Assembly '97 News Home page Documents next story		'Fatal' funding crisis hits church Thursday, July 10 A funding crisis has well and truly hit the Uniting Church, the chair of the Assembly's stewardship task group said yesterday. And the result could be fatal. Assembly General Secretary Rev Gregor Henderson, in his report, contributed to the sense of fiscal foreboding by saying the Assembly was under "intense financial pressure" while being asked to take on more tasks. Presenting the report of the Task Group on Mission Resourcing and Stewardship Planning, Rev Peter Whittington said death had taken a grip on the Uniting Church. He said there was a need to recognise the new mission context and "face the dire situation we'll soon be in financially". The church needed a culture change to "generosity and risk taking in all sections of the church", he said. Task group member Ruth Powell said research in Australia and overseas confirmed the need for a renewed vision for stewardship. She said the Uniting Church needed to consider three points: stewardship must be integrated into regular rhythms of congregational life; stewardship and mission belong together — people are motivated to give when they participate in mission; the church must be open to many and varied ways for people to participate. Another task group member, Mr Murray Fysh, prefaced his remarks with comments from a friend in the Presbyterian Church in the United States – a church also dealing with the issue of sexuality: "We only talk about sexuality because we don't want to address issues of money." Mr Fysh encouraged the church's involvement in electronic funds transfer by saying the use of cash reinforced the idea of church as recreation and not the work of God. Cash is what we play with, he said. The task group's recommendations, seeking the implementation of the major proposals in the report "Many Opportunities, Many Doors", is listed among proposals for the Assembly to accept formally. More bad news for the Uniting Church came today from data "hot off the press" from the National Church Life Survey, which included the Uniting Church triennial census. NCLS researcher Ruth Powell reported that, alone among Australia's churches, the membership of the Uniting Church is declining, having gone down by 4% since the last survey. On an average Sunday, 150,000 people attend church in about 2800 congregations. Further, the UC is the oldest church in Australia with 49% of members aged 60 or over. Also, the UC does less well than other Australian churches in retaining its own young adults, with the UC keeping 45% against the national average of 54%. The picture is not all gloom and doom with the UC topping all the churches in the involvement of its members in community groups — 42% compared to a national average of 33%. In other indicators of church vitality, the UC fares reasonably well. About 6% of all UC attenders were new to Christianity in the last five years — very close to the national average. Ruth Powell sees another positive: "The things that are indicators of church vitality are not beyond the Uniting Church to do." She suggests that UC people can learn to share their faith and invite others to church, and can foster a greater sense of belonging, which are other facets of vital congregations on which the UC ranks lower than the national average.