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The members of presbytery include ordained Ministers, Pastors and other lay people, representing 35 Congregations within The Hunter Presbytery. Some of these have multiple worship centres, which means there are 53 locations across the presbytery where the Uniting Church meets to worship and engage in ministry and God’s mission.
The role of the presbytery is to “exercise oversight over congregations within its bounds, encouraging them to strengthen one another’s faith, to bear one another’s burdens, and exhorting them to fulfil their high calling in Christ Jesus. The Presbyery will also promote those wider aspects of the work of the Church committed to it by the Synod and Assembly.” This includes individual and corporate actions for positive change in society – a focus of the Uniting Church in Australia.
For the Uniting Church, the true tests of our faith in Jesus Christ are our individual and corporate actions in the world in which we live.
God’s compassion for the world shown by Jesus Christ was not just an ethic for relationships between individuals. It includes social compassion that challenges societal norms, social structures and communal arrangements that are destructive to the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of people.
The primary focus in Jesus’ teaching was “the kingdom of God” and how it may become a reality “on earth as it is in heaven”.
The reality of the kingdom is only partial now – where Christ’s disciples loyally live out the kingdom’s values – in the hope of its fullness at the consummation of human history.
In its social justice work, The Hunter Presbytery witnesses to what life would be like on earth if God (as understood by Jesus) were king.
It means critiquing today, as Christ did in the gospels, many of the social injustices which can unfortunately creep into the “kingdoms” of this world, such as:
For the Uniting Church, the true tests of our faith in Jesus Christ are our individual and corporate actions in the world in which we live.
God’s compassion for the world shown by Jesus Christ was not just an ethic for relationships between individuals. It includes social compassion that challenges societal norms, social structures and communal arrangements that are destructive to the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of people.
