Members heed the call

The first phase of the Act2 Project, known as Exploration, took place between November 2022 and May this year, culminating in the third Act2 report since the decision of the 16th Assembly last year to create the Act2 Project Unit and Steering Committee.

The report’s title of ‘Act2: In response to God’s call’, is drawn from the final sentence of paragraph 13 of 1977’s Basis of Union.

“The Uniting Church will thereafter provide for the exercise by men and women of the gifts God bestows upon them, and will order its life in response to God’s call to enter more fully into mission,” the report’s opening page says.

“It is a reminder that the ordering of our life is in response to God’s call.

“This report seeks to both reflect and respond to what we have heard as God’s call on our life through our engagement with the Church, our history, our context and the experiences of so many people shared with us across the length and breadth of the country.”

The 58-page report follows an intensive period of engagement with Uniting Church members right around the country.

The exhaustive consultation period involved direct communication with 2113 local contacts across 1672 local communities of faith and involved all 33 Presbyteries.

Every Synod in Australia was visited, as well as Uniting Church agencies and theological leaders, with 45 meetings allowing for a full process of engagement throughout the country.

Following this lengthy period of consultation, written contributions were received from 187 Church Councils representing over 254 communities of faith, as well as 46 written submissions from individuals, councils and agencies.

“Consistent with the findings prior to the 16th Assembly, this exploration phase has deepened our understanding of the shape of our Church, the challenges we are facing, the things that matter to people across the Church and the imperative for change,” the report says.

“For example, some Synods are relatively well resourced and functioning well, while others are in a more precarious situation.

“This is also true of presbyteries, with some having large leadership teams of ministers and some having no paid resourcing at all.

“It is also true of congregations, where people’s ability to fund mission and ministry depends completely on what money they can raise out of the giving of members or the income off property. This may be unjust, for example, in rural areas.

“So we need to explore if there are better, more equitable ways of resourcing the mission and ministry we want to do.”

Andrew says that feedback during the first phase of the process clearly showed that members were grappling with where their Church was placed at this moment in time.

“I think that we have a Church that is facing some really significant challenges, especially in our congregational life,” he says.

“So that sense of the size, the age, and the energy of our local communities not being where they would hope it would be is real.

“These options range from major strategic change, like going from four councils to three, to something resembling our current structure with some added mechanisms,” she says.

“What we end up proposing to the Assembly next year completely depends on the discernment of the Church.

“A preferred option out of the four may emerge, or out of our engagement we may feel there is a fifth option emerging.”

“There is some grief and disappointment that we're not the Church that we hoped we might be when we turned 46, but there's also still an openness to change, to renewal, and to doing things differently.”

Bethany says Uniting Church members now have the opportunity to consider four directions relating to the future of local communities, and four options relating to future governance.

With the Act2 Project now in phase two, or Collective Discernment, Andrew says members can continue to provide vital input into what will go before the 17th Assembly next year.

“The key thing that we are asking people to do now is to answer the question of where do you believe God is calling us to go in the shape and ordering of our life,” he says.

“We're asking, ‘where is God calling us’, and we're inviting people to engage with what we're proposing, to participate in conversations about it, to offer to us where they see opportunities and where they see risks, and whether they've got questions or concerns.

“So it’s not a case of ‘well, here are our proposals and what do you think’, it’s ‘where do you think that God's calling us?’

“It’s about asking ‘what do you think the opportunity for us is, what would this mean for you, for your context and for our life, and what do we do about it?’

“So people need to participate, engage, contribute, and provide their insight, not just wait and see what eventuates.”

Ongoing participation continues to be the key to the whole process, says Jessica.

“Participate, participate, participate is my advice to Uniting Church members,” she says.

“Please take part by getting involved in the process, reading the material in the ‘Act2: In response to God’s call’ report, and making submissions around that.

“I really do think that through participating in a collective discernment phase, we can discern what God is calling us to.

“Sometimes change is hard, but I think we are really well resourced to be thinking about how we can move forward and step into something really good.

“We have a range of choices in front of us and some of the options are more radical than others, in terms of how we might adapt our structure and governance models, but my hope is that we are able to be really creative, really courageous, and really committed to implementing whatever decisions we make.”

Those decisions and their impact need to be at the forefront of our thinking if the Church is going to thrive well into the future, says Jessica.

“What we've heard consistently in the exploration phase of the Act2 Project is that people are calling for change and they recognise how important and how urgent reimagining what we could look like is,” she says.

“So there is an urgent need for us to reimagine what the future of our Church