Our Life Together

Northcote Uniting Church (NUC) is perhaps a little different to other churches you may have encountered in real life or seen on a screen. This document gives a sense of our “way of proceeding:” who we are, what it is we think we are doing, how we go about it, and some key concepts and practices.

Our earnest hope is that you will join us as we develop authentic, life-giving, fun spiritual community in the heart of Northcote.

Our Story

Every community has a history and a story which shapes how it engages the world.

The foundations of the current, re-founding, congregation at Northcote Uniting Church go back to a church-plant called Cafechurch, which sprang from a Pentecostal church in Melbourne’s Eastern Suburbs in 1999. From then until 2020 we met in a variety of cafes and pubs in Melbourne.

We began to start to use the church in Northcote in 2019, and re-founded the Northcote Uniting Church congregation in 2020.

The key thing to understand about our community is that for 20 years we didn’t have a building. We didn’t have an organ or a church roof to worry about, no coffee rotas, no washing up – all those things which make up the bread and butter of so much of church life. We just had one another. Time to think and talk about things. Things like: what does it really mean to be a Christian disciple in 21st Century Melbourne? What exactly is “church” and what is it actually for? Who is this God person, and what does God want for us and from us?

What we have come up with is not some set of ideas, but rather an approach to being community together. We take ideas seriously because we strongly believe that it is possible to be a serious person with integrity and to be a passionate Christian disciple. We take community seriously: it’s the core of what we do together, and a beacon of connectedness in an atomised culture. We believe that how we live has significance, and that life has a meaning – and that figuring out how to articulate that meaning is itself a key part of that meaning.

Because to be a Christian is to be a Follower of the Way of Jesus. Not an isolated monad with some ideas, but a living, embodied, student of the one who reveals God to us.

The Way Up Mount Fuji

There are many spiritual traditions: how can you be so old fashioned and exclusive as to espouse any one of them in particular? Are you not thereby condemning all the others as valueless, not something one should waste one’s time on? Can you not see that there are many ways to enlightenment, there are many roads up Mount Fuji?

Alister, our minister, wrote a blog series on the whole vexed question of how to go about being a Christian in a pluralist society, but here’s a very, very short take: the point of the paths up Mount Fuji is to use them to get to the top of the mountain. Not to sit around beside the lake and admire them from afar. The point is choose one path and get on with it.

Community

Perhaps the starting point for us is community.

Here’s one way of looking at it: the only way that the surprising central claim of Christianity – that the best, truest, profoundest image of the God who loves us, individually and by name, is an executed state criminal who God raises from the dead, in an astonishing reversal of everything we might expect, is so profoundly countercultural, unlikely, and perhaps even offensive, that it only makes sense in the context of an actual existing community of real flesh and blood people who are sharing their lives together, and attempting to base both their shared and individual lives around this astonishing claim.

Full disclosure: it is a pretty big ask, and we aren’t perfect. But that’s the shared context in which we try to shape our lives.

What would it be like to be part of a community which made the central claim of Christianity – that there is a God who really loves you and is prepared to go to extra-ordinary lengths for you - seem plausible?

Belief and Disbelief

We don’t need you to believe as we believe. Indeed, there is significant variety in the details of what people in NUC believe. However, you won’t get much out of the experience if you don’t at least entertain the idea that the Christian tradition has something important, true, and potentially, life-changing to say.

To start on the journey is to suspend your disbelief, like when you’re watching a film. I have a friend, quite a devout atheist, who is obsessed by Star Wars. In fact, he is so committed to it that when he was married, he had an honour guard of Imperial Stormtroopers. He doesn’t literally believe that “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” But he is prepared to enter into it. To see where it takes him.

That, it seems to us, is a good enough starting point for beginning the journey.

Relevance

A big challenge – perhaps the biggest challenge – for the church in our contemporary western setting is something called “post-Christendom.” It’s a complex and contested idea, but a quick way to understand it is that not only do most people under 50 not attend church regularly, neither did their parents, and quite possibly neither did their grandparents. Church is no longer anything like as central to the community and state as it once was. Given that church and state have been closely intertwined in the West approximately since Constantine the Great extended official tolerance to Christianity in the 300s CE, it is an enormous change for the church - and for society as a whole.

The question is: now what?

Two possible approaches appear possible. One is something we might call “relevance.” We could Attempt to downplay the differences between Christianity and the contemporary culture. This can be done either by seeking significant overlap between Christian and “secular” ideas (with the accompanying temptation of adopting contemporary ideas without remainder) or by making your services as “seeker sensitive”, as non-threatening and non-surprising as possible.

The other broad approach is something we might call “keep Christianity weird.” Christianity is an ancient, ancient tradition, replete with surprising ideas, interesting characters, canny wisdom, and transformative spiritual practices. So why not lean into it?

