JEFF WILD
Critical food shortages and high prices is big news just now. As one example, the price of rice has increased by 70% in less than a year. For us it may be an inconvenience but for an organisation struggling to feed 150 000 refugees on the Thai-Burma border, it’s critical.
It leaves a $6m deficit. That is the situation facing the Thai-Burma Border Consortium (TBBC) which I visited recently.
The dirty brown-grey fog that surrounded Chiang Mai airport on our departure lasted for the entire 70km to Mae Hong Son in northern Thailand.
I was on my way to visit a refugee camp for ethnic groups from Burma displaced by the ongoing fighting and persecution. At Ban Kwai there are 19 000 refugees. TBBC provides food, fuel and other essentials for them and 11 similar camps. Continue reading ‘Burma, food critical: caring continues’
Crosslight contributor Alan Austin reflects on the Pope’s recent visit.
What was the impact of last month’s papal visit?
It showed that hundreds of thousands of young Aussies have a vibrant faith.
It also drew attention to the evils of abusive clergy. And to the reluctance of Roman Catholic leaders to meet with victims. Or mete out justice to the perpetrators.
Were there others?
Could the visit of this conservative pontiff and his entourage to this liberal multifaith democracy have nudged them – just slightly – towards reform?
Change is certainly due. Many would love to see the Catholic church end its blasphemous display of wealth, lose its mediaeval pomposity, open its processes to democracy and welcome gays, divorcees and women.
What crinkles the cassocks of critics most, however, is its murderous teaching against condoms.
There are some glimmers of hope. Continue reading ‘Opinion: Benediction…’
CLIFF BARCLAY
Our funding cuts are the result of poor stewardship.
We have had enough money. In 15 years the Board of mission and financing (BOMAR) has spent over 150 million dollars, enough to fund 100 placements or full-time positions forever.
Church buildings are fossil fuels but we continue to use them to fund recurrent expenditure.
We have relied on Uniting Church Funds Management to save us. Financial markets fluctuate and we have let ourselves become dependant upon boom times to pay our bills.
We make funding decisions without knowing where the money is coming from. We make these decisions in isolation, so we don’t know if other priorities will suffer.
Such approaches are short sighted and will always fail.
Our church structure has been designed for inclusion and focuses on participation and respect rather than efficiency and decision making. Continue reading ‘Opinion: Our funding cuts’
JOHN BODYCOMB
Forty years ago, something began to happen within organised Christianity, which was duly apparent in most Western societies: there was a rapidly growing exodus among those who had been seen as its bastions – clergy and other religious professionals.
Reasons offered for this exodus tended to fall broadly under three main headings: the inadequacies of their professional equipment, confusion about religious ‘roles’, and lack of support systems.
It should be noted that a high proportion of those remaining in their vocations nominated similar sources of disquiet. This seemed to indicate that the discomfiture was being registered by many more than those who left.
Since that time, the amount of attention given to clergy morale has increased. The afflictions of stress, burnout and breakdown among clergy have been identified, weighed and measured, so that there is now a growing literature on the subject. Continue reading ‘Opinion: A little problem of faith…’
RUTH SNELLEMAN
Life on a farm doesn’t often allow for visitors. The responsibility of raising children, maintaining a house and hoping for a successful crop leaves women little time for friendships.
Most farming houses have one room for visitors. In this one room, the heater is allowed on. The rest of the house remains chilly throughout the winter months. Curtains are drawn and the air is pickled with the smell of marmalade, dust and mothballs.
This is the place for the ministry of Mima.
Originally from Melbourne, the Rev Deacon Mima Mitchell, decided, many years ago, to marry a farmer. When she moved to her husband’s farm near Hopetoun, she said she cried every day from loneliness.
Her tears only dried when she gave birth to her baby son.
These days she visits farm women, just as isolated as she once was.
Aside from Mima, one woman doesn’t receive visitors. She told Mima “some women fall onto a bed of feathers when they marry. I fell onto concrete.”
One husband insists upon sitting at the table whilst Mima talks to his wife. There is no privacy on the farm.
