible. With four subjects, ideally spread over two years at one subject per semester, this allows the learning and cost to be spread out gradually, rather than all at once. The course runs in Extensives, three two-day sessions over three months per subject, ideally spread across two years. Many who’ve trained in the past three years say the listening, reflective, and ethical skills they gained made them better ministry practitioners overall, not just supervisors. If you’re unsure whether you’re “qualified enough,” come along anyway. Ask questions. This fits well within your 14 days of annual study leave as part of your ongoing ministry development. A G ROWING NEED

This programme also trains people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, addressing a real shortage of supervisors who understand the cultural nuances many in ministry navigate. If you know someone who’d make a good supervisor but hasn’t considered it, tap them on the shoulder. Encourage them. Well-trained supervisors help the whole church stay ethically strong, reflective, and faithful, strengthening not just ministry, but the communities and society we serve. This helps us maintain the quality of our ministries, our faithfulness to the Gospel, and our kingdom values, keeping us ethically strong and well-equipped as holistic practitioners. REV. JAN REEVE

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United Theological College OPEN NIGHT

7 October 2026 5.30pm-7pm

United Theological College 16 Masons Drive, North Parramatta

UTC Open Night Whether you’re exploring a call to ministry, looking to deepen your faith, or considering further theological study, you are warmly invited to the United Theological College Open Night to explore your study options in more depth.

Program 5:30pm

Refreshments / Informal Meet & Greet faculty

6 - 6:30pm

Information Session (Chapel)

6:30 - 7pm

Sign Me Up

Who is it for?

Those in a Period of Discernment, Pastors, intending Ministers of the Word or Deacons or anyone interested in exploring tertiary education in theology and biblical studies and deepening your faith.

tinyurl.com/ Open-Night

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Charles Sturt University is an Australian University, TEQSA Provider Identification: PRV12018. Charles Sturt University CRICOS Provider 00005F

SEASON OF

Change

YOU DON’T FIGHT DARKNESS WITH A BROOM. YOU LIGHT A CANDLE. Change rarely announces itself. Sometimes it begins with a single act of care and grows, over twenty years, into something far larger than anyone imagined. This is that story.

hen the Bill Crews Foundation’s kitchen in Ashfield went offline for renovations, thousands of Sydney’s most vulnerable people still needed to eat. A Jewish community kitchen in Bondi made sure they did. Every single day. This is the story of how that kitchen came to be, and why it refuses to stop.

Laya Slavin was a hairdresser. She had been doing the work for years, and she was good at it, but she wanted to do something more directly impactful. She was considering a return to teaching, or nursing, and had decided to hang up her tools. Then a client came in who changed her mind, though not in the way she expected. The client was not there for a regular appointment. She was going through chemotherapy and needed a wig. They say every hairdresser is also a therapist, and sitting in that chair, the woman began to talk. About her diagnosis. About the fear. About the particular weight of being unwell and still being expected to hold everything together. Laya listened, and by the end of the appointment she had made a decision. As her husband Rabbi Dovid Slavin puts it: “She realised, I can’t cure her. I’m not a doctor. I’m not a financial institution. But what I can and will do is give her a head of hair that’ll give her the courage to keep the fight going.” Laya let go of all her other clients and devoted herself entirely to women in treatment. One theme kept surfacing in their conversations: dinner. Not in an abstract sense, but in the very specific sense of having to get in the car, find a park, walk the aisles, decide what to cook, and come home and make it. For a mother whose body is fighting for its life, that ordinary sequence of tasks can feel completely impossible. Some of these women were going home and pulling the blanket over their heads.

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So Laya started sending meals home with them. “I have three dinners,” she would say. “I cooked, my husband ordered, we have leftovers.” Then friends started coming to help cook. Then the meals grew bigger than the wigs. Dovid borrowed a commercial kitchen and assembled eighteen volunteers to cook together for a day. Three things struck him: the sheer quantity of food that emerges when people cook together, the way the work becomes a celebration rather than a chore, and the look on his wife’s face. “I had never seen Laya happier,” he said. That evening, still cleaning up after everyone else had gone home, Laya appeared beside him. “Wow,” she said. “When are we doing this again?” His answer came immediately: if they did this again, they would build a kitchen that anyone could use every single day. The Slavins understood they needed something permanent, and that the need they were responding to was far larger than the circle of women Laya had been caring for. Rabbi Slavin had a vision: to transform the basement of the Yeshiva Centre in Bondi into a largescale industrial kitchen open to anyone in the community. A team of businesses, tradespeople and volunteers came together to make it happen. Our Big Kitchen opened in February 2005, and it has not closed since. Twenty years on, Our Big Kitchen supports more than 35 charities across Sydney, distributing hundreds of thousands of meals each year. Among those relationships, one stands out for Rabbi Slavin with particular warmth: the partnership with the Bill Crews Foundation, and the Loaves and Fishes free restaurant in Ashfield. Rev. Bill Crews has spent decades showing up for the people Sydney would rather not see. The homeless. The addicted. The ones who have fallen

through every available gap. When the Ashfield kitchen recently underwent renovations and temporarily closed, Our Big Kitchen stepped in without hesitation, sending 1,000 meals a day to keep Loaves and Fishes running. Not as a favour. As a matter of course. “Bill Crews is an incredible Australian who has championed the needs of underprivileged people who the rest of society has little time for,” Rabbi Slavin said. “We and this country are better for it.” For him, the partnership is not complicated. A Jewish community kitchen and a Christian-founded organisation, both in the business of feeding people who need feeding. One table. Every tradition welcome. It is exactly the kind of relationship the Uniting Church recognises and values: not an interfaith gesture, not a formal agreement, but two communities who share the same understanding of what it means to be responsible for one another. The call to feed the hungry, to show up for the vulnerable, to do so without fanfare, belongs to no single tradition. It never has. On 14 December 2025, a terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach killed fifteen people and injured forty more. It happened at an event the Slavins had attended every year for thirty years without exception. This year, for the first time, they were overseas.

