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Ex-Pres: God is a stirrer
Ex-President Jill Tabart believes God has been stirring the Uniting Church during the three years of her term.
"We've seen it in the exciting growth in the Ministry of Deacons, Community Ministry and Lay Ministry Teams," she said.
"Even in the stirrings about the range of Assembly discussion documents of these past three years that we've clamoured to have a say in, and complained about being asked to, and criticised as not being my thoughts exactly summarised in print — even in those stirrings I discern the Spirit of the living God encouraging us to stretch the limits of our comfort zone, to ask the awkward question 'Why not?'
"We're bound to fail a few times in the process but that risk is about getting it wrong a few times and gloriously right at others." Jill said the highlight of her term was the Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne earlier this year.
"Not that it solved all the problems Australia is facing at this time," she stressed. "No — far from it!
"There was anger and there was bitterness. There was pain and there was frustration. There was grief and there was awakening of memories too heavy to bear.
"But there was an honest looking each other in the eye as the stories and the feelings were shared, and there was hope.
"There was determination that all of us are in this together … and there was a deep underlying conviction that God was there with us and that the healing of the nation, the reconciliation we long for, is in God's hands."
Jill then drew comparisons between that conference and the Uniting Church where she believes similar emotions are being evoked by a range of issues.
"For some the issue is homosexuality," she began. "For some it is cultural identity. For some it's property management.
"For some it's resisting the possibility that there may be different ways of understanding God's word. For some the issue is generational differences. For some it's the rate of change that is overwhelming.
"Whatever the issue, pray God we too may find the courage to look each other in the eye and be honest about what we are struggling with, or enduring.
"Pray God we may not falter in our determination that we are all in this church together, and that together we must find a reconciling way forward for the health and sanity and wholeness of all within this church.
"Pray God we too may hold on to the deep underlying conviction that the healing and reconciliation, the true unity of the Spirit for which we yearn, is to be found only in God's hands."
Although Jill mixed with international figures during her term, she said she placed more significance on meeting church members.
"Meeting the Pope in spectacular circumstances in the Sydney Domain was not as significant for me as travelling out to Goondiwindi in western Queensland, or hearing from people what it means to be church in the desperately dry properties out from Longreach or the lonely isolation of homesteads south of Broken Hill," she said.
"And having lunch with US President Bill Clinton in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra doesn't even begin to compare with the enriching fellowship of President's Table meals in every synod."