At Richmond Uniting as we journey to Christmas, we are inviting people to to write their prayers in chalk on our stairs: the Prayer Stairs. All kinds of people have been responding to this invitation and now our stairs are covered in prayers. There are prayers for the planet, for loved ones, for peace, for happiness, for no wars, for a...
When I was 17 I went to my first NCYC, a big national youth convention, hosted by the Uniting Church. It was amazing to travel from Victoria to Queensland with a diverse range of people, and once there, to hang out with some two thousand other young people who were also interested in the Jesus way. Here there was space to talk...
Whether or not you attend worship regularly, you may have some familiarity with what is called 'The Lord's Prayer'. It is often shared in wedding services and funeral services. It is prayed - or recited - at Parliament House each day that Parliament sits, and it is prayed during worship in churches around the world, across Christian traditions, wherever Jesus communities...
Thousands of Australians are concerned about the way in which successive Australian governments have responded to, and continue to respond to, people seeking asylum in Australia. Not only are people concerned, they are expressing their concern in non-violent acts of resistance. Christians from a wide variety of denominations are continuing to peacefully and creatively protest the intentionally dehumanising and cruel practices of...
At Richmond Uniting we have a pattern of reading books together and discussing them. We reflect together on what surprises us in our reading, what we disagree with, what resonates for us, what challenges us and what this book might mean for our own faltering attempts at living as followers of Jesus, both personally and as a community. In recent times...
Like so many people around our country, I have been reeling this week from the devastating images of the sustained, institutional abuse of young people in juvenile detention in the Northern Territory. The reality that the majority of these young people are Indigenous Australians yet again confronts us with the racism that lurks so closely under the skin of our...
I recently participated in the ANZATS - the Australian and New Zealand Association of Theological Schools - Annual Conference. This conference brings together a wide variety of academics - from vastly different denominations - speaking on various aspects of Christian theology and life. The keynote speaker this year was Rev Dr Serene Jones, President of Union Theological Seminary in New York...
The Richmond Uniting Church congregation was very glad to host an exhibition of art work made by people detained in the Broadmeadows Detention Centre, in our Gallery 314, over the weekend as National Refugee Week starts. So often, when there is debate about refugees and asylum seekers in political discourse, the reality that actual people - just like us - are...
In the Uniting Church we don't have hierarchies. We seek to work through decisions in a complex and powerful process of consensus. That is, we seek to make decisions by discerning together - lay people and ordained people, old people and young people, people from regional settings and people from the city, women and men, and people from a huge variety of...
Tonight within the Uniting Church Synod of Victoria and Tasmania our new moderator, the Rev Sharon Hollis, will be inducted. The Uniting Church, an Australian church,was formed in 1977 when the Australian Methodist, Congregationalist and most Presbyterian churches, came together. The UC is committed to a style of leadership that is not about being dictatorial, that is not about ‘celebrity’ and...