2 minute read
PULSE
PULSE Being the Church FUTURE DIRECTIONS AND MOVING TO A PLACE OF TRANSFORMATION
So I shouted out to some of my friends who have families or who work with families in the UCA to see how they felt about the Future Directions decision of the Synod. The first question I asked was what would you like the Church to know?
The responses were intermingled between working from home, home schooling and trying to be faithful in an overwhelming COVID situation. Life is always crazy busy for families no matter where they live and what they are trying to balance, and like many families before them, balancing Church life, children's life, and work commitments means that once a month is actually seriously understood by the church as regular attendance.
But attending isn’t what they are actually longing for, they are longing for a community to belong to. People who will wrestle with them about faith and what it means in their work situation and in their families, not in a judgmental way, but an earnest wrestling together. People who will inspire the best in them and grieve in their suffering, and be grace with them in all of our failings. This is really what it means to be Church, the verb not the noun.
So how did they feel about the Church’s decision? It was nice to hear a bunch of people who were tired and broken by the Church at times sounding hopeful. I must confess there is a little skepticism in their voice as they hope that maybe this time the church is actually going to put something in place to prioritise young people and ministry with people in the First Third of life.
Their hope that we will start to see more young people in leadership, real leadership, being paid and valued for their ministry in a way that they can afford to live.
Their hope that the Church will slow down just a little to make sure it has listened to those young people and families even if it means someone needs to go and meet them for a coffee, or takes the time to make a phone call. Their hope that as they share in a committee, the committee will listen to new ideas, even if it is hard to understand, or something they haven’t heard of before. We all know that these great plans are amazing, our hope and prayer is that the whole church can make the cultural changes needed to be able to bring this into reality. Our families love our Church, they remain because of that love, they long to see their children discipled and grown in the Uniting Church and for the church to grow. The Synod’s decision says this is important to us as a whole Church as well. COVID has moved us very quickly to a place of transformation, this gives us an incredible opportunity to do new things in new way, God is doing some amazingly courageous things. To quote a parent - “Those are some big changes. This gives me hope!”
REV. KAREN MITCHELL LAMBERT
PULSE LEADER
