great australian presbyterians
Dr Andrew Dutney
Another Centenary
In case you'd missed it, this year is the centenary of federation. It is also the centenary of the first step in the long journey that would lead to the formation of the Uniting Church. On the 24th of July 1901 the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Australia met in the Sydney Town Hall. It had not been easy to get to that point. Presbyterianism came to Australia in the form of three divided denominations, the Church of Scotland, the Free Church of Scotland and the United Presbyterian Church. In Victoria the Free Church managed to spit into two and the United Presbyterian split into three synods. So by the eighteen fifties there were six Presbyterian denominations in Victoria and a similarly splintered church in the other Australian colonies.
Before we get too smug about those quarrelsome Scots we might bear in mind that there were five kinds of Methodist church in Australia at that time too - the Wesleyan Methodist Church, the Primitive Methodist Church, the United Methodist Free Church, the Bible Christian Church, and a very small contingent of the Methodist New Connexion. Between 1888 and 1901 these separated Methodist churches were gradually reunited, and in May 1904 the First General Conference of the Methodist Church of Australia was held in Melbourne.
The first reunion of Presbyterian churches took place earlier, in Victoria in 1859. Presbyterians in the other colonies pursued the same goal, with the final reunion taking place in Western Australia in 1901. But these Presbyterian churches were still divided by the borders of the colonies. In 1884 the separate churches joined in a federal union which, in 1894 approved a scheme for organic union. But it had to wait until 1901 for the Presbyterian Church of Australia to become a reality.
It Was All About Mission
In his address to the General Assembly the newly installed Moderator, the Right Reverend John Meiklejohn, encouraged the 'fathers and brethren' to recognise the implications of the union that they had just confirmed. Their motivation for going through the difficult and protracted process of uniting Presbyterians in Australia in one church had been a desire to enter more effectively into mission in the surrounding society. The Moderator spoke of the challenges facing the church in the new century.
The forces that are arrayed against the Church are numerous and strong, and so it has always been. Mammonism, worldliness in its many forms, the lust of gold, the love of pleasure, that selfish devotion to the things that are seen and temporal, and which blinds the vision to the reality, and the beauty and abiding worth of the things that are unseen and eternal, are perennial sources of evil, and have always been at work as hindrances to the Church's growth… It is because of the evil that is in the world that [Christ] came, that He might by the power of His love overcome it, and lead those who are held captive by it [out of] captivity. And the mission of Christ is the end and aim of the Church.
He described particular challenges at the turn of the twentieth century - and you could be forgiven for thinking they have a familiar ring to them at the turn of the twenty-first century. These included 'a diminishing feeling of attachment to the Church and interest in its ordinances…, an increasing laxity in the sacred observances of the Lord's Day, and a growing shamelessness on the part of evil-doers in doing shameful deeds'. Mr Meiklejohn pointed also to the intellectual scepticism which so marked the age, especially modern scepticism about Christian doctrine on the part of Christian ministers. That kind of teaching, he said, 'is depressing the heart and weakening faith, and chilling the zeal of many in the Church, and keeping outside of it not a few honest and earnest men and women who are in sympathy with the Church's aims.' It was not that the growth of scientific insight that characterised the time was to be feared or criticised. In fact the Moderator expressed the view that the best secular learning was consistent with Christian truth in the way that it sought to address the deepest human needs - something which suggested to him that 'there is at least some ground for cherishing hope with regard to the Church's mission.' However, he said,
No greater harm could befall the Commonwealth than that the Churches of the Commonwealth should lose faith in their mission or in that message of Grace and Salvation through the faithful propagation of which their mission is fulfilled.
If the new Commonwealth of Australia was to be healthy it needed a healthy church within it, he argued. And the church, which he called 'the conscience of the body corporate', would be better equipped to serve the Commonwealth by being united nationally itself. That's what the Presbyterian Church had been intending by its union. And, Mr Meiklejohn said, 'the success of the one might give us some confidence in the success of the other.'
But the Moderator saw something going on for the church that went beyond sharing in the federalist mood of that generation of Australians.
Union is not only in the air, and in public prints, and in Church Assemblies: it is in the heart of every Church that has any claim to be a Church of Christ; for in so far as that claim is well-founded, His spirit dwells in the Church, and His spirit is a spirit of Union, for it is the spirit of Love.
So even now that the Presbyterian Church had finally achieved a state of union in Australia, the Moderator told its first Assembly,
…we have put ourselves in a position in which we can face the question of union with other Churches… [Far] from seeking by union to raise a barrier between ourselves and others, we have rather been preparing the way for the removal of those that exist.
'The End and Aim of the Church'
'The mission of Christ is the end and aim of the Church', the Moderator insisted. It is the mission of proclaiming the 'message of Grace and Salvation' in Christ - of liberation from sin and of reconciliation with God and neighbour in the 'spirit of Love'. He saw that mission could only be pursued in the distinctive historical and social circumstances in which particular generations of the church find themselves. And he saw that for that generation of Australians, entering the new century in a newly united nation, the church would need to be a united and uniting church if its proclamation was to ring true.
But Mr Meiklejohn tried to make it clear that Church union not only represented a better stewardship of resources. And it not only responded to the mood of the time. It was also, and most importantly, an expression of what was essential to the church's identity in Christ - a sign of the truth of the Gospel they proclaimed, of reconciliation with God and neighbour in the 'spirit of Love'.
How in the world can we be the church?
How in the world can we be the church? In 1901 it seemed clear enough. We can't be the church in this twentieth century world in the way we were in the nineteenth century - divided into dozens of splinter groups, bickering and competing against ourselves. In the new Australia being the church means seeking union within our divided denominations and going on to seek union with other Christian denominations.
So, one hundred years ago, the first Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Australia affirmed its 'sympathy with the great ideal of a United Evangelical Church of Australia' and appointed a committee 'to consider the principles on which the Presbyterian Church of Australia is prepared to consider the question of a larger union.' An overture was made to other denominations and by the next Assembly, in 1903, conversations had been taking place with the Anglican, Baptist, Congregational, and Methodist churches.
Very few Uniting Church people know this story, and even among church historians it has never been a big topic of conversation. But it is part of our story. By 1957, when the Joint Commission on Church Union was formed and began to work on the plan of union that would see the formation of the Uniting Church in Australia, the Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian churches already had more than half a century of experience behind them. From that first overture of the Presbyterian Church of Australia they had been involved in six distinct sets of union negotiations, in four different combinations of negotiating denominations, producing five bases of union and two united churches - and they were not even close to tiring of the quest for union.
How in the world can we be the church? Throughout the twentieth century that question was being answered in ways that included the search for church union. It was the most obvious way for a divided church to respond to God's gift of unity in Christ and establish signs of reconciliation in a world torn apart by wars - world wars, civil wars, revolutionary struggles, counter revolutions, police actions, wars 'hot' and 'cold'. In this world the church had to be a church of reconciliation. The quest for church union was an expression of this impulse in the twentieth century, and the Uniting Church in Australia is one of its legacies.