Abstract
In May 1985, the National Assembly of the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) formally established the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress (UAICC). This new organization offered Aboriginal and Islander people associated with the Uniting Church an opportunity to break out of the multiple bondages that had shackled them. They were now in a position to develop indigenous styles of worship, evangelism, and ways of making their own decisions.1 Anthony Nichols, the Anglican principal of Nungalinya College, the ecumenical Aboriginal theological college in Darwin, favorably likened the establishment of the “Black Congress” to the Protestant Reformation.2 Mission Probe, a magazine produced by the Uniting Church’s Commission for World Mission, compared the creation of Congress to the dawning of a new day in Australian history: “something that future generations may regard as a turning point in Australia’s Christian—and national—history.”3
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Notes
Robert Bos, “The Congress: A New Movement in Aboriginal Christianity,” in The Cultured Pearl Australian Readings in Cross-Cultural Theology and Mission, edited by Jim Houston (Melbourne: JBCE, 1988), 175.
David Malouf, 12 Edmonstone Street (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985), 47.
Robert Bos, Jesus and the Dreaming: Religion and Social Change in Arnhem Land, Unpublished PhD, University of Queensland, 1988d.
William W. Emilsen, “The Origins of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress,” in Mapping the Landscape: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Christianity, edited by Susan Emilsen and William W. Emilsen (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 65.
On Clarke’s commitment to the Aboriginal struggle, see the tribute in Delphine Delphin-Stanford and John Brown, Committed to Change: Covenanting in the Uniting Church in Australia (Melbourne: Uniting Church Press, 1994), 50–53.
For a discussion of the Bicentennial debate, see the case study by Susan Emilsen in “‘Conflicting Loyalties’”: Aboriginal Land Rights and the Bicentennial Celebrations. A case method approach to Uniting Church History,” Uniting Church Studies1:1 (March 1995): 1–11 and my “The March for Justice, Freedom and Hope, 26 January 1988,” Uniting Church Studies 16:2 (December 2010): 45–71.
Avril Hannah-Jones, “Competing Claims for Justice: Sexuality and Race at the Eighth Assembly of the UCA, 1997,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12 (2003): 277.
Peter Lewis, Acting in Solidarity? The Church’s Journey with the Indigenous Peoples of Australia (Melbourne: Uniting Academic Press, 2010).
The Covenant Statement is reproduced in Theology for Pilgrims, edited by Rob Bos and Geoff Thompson (Sydney: Uniting Church Press, 2008), 633–40.
Don Carrington, “Converting the Uniting Church,” Northern Synod School of Theology, 1983, 20.
Max Hart, A Story of Fire, Continued: Aboriginal Christianity (Blackwood, SA: New Creation Publications, 1997), 174.
Bobbie Sykes, “Opening Statement,” in Black Power in Australia: Bobbi Sykes versus Senator Neville T. Bonner, edited by Ann Turner (South Yarra, VIC: Heinemann, 1975), 12.
Among Charles Nyamiti early books are African Tradition and the Christian God, (1977) and Christ as Our Ancestor: Christology from an African Perspective (1984).
Wilbur Chaseling, the founding Methodist superintendent at Yirrkala, spoke of the cross as the Jesus-Totem and of Jesus as our Ancestor: see his Yulengor: Nomads of Arnhem Land (London: Epworth, 1957), 171–72.
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© 2014 Jione Havea
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Emilsen, W.W. (2014). National Black Congress: Ambivalence and Ambiguity. In: Havea, J. (eds) Indigenous Australia and the Unfinished Business of Theology. Postcolonialism and Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426673_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426673_10
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