I am an Australian, currently living in the United States. I was born into a deeply religious family (Anglican and Presbyterian) with a strong commitment to ecumenism and social justice. In 1977 the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational Churches in Australia united to form the Uniting Church in Australia which we joined as a family, leaving behind my parents previous denominational commitments. By 10th or 11th grade I knew that one day I would be an ordained minister though it was to be some years before I entered seminary. Seminary (United Theological College, Sydney and SCUPE, Chicago) was a torturous process but also a profoundly transformative time. Perhaps the greatest transformation being my marriage to Jenny! Since seminary I have pastored congregations in Australia and the United States.

So who am I, what are my concerns… my faith…

I read Marva Dawn’s ‘A Royal “Waste” of Time: The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the World’ (1999: William B Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan) a while back. I find myself both reassured and challenged by Dawn’s books (having also read ‘Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down’). Indeed, in my introduction on the American Liturgy List I wrote the following:

The highlight of my life as a presider/pastor so far occurred a few months before(!) my ordination when invited by a group of youth to lead a ‘youth service’ in their congregation (not one I was pastoring). On Palm/ Passion Sunday evening we celebrated Vespers with Lucernarium, Ps 141: chanted, intercessions, etc., and with drama, dance, choruses, electric guitars, Metallica and Indigo Girls! It has been all downhill since My passion, somewhat mired in the mud of pastoral ministry, is this work of faithfully drawing together the Holy Tradition and contemporary idiom in creative and challenging and grace-filled ways.

If this is the affirmation then the challenge is, of course, to live the dialectic Dawn describes between necessary inculturation and essential Tradition.

Further, in reading William Abraham’s ‘Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: from the Fathers to feminism’ (New York, NY: Oxford University, 1998) I discovered a language for describing what I believe to be that essential Tradition.

And this is what excites me, this challenge of deepening my own faith within the language – the canon – of the Church’s faith in Christ and finding ways of sharing this faith with the Church and God’s world.