This debate is not limited to groups within Australian society or the world stage. It rages with varying degrees of intensity within the multicultural Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) as well. Members and participants in this Australian church know that it is not always easy to remain faithful on the journey to that mystery of ‘God’s promised end’ spoken of so freely in the Basis of Union of this UCA. It can seem especially difficult when the hopes and dreams that are embodied in the Church community involve us personally in change, adaptation of what is familiar, and embrace of what is new and quite unfamiliar.

In the first years of the UCA [or decades even] those who had come from the three entering Christian traditions – Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational - entered into an often painful and disorienting time of feeling disconnected from all that had shaped and nurtured us into and in faith. Over time some began to discover richness and nurture in the practices, thinking, world-views and gifts from within the other entering traditions. Soon new expressions, and previously unimagined practices and ways of speaking of and including into the community of God’s people came into the life and language of the UCA.

Always there has been accompanying struggles, the pain of loss and the wonder and mystery of the newly birthed. Leaders and communities alike have journeyed between palliative care and midwifery as models of ministry and expressions of our common life in Christ.

Through the years since 1977 one common thread in all of those challenges and hope-filled journeys has been the growing cultural and linguistic diversity among the people of God known as the Uniting Church in Australia. In the face of ongoing expressions of despair from many Indigenous communities and leaders, growing alienation and abuse of human rights at home and abroad, the removal of humanity and human identity from asylum seekers, and commentary in talk back radio, on-line blogs, daily TV and print media reflecting the worst of Australia’s racism and xenophobia, the UCA has repeatedly strengthened its statements about and visible commitment to justice, healing and reconciliation with First peoples’ and God’s gift and Australia’s treasure of cultural and linguistic diversity among Second peoples’.

In 1985 the Uniting Church in Australia declared itself to be a ‘multicultural church’. That statement included this prayerful hope: The Uniting Church seeks to be open to changes that the Holy Spirit will bring to the church because of the creative contributions of people of different racial and cultural groups to its life. In significant ways the Uniting Church has sought to live as a community that includes and celebrates the rich diversity of God’s created peoples living out the Gospel call to transcend cultural and other barriers declared in that statement.

While experiences of cultural diversity in local contexts will vary depending local demographics, in the national church and in the wider Australian society we belong to communities that are diverse in cultures, languages and religions. This 21^st century Australian society comprises First peoples – the indigenous inhabitants of this land, with their particular identity and unique relationship to land and Second peoples’ - all who have come since. Those Second peoples’, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, bring experiences, ways of thinking, seeing and expressing matters of life and faith are not only shaped by European forms of philosophy, theology and world views, but by other ancient cultures, languages, rich and full insights and world-views.

They bring that diversity and richness, those fear-starters and perceived threats into a land and a developing culture that still struggles with its own DNA, its own identity. We often forget, or may not even know, that the very first piece of legislation enacted in 1901 by the Federal Parliament of this new nation was called the “Immigration (Restriction) Act”. The great vision for this new nation where women already had the vote in some states, and other states had protective legislation for workers rights, was to build a classless society, a workers paradise.

This nation would be like no other then in existence. This nation would learn from the fractures and tensions within other societies and would protect democracy, equality and freedom. However this was to be brought about by radical policies of social exclusion. Two identified groups would have no place in this planned utopia: first peoples’ – they were a relic of a much earlier stage of human development, an evolutionary relic that would soon die out, and non-whites, the so-called servile races.

Those attitudes and beliefs shaped government policy and much of society’s reactions until the latter third of the 20^th century. Speeches, public statements, government policies and programs, welfare and other activities are all now on the public record, and many were at the centre of apologies by this UCA and more recently by Federal and State governments.

All of this has shaped and lies behind many attitudes and expectations within both church and society in 21^st century Australia. These ideas, policies, fears and anxieties are also central in our ongoing conflicts and struggles over what constitutes ‘real Australians’, ‘Australian values’, and justice for and the place of ‘boat people’, asylum seekers, refugees, migration in general, and First peoples in contemporary Australian political and church life.

The UCA has not been free of these same struggles, discussions and strength of feelings. At the 11^th Assembly in 2006 the UCA took a further step in our understanding of what it means to be God’s diverse peoples by adopting the statement “A Church tor All God’s People”.

This simple, scripturally based affirmation provides some biblical stories, parables and metaphors illustrating the foundation upon which this UCA acknowledged the call of God to this rich and diverse identity as a church for all of God’s peoples. We are many cultures because this is God’s gift in creation. We live together in this Uniting Church in Australia, because we take seriously the Basis of our Union in 1977. This includes God’s call to unity, God’s gift of reconciliation to all without fear or favour, the gift of Scriptures, of scholarly insights, and the promises that the Holy Spirit will continue to lead us into new ways of living out and expressing God’s call for reconciliation and renewal.

In the UCA we use the term ‘multicultural’ as our way of describing the fact of our diversity and of God’s call to live together in that diversity. We are multicultural! That is what people see when they look at the UCA in 2011.

However being ‘multicultural’ is not an end in itself. Being a ‘multicultural’ church community is never about providing ways of remaining separate from one another in silos or ghettos of our original and various ‘homelands’ and ‘home churches’ under the ‘umbrella’ of the UCA as some would prefer and fear mongers in the wider community debate try to argue. Nor is ‘multicultural’ a description only of those parts of the UCA that are culturally and linguistically different from the dominant western/English speaking part.

