Uniting Church in Australia

By Paul Turley 

What happened? It seems like only yesterday that our newspapers were filled with stories of China’s economic miracle and of all its great benefits to Australia. Only yesterday that we saw pictures of smiling young women driving huge mine trucks for which they were paid thousands of dollars in our resources boom. Now here we are looking at images of disillusioned and disbelieving factory workers, retirees, managers and economists. Now these same economists, who gave us no hint that all this was coming, invade the nightly news with their dire predictions.

What are we to do? We the church, I mean.

Perhaps our first job is to repent. We have tied our faith practices, language and expectations to the truth that God is the same yesterday, today and forever, while effectively ignoring another great truth of our faith, ‘Behold I make all things new’. To the extent that we have lived by the first truth to the exclusion of the second, we have left ourselves as a community of faith unused to movement and therefore stiff-jointed and ill prepared when change is forced upon us. We have not been a pilgrim people facing the delights and challenges of an ever-changing landscape.

From here we can develop liturgical practices, song, prayers, poems, works of art, anything that will put before us the glorious and frightening reality that everything around us, everything within us, is moving and changing. When we gather we are not the people we were last time we gathered. The world into which we woke this morning is not the same world we left yesterday. Everything in creation is busy becoming something else all the time. Nothing stays the same.

Enveloped by our liturgies of change we can help each other past questions of why, why now and why me to help each other become resilient embracers of change.

Thirdly we can remind ourselves that we are communities of truth. The economic mess we are in owes much of its genesis to a community that hopes for the best. We, our political leaders, our bankers, those who have sat on company boards, have crossed our fingers behind our backs, hoped for the best and tried not to think too far into the future. The church, it turns out, has no part in this make-believe world. When Jesus told us in John 17 that the Spirit would come and lead us into all truth, we were issued a charter for the way our community was to operate. We are called to always see things and to speak of them in truth; things as they really are and not as we think they ought to be or how we might wish them to be.

Given these things, how are we to stand with those of us who have lost our jobs, or might do very soon? Those of us who are frightened that the carefully organised self-retirement income we thought we had, or the inheritance that we so desperately want to leave for our children, seem to be evaporating?

What would you want, what do you want, in this situation? Me – and I have been there and might well be again, I want people who are willing to pray with me, regularly, for courage and faith; two things that always fail me when I am frightened for the future. Could your community of faith figure out systems and structures to offer prayer to all who would like it? Sure it’s obvious and simple but to do it properly, to have people who want to be alongside and not to explain or preach, and to have them available where and when they are needed, takes commitment and organisation.

The other thing we can do is to meet in our communities and, in the spirit of our charter of truth, determine our capacity to offer material and financial support to those within our faith community who have moved from the possibility of real material hardship into the bitter truth of it.

This is a time for us to count those who can and will commit actual money and resources to be distributed to actual members of our faith community. Who can, for a determined period, commit $10 a week or a $100 or a $1000 to a fund to ensure that another sister or brother can pay a few bills or give a treat to their children? How will that fund be managed? How will those in need be able to access it in hope and with dignity?

In every time, whether in or out of crisis, we are called to be truth-telling communities that live with and embrace change and live together in care and service.