News, Synod Speeches, Reflections and Articles
We are not called to conform and to sit still, the people of God have always been a people on the move. As Dom Hélder Câmara said, “Pilgrim, when your ship long moored in harbor gives you the illusion of being a house; when your ship begins to put down roots in the stagnant water by the quay: put out to sea! Save your boat’s journeying soul and your own pilgrim soul, cost what it may.”
I hope the Church that will benefit from the work of our new bishop will be more like the Australian River Red Gums. Sometimes their life-giving water cannot even be seen – only a track of rough, gnarled shady sentinels indicating secret channels winding across our outback landscapes. Their roots delve to the depths for the huge created sea below. Their foliage has supplied shelter, material, food, and medicine for many thousands of years for our first inhabitants. Those ‘red gum churches’ shared God’s love, long before the ‘God boxes’ arrived!
“The truth is that, as I said at my welcome, I do not want this diocese to be labelled either a High Church diocese or a Low Church diocese. It is neither. It is a Church diocese. And if there be some, as I know there are, who reflect sadly that services are in several churches different from what they were thirty or forty years ago, I would ask them to remember that certain changes such as have occurred rather generally in England were bound to come here….Room must be found in our Church and in this diocese of our Church for those who are Anglo-Catholics and for those who would not like to call themselves so. There must be in essentials unity, in non-essentials diversity, in all things charity.”
Archbishop Sharp, Brisbane Synod 1924
“.. the liberating goal of all the woman theologies is not reached by simply integrating women into a society and a church where patriarchal structures, androcentric theory and privileging prevail as the norm. This ‘add woman and stir’ recipe isn’t working, it has never worked and will not work while women are taught to disregard their gifts to try to fit into the male defined world.”
Despite the popular naming of the conflict as incredibly complex, Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh explains the model is simply settler colonialism, the same motivation and mechanisms experienced by the Indigenous people of Australia.
“Christians are nothing if not a narrative people. We engage with story each and every time we meet for worship and whenever we go to Scripture. The story becomes the bedrock for healing and ‘setting relationships right’. Story moves the people from individual experiences to shared experiences; from individual guilt to shared guilt; from individual responsibility to shared responsibility. This movement empowers those storytellers to move from hurt to solutions. Out of the shared story and the shared embrace of the issues emerges shared commitment to new ways of being. Forgiveness emerges. Restoration emerges.”
“How have we come to this: as Christians whose faith commits us to be active peacemakers in Jesus’ way? How has it come to pass if I talk about peace from the pulpit, I may be subjected to abuse, hatred and threats of violence? We are faithfully required to share peace from the position of powerlessness, humility and vulnerability and instead, we comprehensively fail, embedded as we are in a church flourishing among the established powers and principalities of the ruler of the world .”
Our culture and indeed our church so often misguidedly believe that love can still be present where one group or individual dominates another. The church has not only been silent, but in some of its teachings has actively supported structures of dominance and control.
“While working in the Holy Land, I distinctly remember reading a six-word sentence written by a historian. The words are these: There are no exits from history. I believe these words are pertinent to us here in Australia, where our history is haunted by the historical killings carried out against its Indigenous people. A history of which so many Australians are ignorant, or we continue to avert our gaze from its reality.”
The committee charged with developing the apology would like to hear from LGBTIQA+ people who are current or past members of The Anglican Church Southern Queensland, and members of their families, regarding their experience of The Anglican Church Southern Queensland (Diocese of Brisbane) through its parishes, schools, and institutions.
Dr Garry Worete Deverell, a Trawloolway man from northern Tasmania, joins the podcast to explore country and kin as the building blocks of life and spirituality and the web of past, present and future which is expressed as ‘the dreaming’. Paying attention may be the first step in practising a faith that is at home in this land even as we long for the reconciliation which begins in listening to the truth of Australia’s violent colonising history.
NCAN (National Comprehensive Anglicanism Network) seeks to promote inclusive, generous and open-hearted Anglicanism. We value the rich traditions of Anglicanism, where differences are seen as gifts from God to be valued and treasured. We are committed to respectful conversations, across difference, about matters that are of importance in the Anglican Church of Australia.