Their eldest son was there. Their daughter, her husband, and their two young grandchildren were there. From the other side of the world, Rabbi Slavin sat with his phone and tried to reach his children while hundreds of calls poured in simultaneously from people who feared the worst. He typed a single message and copy-pasted it over and over: “The Slavin family are accounted for. Please pray.” He sent it, he estimates, roughly a thousand times.

questions and empowering ones. After something like this, the mind reaches naturally for the paralyzing kind: Why did this happen? What is the world coming to? Who could do this to us? They are legitimate questions, he said. But they lead nowhere. They immobilise. The empowering questions are different. What is needed of me right now? How do we support the families who have lost someone? How do we let our community know we are here and we are staying? Those were the questions the Slavins were asking from the very first day. “I thank heavens those are the questions we were asking,” he said.

His family were physically unharmed. But the pain of those who were not is something he carries permanently. “This was never my story growing up,” he said quietly. “It was always my parents’ story, my grandparents’ story. And now W H AT I T M E A N S TO B E it is mine. And my children’s. RESPONSIBLE And my grandchildren’s.”

His challenge to the wider Australian community is honest and searching. Distancing yourself from violence is only step one, he FOR ONE A N OT H ER If the attack was intended to said. The harder question is: cause the Jewish community who are we? Not who we are to retreat, it produced exactly not. Who we are. “A society is the opposite. Our Big Kitchen did judged not by how it treats those not pause. It multiplied, immediately and who are doing well, but by how it treats without deliberation, feeding overseas its most vulnerable. Children. The elderly. visitors who had flown in to lay wreaths, The poor. The disenfranchised.” That, he emergency workers stretched far beyond said, is the real message of religion. Any their limits, and a community held in religion. shock. It is also, meal by meal, what Our Big When asked what kept him and his Kitchen has been answering for twenty wife going, Rabbi Slavin thought for a years. Laya, he says with unmistakable moment before answering. There is a pride, is still not content to stop. difference, he said, between paralyzing “You don’t fight darkness with a broom,” Rabbi Slavin said. “You don’t sweep it away. You light a candle. And when you light a candle, the darkness disappears.” ADITEE VORA

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SEASON OF

Change

FORTY YEARS AT ASHFIELD: REV. BILL CREWS ANSWERING ONE DOOR KNOCK AT A TIME When Rev. Bill Crews arrived at Ashfield Uniting Church 40 years ago, he did not arrive with a plan for what the next four decades would become. Instead, people began knocking on the door.

ne night, a couple arrived at the church in the middle of the night. Ashfield sat close to the main route between Sydney and Melbourne, and people travelling through Sydney would sometimes stop at the church looking for help. Bill assumed they needed money.

They said, ‘Can we come inside?’ And I said yes,” he recalls. Once inside, they asked the question that had brought them there: would he marry them? The man’s wife had died. The woman’s husband had disappeared, but there was no proof of his death, and they had been unable to marry in the Catholic Church. Bill said yes. “She just burst into tears,” he says.

They sat on the grass outside the church while she told him her story. Bill also wanted to understand what was happening beyond the church grounds. He spent nights accompanying ambulance crews and visited Central Railway Station, then a gathering place for young people experiencing homelessness.

For Bill, the encounter is one of many that mark 40 years of ministry at Ashfield: people arriving with grief, addiction, homelessness, questions, faith and sometimes simply nowhere else to go.

“So I just slept them all in the church,” Bill says.

Bill came to Ashfield with experience in ministry, including time at Sydney’s Wayside Chapel, but says becoming responsible for a congregation was different.

Volunteers began helping. At one stage, Bill says, the ministry was connected with 12 houses providing accommodation for people experiencing homelessness.

“When I came here, I’d get hit by people with all different needs,” he says.

The work eventually became the Exodus Foundation, with the foundation stone for the building behind the church laid in September 1993.

In those early years, he often found himself asking what his mentor, Rev. Ted Noffs, founder of the Wayside Chapel, would have done. “I used to think, ‘What would Ted do in this situation?’” Ashfield quickly developed its own ministry, shaped by the people who arrived. A woman named Barbara once knocked on Bill’s door after beginning Alcoholics Anonymous. She had reached the

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fourth step – making a “fearless moral inventory” – and had decided Bill was the person she wanted to talk to.

Police began bringing young people to Ashfield, but there was no established homelessness service waiting for them.

The relationship between the congregation and the young people could take unexpected forms. Older women brought cucumber sandwiches for those staying at the church, while some of the young people helped paint the church as a way of thanking the congregation. Over time, the work expanded into food services, homelessness support and education. Education remains part of the ministry today, with literacy programs in

Not all the changes at Ashfield can be measured through programs or services, many are captured in moments Bill still remembers decades later. Sydney and Darwin supporting children with reading and learning. Bill came to the Uniting Church after growing up Catholic and says the denomination gave him room to explore questions about faith, spirituality and life beyond death. At theological college, he found teachers prepared to engage difficult questions rather than close them down. He also found a denomination capable of holding different expressions of faith alongside one another. “That’s the Uniting Church,” he says. “And I love that.” That openness became important to the ministry that developed at Ashfield. The people arriving at the church did not always fit conventional ideas about church membership or religious life. Ministry often began with what was happening in front of him rather than an established program. That approach sometimes brought Bill into conflict with church structures as the work expanded.

One involves Shirley Lomas, an Aboriginal woman connected with the church whose story as a member of the Stolen Generations was to appear in The Sydney Morning Herald. The Sunday before publication, Lomas stood before the congregation and asked them to pray for her. The church gave her a flower and, the following day, the newspaper carried a photograph of her holding it. Telling her story publicly took a toll. The next Sunday she returned to Ashfield with friends. During Communion, her distress surfaced, and Bill remembers the sound of her grief filling the church. After the service, the congregation did not stay for its usual coffee. “Everyone went home,” he says. There was nothing simple to say. “They’re experiences you treasure,” he says. They have also carried a cost.

