Rebel push to control churches

Rebel push to control churches
Jill Rowbotham, Religious affairs writer
12nov05

DISAFFECTED members of the Uniting Church in Australia will campaign to change state laws so they can keep their churches if they split with the denomination.NSW upper house MP Gordon Moyes, a minister in the church, plans to lodge a private member's bill to amend the state act under which a property trust owns and administers all property on behalf of congregations and community service organisations.

When Methodists, and most Congregationalists and Presbyterians, united in 1977, legislation was enacted in every state and territory.

Dr Moyes said it was never envisaged that they might want their properties back because "it was felt the proposed basis of union for the Uniting Church would be adhered to and there would never be dissatisfaction".

"When the Uniting Church came into being the courts decided that certain churches, schools and hospitals should either belong to the new Uniting Church or one of the continuing churches," he said. "Now a quarter of a century has passed that needs to be reviewed."

He proposes that if two-thirds of a congregation votes to leave the denomination, it should be allocated resources that might include the building in which it worships.

The move - led by the Evangelical Members of the Uniting Church and the Reforming Alliance within the Uniting Church, who are encouraging members to lobby MPs to support the bill - was prompted by dissatisfaction with responses from the church's leadership on the issue.

"Thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of the membership have left the church, dissatisfied with the moral and theological stance of the current leadership," Dr Moyes claimed. "If churches, schools or hospitals want to disaffiliate that should be possible."

He said it was a matter of justice that congregations that had built and paid for their properties should be able to have the titles restored to them if they left the church.

Uniting Church general secretary Terence Corkin said the church opposed the legislation, describing it as "neither helpful, nor necessary".

"The Uniting Church is not a company with shareholders, where if people want out they can sell up their share and cash it in," he said.

"The church is a community of people who are caretakers for the resources of that church over hundreds of years and we together hold that property to use it and redeploy it over a long period of time."

Mr Corkin said he thought that in many of the congregations the funds of the wider church had helped build the properties and establish the churches.

"Where's the justice in some people who do not happen to like a decision of the moment taking the asset for themselves and going their own way?" he asked.

Ordination of openly homosexual clergy is a source of division in the church but, according to Dr Moyes, a critic of the current leadership, there is also disagreement about theological education, the relative importance of evangelism and the church's general mission.

About 1.2 million Australians identify with the church, which has 250,000 regular parishioners.

© The Australian