Worship and Spirit

In the spirit of Uniting we...

• are committed to dialogue and cooperation with other churches and to participation in state and national ecumenical bodies and international bodies such as the World Council of Churches
• are willing to explore the implications of being in a community with people of many faiths, and what this means for the way we express and share our faith
• accept women and men as equals in ministry, including ordained ministries, and encourage women in leadership
• embrace diversity and are open to discuss controversial issues and what it means to be inclusive of all people and to respect differences
• involve all people in oversight and governance, seeking to make decisions together rather than being hierarchical. We rely on consensus decision making.

Congregations

Many faces... Many places... Many forms

Uniting Church congregations throughout the country are caring communities to which all people can belong. There are more than 2,200 of these congregations with 243,000 members and adherents.

A congregation may have hundreds of members or be a tiny community of a dozen people... be found deep in the heart of our cities, or in the most isolated and outback towns.

They have many faces. There are older people and young, families and single people, people of one culture or many. At least forty different languages are used in worship in the Uniting Church each week.

There are congregations that have existed for many years, and new and very different ones - cafe style churches, groups that find it better to worship on Wednesdays than Sundays, or who minister across a region rather than a local area.

While our congregations can be vastly different, each aims to embrace all people... to unify them with each other and with God. This is expressed in part of our having an open table for Holy Communion, to which all baptised people are invited, welcoming children for baptism and being willing to marry those who are divorced.

Our congregations are communities in which people seek to follow Jesus, learn about God, share their faith, care for each other, serve the local community, and seek to live faithfully and with real joy. This is the kind of engaging church to which we belong.