Church union in Australia

Abstract

Australian Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists came together as one Christian body on 22 June 1977. The Union of the Methodist Church of Australasia, the Presbyterian Church of Australia and the Congregational Union of Australia brought to birth the new ecclesiastical body in the Holy Catholic Church known as the Uniting Church in Australia. This has been described by the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, Dr Francis Rush, as the most significant ecumenical event in Australia's history.

The purpose of this research is to identify and record the main events leading to the formation of the Uniting Church in Australia. The long, chequered story of Union negotiations between the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational Churches in Australia has never previously been told in its entirety. CHURCH UNION IN AUSTRALIA recounts the details of this socio-religious drama, which has been enacted on the Australian stage during the past century.

At several stages of this human drama, specific resolutions have been passed in Church courts expressing the hope that the history of a particular period would be preserved. <(2)> But such resolutions have never resulted in any prepared recorded histories of the proposed Church Union of that period. Indeed, at several stages in the story, when negotiations resulted in dismal failure, a conscious effort was made to forget what happened because the outcome was so painful and frustrating.

Recently, scholars have been drawn to particular sections of this fascinating human drama in order to study the interesting dynamics at work both within an individual religous institution and between different such institutions. <(4)> But these studies have been limited to one or at most several aspects of the drama, rather than covering the whole story.

The method used in this research has been principally to discover and describe. Because of scarcity of reliable information in secondary sources, every attempt has been made to find and use primary sources previously unavailable. These have included large collections of letters written by the leading participants in the Union negotiations, minutes of committee meetings and working papers prepared for various kinds of conferences oriented to discussing aspects of Church Union. Where possible, interviews with prominent participants in the Church Union drama have been taped.

Because many primary sources have been used for the first time in this research and they may be difficult for other students to secure, some of the quotations from them have been longer than would have been the case if they had been easier to procure for further study. Some of these documents will be deposited with the collection the Rev. Robert MacArthur has been preparing for Mitchell Library, Sydney. Others will be deposited in the Uniting Church Archives, Sydney.