Messy Church goes wild
By Sandy Brodine
Australia is a vast country with wide and varied landscapes and climates. While it is a country of great beauty, our land is also a dangerous place to live, where Summer can see one part of the country ravaged by bushfire and another under dangerous flooding. It is not surprising therefore that concern about climate emergency is strong.
Within our churches, we also have a growing understanding that issues of climate and care for the environment cannot be separated from our relationships with our indigenous brothers and sisters, and their knowledge of and love for this land. “Country”: the relationship to the land of their ancestors is the fundamental basis of life for Australian indigenous peoples.[1]
Although the indigenous peoples have cared for the land, we ‘Second Peoples’ who arrived as colonisers have done much damage both to the land, and to our relationships with those who were here before us. These issues are complex and painful and are ones that we are only beginning to wrestle with as church and as society.
As a beginning step to acknowledging the reality of our situation, the Uniting Church in Australia, recognises this in the Preamble to the Constitution:
Through this land God had nurtured and sustained the First Peoples of this country, the Aboriginal and Islander peoples, who continue to understand themselves to be the traditional owners and custodians (meaning ‘sovereign’ in the languages of the First Peoples) of these lands and waters since time immemorial.[2]
Not only are our indigenous people the custodians of the land, but they are the holders of the local creation stories, which show that country is more than just a dwelling place for human beings. “It is also the place in which the creator-ancestors live and continue to speak and guide through river, mountain, sea and myriad animals and plants. The land is therefore something of a sacred text for indigenous peoples. Properly read and understood, it shows us who we are and what we are to do in this world.”[3]
We are learning to walk alongside our indigenous sisters and brothers as second peoples in this land, and to learn from them about how to care for this land, as they had done for millennia before our arrival.
It is hardly surprising then, that a theology that understands God as creator and sustainer, and one who invites us into relationship with one another and the care of God’s creation alongside God, permeates our Messy Churches. At the simplest level, many Messy Churches have taken up the habit of using sustainable or natural materials for activities, rather than plastic, or glitter or other environmentally damaging materials.
We are beginning to grow and develop our understanding of how God calls us to care for the environment and reconcile with one another into our Messy Church programs, so that our Messy Church communities can embody the kind of love that the Triune God lavishes upon us. The hospitality and invitation to reconciliation that God has shown us, form practices that we share with one another as we gather around scripture and wrestle with it Messily, when we celebrate what God has done with us, and for us, and as we eat together in shared community.
We are finding ways to engage in more complex questions around science and faith, and to encourage our faith communities to wrestle with God, and each other as they find ways to live out their faith more authentically and discover ways they can make authentic responses to issues such as the climate emergency we find ourselves in. Being able to engage with Australia’s First Peoples around these issues is of the utmost importance.
Moving forward, I hope that we can continue to plan to intentionally implant these theological perspectives into all we do in Messy Church, so that we can listen and learn more intentionally to our Indigenous Brothers and Sisters, who have so much to teach us about how to care for our planet, and with whom we seek to be reconciled.
This article has been edited based on a piece written by Rev. Sandy Brodine in the book ‘Messy Church Goes Wild: Caring for the World We Live in’, edited by Lucy Moore, BRF, Abingdon, 2022. Pages 83-86.
[1] Garry Worete Deverell, Gondwana Theology- A Trawloolway man reflects on Christian Faith, Morning Star Publishing, Reservoir, 2018. page 10.
[2]The Uniting Church in Australia, Revised Preamble to the Constitution. https://assembly.uca.org.au/images/stories/covenanting/PreamblePoster-web.pdf
[3] Garry Worete Deverell, Gondwana Theology- A Trawloolway man reflects on Christian Faith, page 11.