Lent and racism

It's Lent in the Christian churches, a time to reflect, become aware, and repent of our bad behaviour. To repent means to stop the bad behaviour and put in place systems and practices designed to prevent such behaviour from occuring again. Repentance also means doing what you can to restore and repair the broken relationships your bad bahaviour has left in its wake. Including, of course, making just reparation.

Repentance is not primarily a practice for individuals. It is a practice for institutions, corporations and communities.

At the corporate level, I would call on the churches to repent of their racist behaviour towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, racist behaviour that includes:

• Blak-cladding, that is, making your institution look mob-friendly on the outside, whilst remaining thoroughly racist on the inside. Examples of black-cladding in churches include adorning rooms, buildings, regions and projects with blakfella tropes, hanging Indigenous art, and holding multiple 'welcome' and 'acknowledgement' of country ceremonies. None of these things are bad in themselves. They become bad when they are designed to hide the fact that the organisation continues to discriminate against blakfellas: our bodies, our knowledges, and our cultures.

• Expecting blak people to work for casual rates, or for free. The vast majority of blak people who work for churches do not enjoy permanent, secure, employment in jobs that are ongoing. Most of us work for the church as volunteers or casuals, even if we are ordained and/or have recognised qualifications in theology and ministry. Why? Because we, and what we have to offer, are simply not valued. Not enough to employ us, anyway. If there is a whitefella or someone from a more recent immigrant group going for a proper job, it is they who will most likely get it. For mob are, quite literally, the last and the least in the church's colonial economy.

• expecting underpaid or volunteer blak people (out of the goodness of our hearts) to do the anti-racism work for the whole organisation. For racism is not something that dominant cultures (read 'white' cultures) give much thought to. And certainly not something they allocate time, energy or money to. For, by definition, racism does not affect dominant cultures. 'If it is not happening to me, then it is not happening'. Thus, when blak people complain about being ignored or mistreated, the default response is 'well, you do something about it'. Which is to entirely mis/place where the responsibility lies. It is to burden victim-survivors with the task of expiating the pertpetrator's sin.

• marginalising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges. Although blak people have a long experience with this country, an experience which gives us a unique and expert perspective on how to live the life of the spirit well in this place, that is apparently of little or no consequence for the dominant culture. The churches and their instutions continue to ignore and supress the fact of our spiritual seniority in this country and worship, instead, at the feet of Europe and North America. You cannot study blak knowledges at the churchly institutions where whitefellas study. You will rarely encounter blak teachers, preachers or liturgists, except for those who are brought in for one-off, entirely token, bits and pieces. Because what is important is whitefella knowledge. Everything else, especially the knowledge of mob, is entirely surplus to requirements.

All of these corporate behaviours do enormous damage to the bodies and spirits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We are forever wounded. We hurt. We languish. Our health suffers. For each day we must rise to the struggle to be ourselves, even in this, our own country.

The remedies for these damaging behaviours are obvious, are they not? Change the heart, not just the outward appearance. Value blak people and what we can contribute. Employ and learn from us. Care for us. Work with us. Allow us be who we are in God. Just as Jesus would.

Garry Worete Deverell

Lent 2025

White Supremacy with a Human Face: reflections on Australian theological education

I have been in and around theological education in Australia since 1992, when I first enrolled in a Bachelor of Theology through Whitley College and the Melbourne College of Divinity.  As far as I can tell, I was the very first Aboriginal student to successfully enrol in that hallowed institution. Unsurprisingly, working my way through the degree proved challenging. For myself, certainly, but also for my teachers and fellow students. For I was a 'difficult' student. 

On the one hand, I was academically capable and articulate in class. On the other hand, I struggled to find a home within the prevailing culture. My teachers and my class mates were overwhelmingly white and middle class. They valued being polite and avoided any discussion which might highlight white privilege or the prominence of white people in cultural violence. Matters of theology (from books written almost entirely by white Americans or Europeans) were discussed mainly in the abstract, thus indulging the white fantasy of objectivity.  Or, when discussion strayed into the personal or the biographical, it was white and middle-class worlds which were assumed to be both 'normal' and 'moral'.  Many, not all, of my comrades would shift uncomfortably in their seats when I found the courage to speak about what was normal for my family and community or to make a critique of what they assumed to be 'normal'. As a consequence, I was often taken aside by teachers and asked both to 'tone down' my contributions and to 'be respectful' of others.  At the time, I felt beaten up, misunderstood and despairing. I fell into a long and deep depression. Now, from the vantage point of years and experience, I can see that the dominant culture was simply seeking to expel and control what it understood to be a threat to its equilibrium.  

To be and feel at home in this 1990s world of Australian tertiary theological education required much more than a talent for theological reflection. You also had to possess the cultural capital that came with being white and middle class. You had to know, deep in your belly, how to navigate the cultural rules. And I didn't know. Nor could I! Because here is the cruelest fact of all about white, middle-class, theological education. It is fundamentally and structurally racist. If you suceed as an Aboriginal person, even if they give you a degree (or two, or three) you will never be seen as the equal of similarly trained white people. Even if you write books and teach with aplomb and insight and grace, your legitimacy will forever be questioned. You will always have to work harder and longer and with far less institutional, financial, and personal support than everyone else. Simply because you are blak. Simply because you will never belong to the privileged society that makes the rules. 