The temptation for the second approach, of course, is to attempt to retreat from a frightening modern world and pretend it is still the 1950s (or the 1550s, or the 320s, depending on your denominational heritage.)

How do you “keep Christianity weird” without retreating into an imaginary past?

Ideas

To start with, we think that ideas are important. We spend a lot of time in discussion, working together to improve our ideas about God and faith and the world and all the rest. It seems to us that one of the big problems that the church has in our context is that it has more or less checked out of lively intellectual engagement with the world. We don’t want to be fundamentalists endlessly attempting to defend the indefensible, nor stuck in theological arguments which are completely opaque to the rest of the world, and we definitely don’t want to turn into a pale reflection of the “secular” world. It is what shapes our community

Here’s an idea: what if we thought about “truth” as being more like being a watering hole drawing the sheep in rather than a fence around a paddock penning everyone in with a strict rule about insiders and outsiders?

What does it mean to hold onto a distinctively Christian worldview, but also be open to the world? Can there be a truly “generous orthodoxy”?

Faith and Belief

Having said that, the main point of what we do is not to have a certain set of beliefs about the universe. The point is trust and ensuing transformation towards the best possible version of yourself – the most loving, freest, integrated you that you can be.

You might like to reflect on the various shades of meaning in the word “belief.” Do you believe that the world is (roughly) round? When someone says “I believe in you” are they saying something like “I accept the theory that you exist”? Or are they saying something about your trustworthiness?

The nexus between belief-in-an-idea and trust is where a lot of interesting, transformative stuff happens. So we spend a fair amount of time there.

What might it be like to trust in a God who loves you passionately? How might that affect all of your life – your self-identity, your relationships, your work… everything?

The Bible

When people who don’t come from a church-y background come to our gatherings, I wonder whether they are wondering why we spend so much time reading the Bible together? If you come one week and we spend an hour unpacking a few sentences from a book written by who-knows-who, roughly two thousand (or so) years ago, you might think: hmm. Interesting. And then you come back the following week, and we are giving earnest attention to the next few sentences. And so on. And what we do mostly. Even when we aren’t doing deep reading of a passage, we always bring it in, always use it, always refer to it. We give it a primacy that might surprise people.

Why?

Essentially, like the Uniting Church Basis of Union we think that Scripture witnesses to Jesus, the Word of God – that is, Scripture points to Jesus, and Jesus is what God has to say about Godself.

Engaging with Scripture is kind of what makes our gathering “Christian” at all (as opposed to a group of generally nice and well-meaning people having dinner together.) The Christian worldview is formed by reflecting on Scripture, informed by reason, experience (or, better, context), and tradition. This is sometimes called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

Where do we look for ancient, life-giving, transformative wisdom? What points us towards God?

Ignatian Spirituality

It might surprise you to learn that a Protestant church like us uses a lot of catholic-seeming spiritual practices. This is because a lot of the spiritual riches of the church have been downplayed in the Protestant world, and were maintained and developed in the Catholic world, especially within the religious orders. Also: the Uniting Church is ecumenical to its core – the clue is in the name.

Some of us have had significant formation in the Ignatian tradition – named after Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and thus use it quite a bit. The reason we like it is that it is a tradition where commitment to Jesus is the primary point, and it involves deep engagement with Scripture, but not always at the slightly abstract, intellectual plane that is more common in Evangelical circles.  

For example, we do a lot of prayer where you are invited to imagine yourself in the boat with Jesus – feel the spray in your face, feel the roughness of the rope in your hands, hear the wind whistling around your ears. The point is that God speaks to us through our emotions and imaginations as much as our ideas.

It's a much richer tradition than I have time to explain here – you can read much more here.

The Uniting Church

We are a congregation of the Uniting Church in Australia, in the Synod of Victoria and Tasmania, part of the Presbytery of Port Philip West, which stretches from roughly a little east of our front door north to Kyneton, and South West to Lorne.

The Faith of the Church

In terms of faith and belief and so on, there appears to be a certain amount of confusion about what the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) in fact does believe. Literally an hour ago someone asked me if the Uniting Church is Christian (which it is.) If you are interested, you can check out a document called the Basis of Union, which was the original agreement between the UCA’s predecessor churches in 1977 (Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian – you can read more about that here.)

Sex, Gender, Sexuality

Northcote is an affirming church who welcomes all people, regardless of gender and sexual preference.

One of the key distinctives of the Uniting Church is we will ordain people of any gender (including trans people) and any sexual orientation. We are also able to marry same gender couples. Because the UCA is a large church, with people from a variety of cultural backgrounds and theological stances, not every congregation avails itself of this opportunity.  

But we do.

Covenanting

The Uniting Church covenant relationship with First Peoples is at the heart of our Church. It is a commitment to stand with our First Nations brothers and sisters in Christ in their struggle for justice. Click here to read more about the Uniting Church’s commitment to walk as First and Second Peoples together.