From the Chaplains
National Reconciliation Week
30 Years – Looking back at the Uniting Church’s Covenanting Statement
The Uniting Church in Australia has been a proactive leader in the reconciliation movement.
In 1994, The Uniting Church delivered an apology to the First Nations body of the Uniting Church, the Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress (UAICC), for the part the church played in the destructive processes and policies of colonisation in this country.
Even though the Uniting Church did not exist as a denomination until 1977, in its apology it took responsibility for the hurts inflicted on First Nations peoples by the Christian church in general since 1788.
The UAICC graciously responded to the apology, and the apology and response together have been come to be known as the Covenanting Statement.
This week, to mark Sorry Day and National Reconciliation Week, we have been proud to acknowledge in our Chapel services the 30th anniversary of this Covenanting Statement.
Delivered 14 years before Kevin Rudd’s official Apology to First Nations peoples on behalf of the Australian government, this covenanting statement was well ahead of its time. It expresses a vision of reconciliation and articulates the complexity of this process in a way that the rest of mainstream non-Indigenous Australia was yet – and is yet – able to.
The artwork below tells a sacred Creation story of the Wagalak sisters and speaks particularly of the alliance of four Clan Nations and their responsibilities for the land and waters of their yirralka (lands).
The painting also depicts the sacred ground where ceremonies take place and in particular the Wukindi ceremony, to restore relationship when blood is spilt and bring reconciliation.
The painting is in itself an initiation for Uniting Church members to stand with members of the UAICC in their struggle for justice.
The Covenanting Statement articulates a desire in the Uniting Church from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous to realise, through the church, a vision for a better future.
On behalf of the Uniting Church in Australia, the then President of the Uniting Church, Dr Jill Tabart, read out an apology to the Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress for the harm caused to Aboriginal and Islander Peoples by the actions of the church.
Here is an excerpt:
My people did not hear you when you shared your understanding and your Dreaming. In our zeal to share with you the Good News of Jesus Christ, we were closed to your spirituality and your wisdom.
In recent years we non-Aboriginal members of the Uniting Church in Australia have had the privilege of journeying with the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress and with other Aboriginal people. We have become more aware of the sad impact that in earlier times the church and our culture had on your people.
So, on the one hand, we give thanks with you for those of our people who have lived among your people bearing faithful witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ which brings hope and liberation to all. We give thanks to God who has empowered and encouraged your people to stand firm and exercise moral leadership throughout these two centuries.
But on the other hand, we who are non-Aboriginal members of our church grieve with you, our Aboriginal and Islander brothers and sisters. We grieve that the way in which our people often brought the Gospel to your people, belittled and harmed much of your culture and confused the Gospel with western ways. As a result, you and we are the poorer and the image of God in us all is twisted and blurred, and we are not what God meant us to be.
We lament that our people took your land from you as if it were land belonging to nobody, and often responded with great violence to the resistance of your people; our people took from you your means of livelihood, and desecrated many sacred places.
Our justice system discriminated against you, and the high incarceration rate of your people and the number of Black deaths in custody show that the denial of justice continues today.
Your people were prevented from caring for this land as you believe God required of you, and our failure to care for the land appropriately has brought many problems for all of us.
We regret that our churches cooperated with governments in implementing racist and paternalistic policies. By providing foster homes for Aboriginal children, our churches in reality lent their support to the government practice of taking children from their mothers and families, causing great suffering and loss of cultural identity. Our churches cooperated with governments in moving people away from their land and resettling them in other places without their agreement.
I apologise on behalf of the Assembly for all those wrongs done knowingly or unknowingly to your people by the Church and seek your forgiveness. I ask you to help us discover ways to make amends.
You can read the Covenanting Statement here in full; both the heartfelt apology and the gracious response from the UAICC.
Here at Pymble, we are proud to be a school of the Uniting Church – a church with a history of walking alongside First Nations peoples, humbly acknowledging the great wrongs that have been done in the past and how this damage continues to impact the present.
As they have learned about this Covenanting Statement this week in Chapel, our students have felt proud to be part of this tradition.
We are right to feel proud of the steps that the Uniting Church has made on the path towards reconciliation. But there is still a lot of truth-telling to be done.
Like the fibres of this unfinished woven basket, woven by my baba (sister) Esther Wilfred (Minyerri community, Alawa land, NT), the threads of the stories of our past still need to be woven together, so that we can see, with clear eyes, the whole story.
Blessings and peace.
Edwina O’Brien
Assistant College Chaplain