“There were times it was awful,” he says.

After 40 years, Bill is direct about an aspect of ministry that anniversary celebrations can overlook: it can be lonely.

But he also remembers those within the Church who backed the work.

“The big thing I want to get across is the loneliness of doing this,” he says.

“I had a lot of supporters as well.”

People regularly tell him they would like to do the kind of work he has done. His For Bill, the tension raised an ongoing response is that public ministry begins question about how institutions respond with something less visible. when ministry develops in ways their structures did not anticipate. He remains “The first thing you’ve got to do is face wary of allowing regulation to become your own internal loneliness.” a substitute for judgement, particularly Listening repeatedly to people’s when an emphasis on avoiding risk experiences of homelessness, addiction, prevents people from responding to need.

family breakdown, grief and trauma leaves its mark. “You carry it with you,” Bill says. For Bill, psychotherapy has been one way of dealing with that weight. He says he has undertaken it weekly for 40 years, helping him examine his own responses rather than assuming that caring for others makes a minister immune from what they hear and witness. His ministry also affected his family. The demands of public work could compete with life at home. He remembers one birthday when a church event clashed with a family celebration. Bill went to the church commitment while his family continued their party at home, placing a teddy bear in his chair. “That’s the other side of this,” he says. His marriage later ended, and Bill says rebuilding family relationships took years. The experience changed his understanding of ministry and of himself. The Ashfield of 2026 is not the Ashfield to which Bill was called four decades ago. The community has changed, the Church has changed and the services operating from the site have changed. Bill has changed too. Perhaps that is one of Ashfield’s enduring lessons is that churches change not only through strategies, structures or programs, but through the people they make room for. And sometimes, that change begins with a knock on the door. JO MALONEY

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SEASON OF

Change

PULSE

ARE WE READY FOR GEN ALPHA? Have you only just wrapped your head around Millennials and their avocado toast? Or Gen Z and their hyper connectedness? Cue the next generation on the conveyor belt of pointing out what makes us different – Generation Alpha.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term coined for children born since 2010, they have been officially classified and with the youngest Gen Z’s turning 17 and 18, Gen Alpha makes up most of today’s kids and teenagers. As an unrelated aside, I feel a little sorry for the meme culture likely to surround Gen Beta in a few years’ time… but that’s not what we’re here to talk about today! Last week I attended the International Association for the Studies of Youth Ministry conference in Sydney. I was incredibly blessed to sit at the feet of many wonderful researchers who are paving the way to understanding and better practice for those who work with young people in the church. The papers we read and heard are not yet ready for publication or public response, however, I want to share a thought I had while engaging with some of the sessions. What we’re really looking for and hoping for out of life, remains largely the same, regardless of generation or life stage. How we think about that and how we seek it may change from generation to generation, but at our core we are far more similar than we are different. Part of my job with the Uniting Church Synod of NSW and ACT’s Pulse Team in the past three years has been to lead congregations through Growing Young consultations. The key things that Fuller Theological Seminary identify as needs in the lives of teenagers and young adults that become the basis of the whole consultation is what forms their identity, belonging, and purpose.

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What I have found myself saying all the time in Growing Young consultations is that ultimately, we are all either striving towards or striving to maintain those three things in our lives. Who we are, who our people are, and why we are here, are in many ways, the big questions not just for young people, but for humankind. Those of us old enough to have had all three of those things feel fairly settled at once, know what a delight it is to live a life in which those questions have been answered. And those of us who have done any journeying at all in life post-adolescence, know they aren’t set in stone forever and our lives are marked by ongoing disruptions to one or more of those things at different points in that journey. I am greatly encouraged by this, because it ultimately means that anyone with a genuine desire to engage meaningfully with young people, already has the core life experience required to get started. You know deep in your soul how it feels to face those three questions and not know the answer. While it is true we largely hold that in common across the generations, it is also true that we are formed and grow up in vastly different worlds from each other. The oldest Gen Alpha’s were still in primary school throughout COVID, meaning they were formed as children in their homes, with their families, largely separated from school and extracurricular socialisation.

PULSE

THEY ARE BEING FORMED IN A WORLD VASTLY DIFFERENT TO THE ONE WE GREW UP IN, BUT JUST LIKE US, THEY ARE LOOKING FOR IDENTITY, BELONGING, AND PURPOSE IN AN EVERCHANGING WORLD.

Politically, they are the first generation to grow up in a world where the performative antics and polarising rhetoric of Trump and his global contemporaries is just – what politics is. Technologically, they are the first generation to graduate school in a world where AI is a fact of life, and they have never known a world without the touch screen. Professionally they will graduate from various institutions into a world that is already experiencing many of the predicted disruptions AI and robotics promises. So, considering that, what are Gen Alpha themselves telling us matters to them, particularly when it comes to faith? The Fuller Youth Institute recently completed a study with 3,000 Gen Alpha’s. Here are 4 of their findings: • Family Matters – todays teenagers self-report that family is the biggest influence in their lives. They are more likely to trust family than friends in matters of identity formation and belonging, and significantly more likely to trust family than religious leaders in matters pertaining to faith development.

• Mentoring Matters – they consistently say they crave nonjudgmental relationships with adults who listen and follow through. • Spirituality is Hybrid – while the church struggles with whether to have a strong presence in the digital world, they are already learning spirituality from it. They claim both church community AND digital space significantly form their religious and spiritual identity. So, are we ready for Gen Alpha? They are being formed in a world vastly different to the one we grew up in, but just like us, they are looking for identity, belonging, and purpose in an ever-changing world. And they are looking for genuine and nonjudgmental adults who care about them. The best advice is not to focus on the things that divide, and to remember that you know exactly what it feels like to not have all the answers and to be an empathetic ear and consistent presence for the young people in your midst. DAVID TOOGOOD

• Home Matters – they are most comfortable, feel they most belong, find purpose, and explore faith at home. While it is true home is not safe for many, those who have a safe home prefer it over their friend groups and third spaces.