Another turns the radiator on the kitchen when he eats his lunch. The room soon becomes toasty. Once he leaves the room, he switches the radiator off. The winter chill once again engulfs the women. Continue reading ‘Loneliness of the distant farmers wife’
Ruth Snelleman
In the country, everyone talks about rain. Conversations aren’t initiated with “how are you?” Rather, “how many points did you measure?”
The Rev (Deacon) Mima Mitchell, 71, works as a rural outreach worker in the Loddon Mallee presbytery. She lives in a small town with a bakery, a news agency, a pub and a church, and that’s about all.
For the past thirteen years she has visited isolated farming families in the Mallee.
Cake stalls, film nights and book sales saw Burwood Uniting Church, Melbourne have helped raise $4,000 for Mima’s work.
Speaking to Crosslight Mima said, “farmers get one income from their crop. They have to wait until after harvest to know what they can spend.” It costs nearly $1,000 to fill a tractor. Still, some spend a third of their income on freight.
Between the months of June and September last year, there was no rain. “Some farmers are just floundering. They don’t know where to go” said Mima.
One family she visits is $2.5 million in debt.
But it’s the farming women that Mima connects with. She sits at the kitchen table and just listens. “The loneliness and isolation they experience are things that city people couldn’t possibly understand,” she says. Continue reading ‘The Ministry of Mima’
RUTH SNELLEMAN
The Uniting Church in Australia will help lead this year’s Greenbelt festival in the UK.
In a first, the synod of Victoria and Tasmania’s alternative worship project officer Cheryl Lawrie will conduct worship at the festival. She will also meet “people who are a bit further on the journey than I am.”
Greenbelt, the world’s best-known annual Christian festival, will be held from 22nd to 25th August at Cheltenham racecourse in England.
About 25,000 people will hear music and talks and attend worship, workshops, art installations and theatre. The festival encourages people to explore their faith in ways different from the mainstream churches. It welcomes those with and without faith.
To Cheryl Lawrie, Greenbelt “opens another world - not to copy, but to learn from the questions other people are asking so we continue to question ourselves.
“Greenbelt offers broader perspectives than anything we have in Australia,” she told Crosslight. “Here, it is easy to think we are doing something new and that we are the only ones doing this.” Ms Lawrie’s theme will be the memory of water.
She described this opportunity as a “lovely privilege”. She hopes to speak about the commission for mission’s communal justice project.
Artists performing at Greenbelt 2008 include Michael Franti and Spearhead, 1 Giant Leap and Fightstar. Continue reading ‘Greenbelt Festival, UK’
RUTH SNELLEMAN
Orphans in Kampala, Uganda, have a new home thanks to the Uniting Church.
Church members from Swan Hill, Victoria, and Atherton, North Queensland, built the house during an 18 day visit.
“It took ten days, 10,000 bricks and the help of six locals,” Swan Hill UCA minister, the Rev Maurice Wildish, told Crosslight. “But we finished the external and internal ground floor walls.”
The volunteers each paid $5,500 towards the project. The Swan Hill church contributed $12,000. The visit was organised through the Kampala Pentecostal Church (KPC).
Eight children will live in the house with a surrogate mother. Because of the poverty caused by the regime of Idi Amin “the basic things of life are very precious to them and greatly appreciated,” Mr Wildish said. Continue reading ‘Eighteen days in Uganda’
KAYLEA FEARN
Like many other congregations St. Leonard’s Brighton Beach, Melbourne, took part in the Ten Conversations program organized by the UC’s commission for mission. What led from that was an awakening to become more involved with local young people.
“We wanted to be more mission-oriented and more present in our local community. We chose to develop the ‘Seasons for Growth’ program in our area because we knew that behind the glossy Bayside veneer, there is a lot of hurt and loss.
“We knew that this was an area where St. Leonard’s could be of service,” says Vivienne Mountain, St. Leonard’s parishioner and Seasons for Growth site coordinator.
The original idea for the ‘Seasons for Growth’ program was inspired by Mary MacKillop, who said, “Never see a need without doing something about it”. The Mary MacKillop Foundation was inspired by this and cultivated the program using common idioms based on Christian principles.
The children who attend ‘Seasons for Growth’ are dealing with confusing changes including the death of a family member or pet, parental divorce and change of house or school. Continue reading ‘Seasons for Growth article – Crosslight’
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