By Adrian Pyle, Director of Chaplaincy and Connections
Five things I think Jamie Breden (Head of Faith and Community at Scotch Oakburn College) and I tried to explore at the Uniting Connections Conference.
In our session we shared some of the ways we’ve been trying to strengthen the relationship between Uniting Church schools and the wider life of the Church, alongside Jamie’s story of helping shape a new role at Scotch Oakburn College. These were the ideas I hope people might have heard:
1. Uniting Church schools are not simply stakeholders of the Church: One of the themes I’ve been exploring for some time is that schools are not organisations sitting alongside the Church. They are educational expressions of the Church itself. That is not such a subtle distinction. I think it changes the way we think about identity, governance and purpose.
2. Identity grows through conversation as much as through policy: Many of the resources we’ve developed in Victoria and Tasmania haven’t tried to provide definitive answers. They’ve instead been designed to provoke conversations: What is distinctive about the Uniting Church? What is our school’s unique contribution to its life? How might boards, staff, students and parents engage with those questions?
3. Formation belongs to whole school communities: Jamie described a role that is neither a traditional chaplaincy nor another teaching position. His experience suggested that nurturing the spiritual life of a school is increasingly becoming something woven through leadership, relationships, service and everyday culture, rather than resting with one person alone.
4. Student voice may be one of our greatest opportunities: An encouraging theme in both our presentations was the growing ownership students are taking: leading worship, shaping community life, engaging in service and exploring faith in ways that are authentic to their own context. Formation deepens when students are invited to participate rather than simply receive.
5. The work is about preserving the essentials of the past with a creative eye on the future: Jamie’s description of Scotch Oakburn College wasn’t nostalgic. It acknowledged that schools change, communities become more diverse, and new questions emerge. The challenge is not to recreate a former era, but to find faithful ways of expressing the Uniting Church’s ethos and identity within today’s educational landscape.
I deeply appreciated how our two presentations complemented one another.
I spoke about resources, frameworks and questions. Jamie spoke about what happens when those conversations begin to take shape in the everyday life of a school. I think we emphasised though that formation is never just documentation or roles. It is a community learning, over time, how to live out its purpose.