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TOP END IMMERSION TRIP

20th - 29th

NOVEMBER

2026

From November 20-29, a small group of young adults from the UCA in NSWACT will travel to the Top End (Darwin) to immerse in culture, listen, and learn alongside our First Nations siblings. Our journey will begin at Nungalinya - a combined churches training college for Indigenous Australians - where we will learn from Faculty and UCA leaders from the Northern Regional Council of Congress. In the second half of our time we will leave Nungalinya to cross into Kakadu, seeing Cahills Crossing and Arnhem land, visiting with the community in Jabiru, and ending our time in Litchfield National Park.

This isn’t a holiday, and it isn’t a mission trip in the traditional sense. It’s an immersion in place, relationship and in shared learning (and maybe some much needed unlearning along the way).

Requirements:

Cost:

Deposit:

In order to apply for the trip you must be a young leader, or young emerging leader (18-30) within your congregation or the broader Uniting Church. You must also submit a reference letter from a UCA representative (Your Minister/Pastor, Church Council Chair, member of Presbytery or other appropriate person).

$1750

$500

(includes flights, accommodation, transport, food, etc.)

upon acceptance of application

Fundraising:

Who:

We actively encourage fundraising in your Church / Presbytery / broader community to come on this trip. If your application is accepted, you will be provided with an online fundraising portal to simplify this process.

Young leaders (18-30 years old) in the UCA Synod of NSWACT.

Note: Places are limited and by application.

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We believe this is a powerful discipleship opportunity for our young people as they engage with Christianity and Spirituality as taught and understood by our First Nation siblings, and are challenged to think seriously about their part in Christ’s call towards reconciliation.

Find Out More

U N I T I N G C R E AT I V E

BELONGING, AND THE

SACRED WORK OF SEEING ONE ANOTHER We often begin as strangers, carrying our stories quietly within us. We arrive with hopes and uncertainties, songs half-written, questions still unfolding, and the weight of all that life has been asking of us. Yet something remarkable happens when people choose to stay present to one another. Through listening, shared meals, stories, and music, the distance between us begins to soften. We unfold. During the Creative Retreat held on 31st July at Hunter Valley, David Gungor shared a tradition from his own community: whenever someone reaches that moment of feeling truly at home, they stand up and announce, “I’ve arrived!” It’s playful, but profound too, speaking to the moment we realise we no longer need to perform, prove ourselves, or hide the unfinished parts of who we are. Before long, we’d taken up the same practice. As laughter deepened and stories became more honest, someone would call out, “I’ve arrived!” The words became a celebration of belonging. This retreat was built around the theme of Bond, the ties that hold us, sustain us, and create the conditions in which beauty can emerge. As we listened to one another’s stories, dreams, and longings, we became more than individual artists, songwriters, ministers, and dreamers. We became a creative community, discovering that what holds us is also what creates us. We arrived as fellow travellers. We left as witnesses to one another’s becoming.

REFLECTION: WILL SM ALL (SPIRITUAL MISFITS & MEE TING GROUND)

For me, the retreat weekend was like a deep and gentle inhale. In the ancient world, “breath” and “spirit” were the same word, and it feels true to say I breathed spirit deeply. My goal wasn’t to produce creative work, but to “fill the well,” to borrow language from writer Julia Cameron. And fill it I did. Listening to vulnerable stories from a diverse bunch of “scallywags,” feasting together at an enormous table, and stepping outside the routines of my full-to-thebrim life, this was rich and nourishing. I was reminded that the face of God can be seen everywhere, if we have eyes to see. The work of songwriters, poets and artists in the Church is to see, and then to share. On Sunday morning I wandered out, coffee in hand, to the fire pit where we’d sat beneath stars the night before. The coals were still warm. I know the coals of my own creativity will remain warm too, in the afterglow of this time.

REFLECTION: RE V. KE VIN C ROUSE (NEW CIT Y M AITL AND)

After being invited to the retreat, I found myself wondering whether I truly belonged. It had been some time since I’d written songs, let alone picked up my guitar, and I questioned whether I still had a place in a creative community. A recurring theme throughout, particularly in our sessions with Kym Dixon, was belonging. People shared their stories with courage and vulnerability, and those stories were received with gentleness and grace. It was a gift to reflect together and receive wisdom from Tash Holmes, Will Small, Kym Dixon, David Gungor, John Arndt, Jon Reichardt, and every person who attended. The retreat gave me permission to return to writing without the pressure to produce, perform or prove myself. During the weekend I drafted a poem, Dead Cherry Tree, which I hope to fine-tune in the coming weeks, part of my ongoing healing and formation journey. Before and after the retreat, I found myself picking up my guitar again and relearning old songs. A quiet but significant sign that something has been rekindled. LOOKING AHEAD

As we step back into daily life, we carry the warmth of these firelit conversations and the sacred trust built this weekend. The retreat may have ended, but the song is far from over. In the coming weeks, we’ll nurture these connections through upcoming songwriting sessions and shared creative spaces. May the coals of your creativity stay burning bright, and may you continue to create, rest, and belong right where you are. NATASHA HOLMES

UNITING MISSION & EDUC ATION MISSION C ATALYST - UNITING CRE ATIVE

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LECTIONARY REFLECTIONS

September: The Kingdom’s Different Math Prepared by Dr. Matthew Anslow

September’s readings summon a community learning to reckon with each other honestly: sin confronted so the lost can be found, debts forgiven past all reasonable limit, wages paid by need rather than merit, and lives measured not by profession but by fruit. SEPT 6 – PENTECOST 15

Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 149; Romans 13:814; Matthew 18:15-20