The Gospel of Christ and even the western notions of the community of God demand more of all of us than that. Western notions of God as Trinity: three-in-one and one-in-three, can actually assist in understanding a little about living under the cross – culturally. Trinity is not about assimilation – the three become one without differentiation! There is something akin to the notion of integration about the Trinity – where there is sameness and differentiation, uniqueness and unity held together within that mystery.

So too our calling of God in Christ as a multicultural UCA is not a call to assimilation. The journey of God’s pilgrim people is not towards a ‘promised end’ where in one generation or two everyone will become ‘like us – the dominant church culture’: westernised, English-speaking, of the same world-view and ways of expressing faith, theology and our life in Christ.

There is a more important descriptive term that speaks out of our life in Christ and of how we live our lives as this multicultural community of God’s people. That descriptive term is cross-cultural!

As discussed earlier in this piece, our journey into the UCA was about enriching and building on our inherited traditions and insights that had shaped us, nurtured faith and faithfulness, and expressed one or more facets of the jewels of insight and understanding nurtured through millennia of God’s faithful peoples. That journey was not about losing everything into some single, dominant view of world and faith, God and Gospel. But it was about building on those riches a new experience and expression of Christian community life in Australia. This is about a journey begun and not yet completed. It is about a UnitING Church IN Australia!

Being a multicultural community living under the cross – culturally, is a calling to both sameness and differentiation. Being a multicultural community living under the cross – culturally, is about integration through respectful relationships!

1. This is a gift and journey where respectful crossing over between cultures becomes normative.
2. This is a gift and a journey involving living out and evaluating our cultural and theological values and assumptions in light of God’s saving activities in Christ.
3. This is a gift and a journey where faith in the God who is one-in-three and three-in-one and participation in the mission of that God are common values with unpredictable and unexpected outcomes.
4. This is a gift and a journey characterised by unexpected eruptions of the Holy Spirit in new insights, ways of seeing the world, God and the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, in listening to, expressing and living Gospel.

Living under the cross – culturally is how we are called to live out our life in Christ through faith. This is about journeying between our own and other cultures, moving backwards and forwards from the known to us and valued by us to the unknown to us and yet to be valued by us.

Living under the cross – culturally is the place where all of our cultural and linguistic expressions of God, Gospel, faith and discipleship are to be stripped bare, examined, judged, valued and shaped.

Living under the cross – culturally is a relationship of respect and equality, of justice and of reconciliation, of loving kindness and renewal.

Living under the cross – culturally is to live the life of the servant Christ in anticipation of and hope for God’s promised end for all creation and all its peoples.

For this Uniting Church IN Australia ‘Living under the cross – culturally’ means being respectful of each other and the gifts that God has given us in each other through:

1. Living and working respectfully with First peoples’ especially through the ministries of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress [UAICC];
2. All of our members and councils seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit in discerning ways in which every member can dig deep into their experience of and faith in God in the language[s] in which those experiences can be most profoundly expressed so that the UCA and our worship, witness and service are enriched;
3. Providing key documents in language[s] that make them accessible to all those who want to understand us and the God we worship and serve;
4. Making it possible for individuals and communities to participate fully in the councils and worship gatherings of the UCA by providing interpreters and information in the first language as far as we can;

• Supporting first generation arrivals [migrants, asylum-seekers, refugees] to express and live out their faith in this new and often mysterious land with its vastly different dominant culture and world-view;

1. Nurturing the faith and new expressions of faith of the children of new arrivals who live their lives on the ‘hyphen’ between cultures – those who come as children and those born and educated here

The genuine gift of grace that the UCA can offer into the ongoing claims about the abject failure of the ‘experiment of multiculturalism’ is to take seriously the gift of cultural and linguistic diversity with which God has blessed us. To actually model respectful relationships across cultural divides, and to live with our neighbours as if who they are and what nurtures life and hope in them genuinely matter for Australia and for Australians will make a lie of arguments built on separation, alienation and lack of respect. To live like this is to genuinely live out the promise of paragraph 3 of the Basis of Union: “… to be a fellowship of reconciliation, a body within which the diverse gifts of its members are used for the building up of the whole; and instrument through which Christ may work and bear witness to himself.”

Some useful resources on the web site of the UCA Assembly

The Basis of Union: 1971 as approved by the Uniting Churches, and 1992 edition [slightly amended for more inclusive language]

The Uniting Church is a multicultural Church – Statement of the 4^th Assembly in 1985

A Church for All God’s People – Statement and Affirmation from the 11^th Assembly, 2006

The Vision of a Multicultural Church – A reflection 12 years after the 1985 statement

(contact National Director at the Assembly Office: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Building Bridges: Sharing Life and Faith in a Multicultural Church, Seongja You, Colville Crowe, John Mavor (Eds), 1993, National Mission and Evangelism Committee UCA Assembly

Crossing Borders: shaping Faith, Ministry and Identity in Multicultural Australia, Helen Richmond and Myong Duk Yang (Eds), 2006, UCA Assembly & NSW Board of Mission

Snapshots of Multicultural Ministry, Helen Richmond (Ed), 2006, Multicultural and Cross-cultural Ministry UCA Assembly

Multicultural and Cross-cultural Reflections is a blog by Rev. Dr. Tony Floyd. Tony is a Minister of the word in the Uniting Church in Australia has been National Director for Multicultural and Cross-cultural ministry in the Assembly since March 2007. Multicultural and Cross-cultural Ministry is charged to assist the UCA nationally to acknowledge, embrace, and live out diversity as God’s gift and calling. Central to and key in all of this are relationships that are built on respect, collaboration, consultation and mutual recognition of gifts and calling.