Scots Church Adelaide - Uniting Church in Australia

Why "rewire" the church?  Church has been at the centre of my identity. It’s formed me, frustrated me, deeply angered and hurt me, guided me, and protected me. Some of the most challenging ideas I have ever met, far more radical than the lawn meetings of my student days, have come from the theologians of the church.  There has been a sense of connection to the tradition and wisdom of millennia. And, inevitably, the frustration of tradition hide-bound.  I remember singing the words of a hymn one Sunday morning, “nothing changes here...” and one of the youth group muttered sotto voce to his girlfriend, “God, you can say that again!”   What worked for our  parent’s church doesn’t necessarily work for us.  I notice it often doesn’t work for them anymore, although older people are sometimes more gracious about their frustrations! Life changes, we change, and constantly need to reassess where we are going.

This little church on the web is modelled around the metaphor of an old and treasured house.  It's the house our parents lived in and inherited from someone we never knew.  The house is strong and robust, but needs rewiring.  Our ways of thinking and being need to change to make the house liveable and practical. Otherwise it will be a burden, not a base camp for life.

Living the Life

Life is a messy circle. We are forever tethered to the biological in which we live and upon which we depend.  It shapes our hopes and fears, and limits our reaching into the transcendence we sense so close to us.

Life confronts us with pain, injustice and absurdity.  There are times when it seems there is nothing beyond the muck and senselessness. Then there are days when something intangible touches us.  Beyond our biology, more profound than our all too common wish fulfillment, and not merely germinated and fuelled by the terror of our death, there is more.  Joy, beauty, mystery, oneness, hope, love… all these are real.  Carried and mediated by the raw atoms of our body, they are not caused by them.

We are not able merely to contemplate these. They are found and proved by the act of living.  As much as we make sense of life, and seek to be open to the transcendent, we must also live life.

In the messy overlap of thinking and doing, acting and reflecting, learning and forgetting which forms life, this section of our website focuses mostly on the doing and being.  And then, of course, we will return to think and make sense of it all.