Throughout Matthew 18, Jesus teaches on the nature of the community of faith. In 18:15–20 he says that if your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault in private; if they listen, you’ve regained them. What if the offender doesn’t listen? Jesus instructs successive confrontations until, if the person refuses to listen even to the correction of the whole assembly, they should be treated as a “gentile or tax collector.” At first, this seems rather harsh. But the placement of Jesus’ teaching immediately after the parable of the lost sheep suggests that, just maybe, this offender is a lost sheep. Perhaps Jesus’ teaching here acts as an illustration of how God finds lost sheep. This would mean the emphasis here is on reconciliation, not exclusion. Treating someone as a gentile or tax collector doesn’t mean hating them. Remember, Jesus loves gentiles and tax collectors, just as God loves the lost sheep. Maybe the lost sheep, the one who has wandered from the fold, is meant to find their way back through the loving, truthful, reconciling work of the community of faith. SEPT 13 – PENTECOST 16

Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114 Or Exodus 15:1b-11, 20-21; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

In Matthew 18:21-35, Peter asks Jesus how often to forgive. “As many as seven times?” His smugness radiates off the page. Jesus retorts that forgiveness ought to be repeated seventy-seven times. He both challenges Peter’s pride and commands limitless forgiveness. Jesus then tells a parable about a slave indebted to a king by sixty million days’ wages. Having been forgiven this unimaginable debt, he comes upon another slave who owes him three months’ wages. Rather than echo the king’s mercy, the first slave has

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the second thrown in debtor’s prison. The king condemns his wickedness. The point is obvious: our willingness to forgive ought to reflect God’s inconceivably generous forgiveness. Forgiveness is a kind of “letting go” of debt or offence or wrongdoing. It’s difficult, as we know from experience. And wisdom is required so forgiveness doesn’t enable injustice. But without forgiveness, we resign ourselves to a never-ending onslaught of resentments and enmities. Indeed, forgiveness is a power that makes relationships and societies possible. SEPT 20 – PENTECOST 17

Exodus 16:2-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16

God’s justice isn’t fair. In Matthew 20:1–16, Jesus tells of a landowner seeking labourers. He hires some at 6:00am but, needing more, he returns to the marketplace three hours later. Again, he hires more six hours later, then nine hours later, and even eleven hours later. Why are there still labourers available at 5:00pm? Why weren’t they hired? Maybe they’re lazy. But maybe they’re undesirable labourers: old or sick or disabled. Yet the landowner hires them, promising to pay “whatever is dikaios,” a word meaning “righteous,” “equitable,” or “just.” When time for payment arrives, we can imagine the first labourers’ excitement when they see a full day’s pay given to those who worked only an hour. “What will we get?” To their dismay, they also receive a day’s pay. Regardless of the amount worked, they all receive the same, what they need for the day. This is what the kingdom is like (20:1). Apparently God’s economy works differently to human economies. Everybody is given what they need, no more, no less, regardless of how much they’ve contributed. God’s justice isn’t fair.

SEPT 27 – PENTECOST 18

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32

In Matthew 21:23–32, Jesus tells of two sons asked to work their father’s vineyard. The first refuses but eventually does the work. The second agrees but doesn’t follow through. It’s the fruit of our lives that reveals the measure of a person. You can seem impressive, but if your actions don’t bear fruit, it’s all playacting. In Matthew, the chief priests and elders use the right words but miss the signs of God’s presence among them. In contrast, the tax collectors and prostitutes seem disappointing but discern God in their midst. They believe, bearing the fruit of the kingdom. It’s not impressive appearances but faithfulness that fulfils the will of God. This is the way of Christ. He didn’t come in some impressive guise, but rather in the form of a slave (Philippians 2). Though in the form of God, he assumed our likeness, humbling himself to the point of death on a cross. Because of his faithfulness, God exalted him (Phil 2:9). This is our pattern to follow (Phil 2:5).

LECTIONARY REFLECTIONS

October: Belonging to God Alone Prepared by Dr. Matthew Anslow

October’s readings press disciples toward undivided allegiance: a sky still preaching humility despite our neglect, a welcome that demands real change, a coin that exposes divided loyalties, and a love commanded not as rule but as the shape of an entire life. OCT 4 – PENTECOST 19

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20; Psalm 19; Philippians 3:4b-14; Matthew 21:33-46

There’s something about the sky that transports us somewhere transcendent. Whether it’s a clear blue expanse, a green-tinged sign of impending deluge, a masterpiece made of cirrus and cumulus, an achingly beautiful dawn sea of orange and pink, or the wonder of gazing at thousands of stars knowing there are billions more our naked eyes cannot perceive. Psalm 19 tells us that “the heavens declare the glory of God.” Though the heavens have no speech, their voice goes out to all the world (19:2–4). Perhaps today that voice contains anguish. Greenhouse gases, air pollution, acid rain, and artificial light—we’ve tainted the sky, that great sign of the glory of God, like mindless graffiti on a prized artwork. And yet, the sky is a constant billboard counselling us in humility. It reminds us to see ourselves as part of an unimaginably expansive creation, the work of a Creator who fashions quarks and blackholes from nothing. It calls us to contemplate the God of the heavens, who calls us to be reconciled and united to Godself, each other, and all creation. OCT 11 – PENTECOST 20

Exodus 32:1-14; Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14

Matthew 22:1–14 is a challenging passage. A king gives a wedding banquet for his son but those invited refuse to come. Many abuse and kill the slaves sent to bring them. The king destroys the murderers and their city. The slaves are then told to invite everyone they find in the streets. The wedding hall is filled. But the king notices a man dressed inappropriately. He’s bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness where there’s “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

As I said, challenging. Here Jesus’ inclusivity seems to give way to a fireand-brimstone kind of exclusion. However we understand “outer darkness”—literally or metaphorically; as signalling eternal damnation, a temporary purification, or something else—we should contemplate Jesus’ warning. This parable suggests inclusion isn’t enough. Jesus doesn’t merely include people without requiring a change in them. Rather, Jesus welcomes people. And that welcome requires repentance, a change of mind and life. Coming into the wedding banquet demands transformation—a transformation that’s good news since it makes us more like Christ.

