Transforming Communities

Essentially this means becoming 'missional' as faith communities and as a wider movement. In the wider sense we'd do this by more intently focusing on whatever resourcing or encouragement or cajoling it takes to move our faith communities to the edges where they will find people with hurts and hopes they can serve!!

The Uniting Church is cash poor [arguable] and property rich... from not tackling that when [3] denominations formed our current 'Uniting' movement. There have been moves to release property and finances for missional use but it's not gone far enough.

The [1] Presbytery which had an audit caused the proponents of a Property Resources Unit focused on rationalisation and better utilisation to back off and look to 'value add' to strategic properties.... they dogged it!!

What if we adopted the model of other Synod's [roughly states] in our movement [but for different reasons] became a one Presbytery Synod for a period of set time... not forever... in order to distribute our centralised resourcing across NSW/ACT and thereby give stronger direction to all that divestment of resources... we could even then shift focus from region to region as required or according to those best responding to the synod vision...

Our central administrative structures would need reform and to embrace a missional standpoint. Our theological college should adopt the South Australian model for staffing and courses. Emphasising context, missiology but moreso teachers who are current practitioners in a variety of settings, yet academically qualified to teach!!

We need to do something about the fact Uniting Care and Uniting Financial are growing, there's a gap between both and the grassroots church in some ways and the tremendous work of both doesn't fully connect beyond their own work. It's not enough to merge our Boards of Mission and Education to solve a financial need and out of a sense that 'someone has to control the change or nobody will'... the fact this change has overshadowed a call for a wider review is a problem with as yet no solution.

More later...