But doesn’t Psalm 24:1 say that “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it”? If everything belongs to God, then what’s left for Caesar? Certainly not the loyalty of human beings… OCT 25 – PENTECOST 22

Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

The Law of Moses contains 613 commandments. Part of interpreting the Law would have been to judge the relative importance of different legal prescriptions. One can’t treat all commandments equally, after all. It was natural, then, to ask “Which commandment is the greatest?”

OCT 18 – PENTECOST 21

This was a lively debate in Jesus’ time. In Matthew 22:34–46, it arises as a test orchestrated by the Pharisees.

In Matthew 22:15–22, the Pharisees attempt to entrap Jesus, asking whether it’s lawful to pay taxes to Caesar.

Jesus’ two-fold answer reverberates through history: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself (Matthew 22:37–39).

2Exodus 33:12-23; Psalm 99; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

Taxation was no minor matter. Taxes were exacted to line elite pockets. They were high, crushing the poor and, unlike in Australia, not used to administer social services. Refusal to pay Roman taxes was viewed as rebellion. Sometimes taxation sparked peasant uprisings. If Jesus answered that paying taxes was lawful, he’d be accused of colluding with Rome and sanctioning exploitation. If he said it wasn’t lawful, he’d be accused of rebellion against Rome, an executable offence.

It seems so simple. But this is no mere rule, a straightforward “do this” or “don’t do that.” Rather, it’s a virtue, a way of life, not just something to obey. It’s meant to characterise one’s entire existence, not merely particular moments in time. All things, whether they relate to God or neighbour, are meant to be characterised by love. Crucially, this love is demonstrated to us in a specific way, namely that of the saviour of the world crucified on a Roman cross.

Jesus refuses to answer. Asking instead to be shown a coin, he shows that his opponents are carrying Caesar’s image with them. That is, they’re carrying an idol (Exodus 20:4). It’s an astute response. Jesus goes on: “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” What belongs to Caesar, exactly? The coin? Perhaps; his face is on it, after all.

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LECTIONARY REFLECTIONS

November: Watchful, Humble, and Accountable Prepared by Dr. Matthew Anslow

November’s readings press disciples toward readiness: humility that refuses self-exaltation, lamps kept burning for an uncertain hour, talents risked rather than buried, judgment measured by care for the least, and a longing so urgent it begs God to tear the heavens open. NOV 1 – PENTECOST 23

Joshua 3:7-17; Psalm 107:1-7, 33-37; 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13; Matthew 23:1-12

Humility seems out of fashion. We live in a society in which social media encourages us to curate an impressive image of ourselves for consumption by others. In Matthew 23:1–12, the theme of humility is brought into sharp focus. Here Jesus accuses the scribes and Pharisees of seeking recognition. Listen to their teaching, he says, but don’t copy their actions; they don’t practise what they preach, they only act to be seen by others. Jesus tells us his followers ought not seek after such things. We shouldn’t even accept certain titles because they belong to God and Christ. Instead, we need to see ourselves in our proper place, as servants of God and one another. Jesus gives this teaching eschatological significance: in the end, all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. NOV 8 – PENTECOST 24

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25; Psalm 78:1-7; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13

One of the themes that arises in these readings is urgency. Matthew 25:1–13 has Jesus telling a parable about ten young women. Half are prepared for the arrival of the bridegroom, half are unprepared. The message seems clear: “Keep awake … for you know neither the day nor the hour” (25:13). The earliest Christians lived with a keen sense of Christ’s return, which they probably believed would occur soon. Paul’s words in 1 Thessalonians 4:13– 18 reflect this. In contrast to the anxiety that talk of Christ’s return often induces in modern Christians, Paul is rather positive about it. He thinks Christ’s return is a cause for encouragement (4:18; 5:11) since we are destined for salvation (5:9). He’s clear, though, that this return makes demands on our lives here and now, requiring our ethics to conform to Christ.

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I wonder to what extent we share this urgency. Do we see Christ’s return as good news? NOV 15 – PENTECOST 25

Judges 4:1-7; Psalm 123; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30

The theme of urgency continues in Matthew’s Parable of the Talents, which speaks of the demands that arise from Christ’s eventual return. In recent decades some have read this parable as concerning injustice; the third slave is seen as protagonist and victim (Luke 19:11–27 is convincingly read this way). I’m sympathetic, but not convinced. Matthew 25:1 suggests this whole chapter teaches about the kingdom. And throughout Matthew 25 there’s a consistent theme of urgency owing to Christ’s return and judgement. In short, the parable portrays the responsibilities placed on God’s people, represented by the monetary unit “talents” (15–20 years of labourers’ wages). It asks how we’ll account for the blessings God has given us when Christ returns. What are these responsibilities? We’re not told in the parable itself, except to be “trustworthy with a few things.” Perhaps the next part of Matthew 25 provides some insights… NOV 22 – PENTECOST 26 (REIGN OF CHRIST )

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 100; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46

Matthew 25:31–46 is the infamous passage about the sheep and the goats. It continues the thread of urgency running through the chapter. Here this urgency concerns the eschatological separation of people into the righteous and the unrighteous by the One on the throne. A doctrine of justification by faith is nowhere to be found here. Matthew insists that the designation of righteousness results from what’s done for “the least of these.” This passage is probably informed by Ezekiel 34’s vision of the Shepherd God who searches for the sheep who are

lost, injured, and weak. The judgement described there is between “fat sheep and lean sheep,” that is, among the people of Israel. Jesus’ words, then, seem to be a judgement on first-century Israel, calling them to remember Ezekiel’s words. In a more general sense, they’re a reminder of God’s intense concern for the poor and oppressed. Indeed, the Church ought to be known for its righteousness, which Matthew depicts as being reflected by our treatment of the least of these. This, it seems, is what it means to be trustworthy with the “talents” we’ve been given (Matthew 25:14–30). NOV 29 – ADVENT 1

Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37

The urgency of the last few weeks flows well into Advent, and the beginning of a new lectionary year. While Matthew 25 may have been highlighting the urgency we ought to feel regarding Christ’s return (so too this week’s Mark reading), this dovetails into the urgency of Advent, in which we await Christ’s birth. If you were to imagine the coming of God, what would come to mind? Isaiah 64 begins, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.” It’s a powerful description, the kind of thing that naturally comes to mind if we imagine God’s arrival. The Jews who had recently returned from Babylonian Exile hoped for this very thing. Though they’d returned, things still weren’t as they should be. They were desperate for God to arrive and restore everything. Christ’s birth, the very arrival of God, fulfils these words, but in a way that no one likely imagined. It’s hardly “tearing open the sky” or causing “the mountains to quake.” Yet Christ will cause mountains—the human and spiritual powers of this world—to quake. At Advent, we wait again in hope for his unexpected revolution.

B E L I E F M AT T E R S

WHAT’S THE POINT OF EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF AI?

It is not just the arrival of artificial intelligence tools, nor the debates about cheating, assessment, or screen time. It is something deeper — a cultural message that young people are absorbing long before educators have found the language to respond to it.

hat message sounds something like this: Artificial intelligence will soon do everything you do, and it will do it faster and better than you ever could.

learning — the searching, the confusion, the slow formation of understanding — disappears. Why wrestle with an essay when a machine can draft one in seconds? Why memorise facts when retrieval is effortless? Why even try to think deeply when outsourcing thought feels efficient, normal, even inevitable? The question lurking underneath is unavoidable: What is education actually for now?

Answers are abundant, immediate, and often persuasive. The old justification for schooling — “you need to know this because you won’t always have access to it” — no longer rings true to students living online. But this disruption may expose something important: education was never primarily about information. We simply mistook the tool for the purpose.

Education, at its best, is not about For much of modern history, education producing answers. It is about forming has been tied to knowledge acquisition. people. Schools existed to transmit information — For adults, this idea is unsettling enough. AI can generate responses, but it history, mathematics, science, literature For teenagers, it can be existential. cannot develop judgment. It can — because information itself was scarce. summarise arguments, but it cannot Teachers were gatekeepers. Libraries Imagine being 15 years old, sitting in decide what is worth caring about. It were cavernous treasure chests. a classroom already struggling to hold can imitate creativity, but it does not Learning meant gaining access to what your attention, aware that any question experience wonder, frustration, or moral you did not already possess. your teacher asks can be answered responsibility. These human capacities instantly by Google Gemini on the Artificial intelligence destabilises that — discernment, curiosity, resilience, school-issued Chromebook in front of model entirely. Information is no longer empathy — are precisely what education you. The friction that once accompanied scarce; it is plain old overwhelming. should cultivate.

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A STUDENT’S WORTH IS NOT MEASURED BY SPEED, PRODUCTIVITY, OR OPTIMISATION. IT LIES IN CONSCIOUSNESS, RELATIONSHIP, MORAL AGENCY, AND THE CAPACITY TO LOVE AND BE LOVED — QUALITIES THAT NO ALGORITHM POSSESSES.

The danger is not that students will use AI. The danger is that they may conclude their own thinking no longer matters.

focus on formation — ethical reasoning, collaboration, curiosity, imagination, and the search for and making meaning.

When young people hear repeatedly that machines will outperform them, motivation erodes. Why struggle through algebra if algorithms will always calculate better? Why learn to write if AI composes more polished prose? The risk is a generation that confuses efficiency with meaning.

There is also a spiritual dimension to this conversation that is rarely acknowledged. Human dignity has long been tied to our capacity to think and create. If young people begin to believe that machines surpass them in these areas, they may quietly internalise a diminished sense of their own worth.

Yet struggle is not a flaw in education; it is its mechanism. Learning happens through effort, through misunderstanding, failing, learning, revision, and persistence. Cognitive scientists have long shown that difficulty strengthens understanding, that time away from screens is beneficial for curiosity and creativity. Remove effort entirely and learning becomes shallow imitation.

Education must therefore affirm something countercultural: human value does not lie in outperforming machines.

AI offers answers without the formative journey that makes knowledge personal. This creates a paradox for educators. The tools that can enhance learning can also short-circuit it. Used well, AI can function like a tutor — explaining concepts, offering feedback, expanding curiosity. Used poorly, it becomes intellectual outsourcing. The question, then, is not whether AI belongs in education. It’s already present. The question is, how schools help students understand why thinking for themselves still matters. Perhaps education in the age of AI must shift from teaching students what to know toward helping them understand how to know and why knowing matters at all. Critical thinking becomes less about recalling facts and more about evaluating truth. Writing becomes less about producing text and more about clarifying thought. Creativity becomes less about originality of output and more about authenticity of perspective. In this sense, AI may force education back toward its oldest philosophical roots. Socrates worried that writing itself would weaken memory and understanding. Yet the goal of his teaching was never memorisation; it was the cultivation of wisdom through dialogue and questioning. The same may now be true again. If machines handle routine cognition, schools may finally have space to

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A student’s worth is not measured by speed, productivity, or optimisation. It lies in consciousness, relationship, moral agency, and the capacity to love and be loved — qualities that no algorithm possesses. Seen this way, the purpose of education becomes clearer, not less. Education prepares people not merely for employment but for participation in human life. It teaches us how to live with others, how to wrestle with complexity, how to seek truth even when answers are uncertain. AI may assist with tasks, but it cannot replace the human task of becoming. The bored 15-year-old staring at a Chromebook does not need convincing that AI is powerful. They already know that. What they need is a reason to believe their own mind is still worth developing. The challenge for educators, parents, and even faith communities is to articulate that reason convincingly. In an age where machines can produce answers instantly, education’s purpose may be revealed more sharply than ever: not to compete with artificial intelligence, but to nurture the deeply human intelligence that gives knowledge meaning in the first place. ADRIAN DR AY TON

E N T E R TA I N M E

THE TROJAN HORSE

IN PLAIN SIGHT

What a phenomenal achievement Christopher Nolan’s film is. It’s technically astonishing‚ emotionally ambitious and visually unlike anything else showing in cinemas at the moment. Shot entirely on IMAX film‚ every frame feels enormous without ever sinking into some hollow kind of spectacle. The scale is ultimately more part of the story than a distraction.

att Damon lends Odysseus the quiet weariness you would expect from a Nolan movie‚ a smart and brilliant man tortured by the decisions that led them to victory but left destruction in their wake‚ rather than the swaggering hero of a typical sword and sandal epic. Anne Hathaway gives Penelope strength and dignity and Tom Holland a quiet vulnerability that actually makes the reversals of the various family relationships feel surprisingly intimate against the scale of the narrative.

Yet for all its astonishing craftsmanship‚ I left the cinema asking a different question‚ is Christopher Nolan really making a film about ancient Greece or is he making a film about us‚ or perhaps both? But all Homer has ever been about is the journey home after war‚ so in this particular instance‚ Nolan seems less interested in monsters and the mythology of Greece than he is in the nature of victory and what comes after victory when an empire thinks it has won.

The Trojan Horse‚ then‚ was more than a ruse. Here you have the first great technological advance that changes everything in warfare forever‚ an advance so successful that it destroys the moral basis of civilization. It’s impossible not to think of Oppenheimer‚ with Nolan having made a film about a scientist who invented something he thought would end the war‚ but then also created an age of constant anxiety‚ and now‚ with The Odyssey‚ he reexamines the man (Odysseus) who devises the stratagem that wins Troy for the Greeks and becomes most troubled by it. A victory and a catastrophe are now inseparable. It seems that some kind of Trojan Horseallusion was intended‚ and that the two films can be seen almost as companion pieces to each other. But we live in an age of innovation‚ where artificial intelligence‚ surveillance technology‚ autonomous weapons and data-driven power can promise greater efficiency and greater control. Yet every new advance raises a question about

its unexpected outcomes. History keeps teaching us that the tools which make nations powerful also have the capacity to hollow them out from within. Nolan seems to be fascinated by the paradox that throughout The Odyssey, Greece has technically won the war. And at last‚ Troy has fallen with the enemy defeated. But nobody emerges victorious. The kingdoms are divided‚ the trust all but gone. The leaders are now prisoners of their own ambition‚ and what was once home no longer feels like home. Perhaps that’s why‚ much of the time‚ it feels strangely post-apocalyptic. Nolan treats the collapse of the Bronze Age as if civilization has survived its own version of a nuclear exchange. But although the buildings stand and kingdoms exist‚ there is a feeling of emptiness. And there is something about Nolan’s obsession with empires. If you think of it‚ it’s The Dark Knight‚ Dunkirk‚ Oppenheimer and now The Odyssey going back to the empires at the moment of doubt. His heroes are rarely villains

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E N T E R TA I N M E

but they aren’t uncomplicated saviours either. They are usually people whose intelligence enables them to achieve miraculous feats while unleashing forces beyond their control.

That‚ perhaps‚ is the real Trojan Horse that is hiding in plain sight. Not the building outside the gates‚ but the seductive idea that control is the same thing as security.

And meanwhile‚ there’s a collapse of trust in institutions around the world‚ there’s increasing political polarization‚ there’s wars that seem impossible to resolve‚ there’s a rapid pace of technological advancement that seems to outstrip our ethical frameworks‚ and countries that are willing to fight wars to seek dominance because they believe that’s what will keep them secure.

There is no doubt that The Odyssey is one of the most extraordinary undertakings ever to be committed to film and the great achievement of the film is that it turns one of the oldest stories known to humankind into one of the most contemporary. Nolan isn’t just saying that this tends to be how every force in a civilization eventually makes its decision: to conquer at any cost‚ or to return to the values of a civilization worth saving.

Though Nolan may have a different view‚ The Odyssey shows that civilizations do not fall simply because they come under attack. They collapse when they abandon the values that held them together. The theme of xenia‚ the Greek law of hospitality with its sacred duty to protect guests and strangers‚ is central to the film as each of the major scenes depicting violence begins with someone breaking the sacred obligation to be hospitable to strangers. Compassion quickly turns to suspicion and deception with Circe. Hospitality becomes exploitation and fear replaces faith during the sacking of Troy. At some level‚ Nolan always returns to the idea that a civilization is only as good as its weakest members‚ not by the strength of its military. As contemporary debates over refugees‚ migration and nationalism show‚ and as Nolan’s film suggests‚ there is always a temptation to define neighbours as enemies rather than as fellow human beings. As a writer about faith and culture‚ a second parallel immediately came to mind for me. Many Biblical accounts caution against power without humility (Babylon‚ Egypt‚ and Rome‚ who all assumed their power would last forever). Scripture and indeed humanity itself repeatedly reminds us that pride comes before a fall and that justice is always more important than military success. Nolan might be arriving at a similar conclusion‚ though perhaps a different way. His film doesn’t preach. It doesn’t offer easy political analogies. It asks whether our most serious threat isn’t our enemies as much as our belief that intelligence‚ technology‚ and power can save us without the need for wisdom.

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By the end of the film‚ Odysseus learns that the greatest journey is not across the sea nor is it against the monsters of the world, but to accept and reconcile the consequences of one’s actions in one’s journey to repentance and homecoming. In an age obsessed with power‚ that may be Christopher Nolan’s most radical statement yet. ADRIAN DR AY TON

THE ODYSSEY SHOWS THAT CIVILIZATIONS DO NOT FALL SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY COME UNDER ATTACK. THEY COLLAPSE WHEN THEY ABANDON THE VALUES THAT HELD THEM TOGETHER.

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