There's more. What I have said so far could apply, equally, to many people 'of colour'. South-East Asians. Semites. Indians and Sri Lankans.  Africans. South Americans. Pacifica people. Even Indigenous people who have come to Australia from other parts of the world. But Australia reserves an especially intense form of racism for its own Aboriginal people. For mob represent not only white society's 'other'. We represent that other which has survived colonisation and attempted genocide at the hands of the white settler community that now controls this country. We are therefore arch symbols of both the failure of colonial ambitions and the shame of its genocidal desire. We are, quite literally, white Australia's worst nightmare. As such, we attract a sense of revulsion in the white gut that runs stronger and deeper than all the more common forms of structural racism.

That is why, despite the many welcome changes that have occured in Australian theological education - despite the great influx of teachers, students, and theologies from the sub-continent, south-east Asia and the Pacific - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and perspectives are barely there at all. The best the established churches can do is Nungalinya, an institution that continues to teach theology at TAFE level because its financiers and white governors believe that we are not capable of much else.  Wontulp Bi-buya was much the same, despite having a Torres Strait Islander man as its Principal. In any case, Wontulp was closed just a few weeks ago for lack of funds.  The School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Divinity, which sought to become a place where Aboriginal theologies were developed and taught by Aboriginal academics, was recently closed after less than three years of operations. Whilst it is true that the School 'failed' because it could not raise sufficent funds to stay operative, it is also 'failed' because that was always going to be the case. It is very clear now, if it has never been clear before, that established churches have no interest in Indigenous theologies or the development of a tertiary-educated Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander leadership. The School of Indigenous Studies was set up to fail. And now it will be blamed for its failure. Which leaves only the NAIITS programme at the Sydney College of Divinity, a programme run by a single Aboriginal academic using funds raised in north America, as the last hope for our people in Australian tertiary theological education.*

Let me be as clear as I can about what all this means.  White supremacy has a human face in Australian theological education. Its face is that of the concerned white ally who expresses sympathy and solidarity as a private individual, but who continues to occupy a secure place in a system that excludes and villifies the crucial contribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers, students and theologies. It is the face of tenured white theologians who do not hesitate to appropriate the labour of untenured Indigenous theologians and to teach the theologies of the marginalised as if such theologies were their own. It is the face of white instutional moderators, bishops, presidents and principals, who agree that the theologies of Indigenous people are important, but allocate not a dollar to either employing us as tenured academics or to recruiting and supporting Indigenous students.  

There are very few Aboriginal people with research degrees in theology. There are very few tertiary-trained Aboriginal clergy or church leaders. We are marginal to society, and perhaps even more so to the established churches. Most of us do our ministries and our theological work entirely without recompense. But that is why our theology is so crucial for Christianity in Australia. We, more than anyone else, occupy the symbolic space of the crucified one, the Jesus who was driven out of town and crucified on the cross of empire.  We are those who have been exiled from our own land. We are the strangers and sojourners the colonial church can only ever pretend to be. Could it be, then, that Aboriginal people might be just the theological teachers that the church needs to learn the way of Christ? Could it be that Aboriginal theologians, who have experienced the paschal mystery in the embodied life of our own history, might be exactly the ones who can teach that path to others?  Could it be that Aboriginal theologians might instruct the church about the primacy of country and of creation to our common survival? I believe so. But belief has never been enough. What we need, also, is communal and institutional change. Trunk and root change. Some kind of revolution.

I am tired and I need to retreat a while to lick my wounds and commune with country. For I am the one who, with valued blak and white allies, founded the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Divinity. I am one who, along with the entire Aboriginal staff of the University, was made 'redundant' just a couple of weeks ago. I am tired, and hurt, and sad once more. But I take comfort in the words of the Johannine Christ, 'If the world despises you, be aware that it despised me first' (Jn 15.18). Now, as always, and especially in the midst of this present catastrophe, we can speak from the depths of the divine experience with empire.

*An update from March 2025. NAIITS appears to have disappeared as well.

This post is dedicated to my esteemed Aunt, Dr Anne Pattel-Gray, and my cousin Ms Naomi Wolfe. Blak theologians both.

Garry Worete Deverell

August 6, 2024

The Kenosis Model: how the churches can reckon with their colonial legacy

Let me begin by acknowledging this country, Gadigal country, its ancestors and elders. Like my cousin Naomi, I am trawloolway. Our country is in the NE of lutruwita/Tasmania. We are privileged to walk on the lands of the Gadigal. Thank you for your gracious welcome.

Today I want to remind the churches you have a colonial legacy, and in five senses:

1. You participated in, and still benefit from, the stealing of our lands;
2. You have blood on your hands because those who participated in the massacres, the frontier conflicts, the genocidal policies concerning our people, were overwhelmingly Christian;
3. You took the lead in the attempted destruction of our spirituality, our way of life, especially during the missions period;
4. You participated in, and continue to be largely silent in the face of, the ecocide which accompanied the genocide: as you acquired country, you damaged it through your ignorance about how to manage it
5. Many of you continue to deploy an imaginative terra nulius regarding our people by effectively pretending that we don’t exist. Our voices are not there in the policy-making bodies of your councils, your agencies and your educational institutions. You are uncurious about the country you walk on and the knowledge we have of its ways and its spirit. There continues to be a lack of curiosity about our theology, which is different to your theology in fairly fundamental ways.

This account gives rise to a fundamental question: how are the churches to reckon with this colonial heritage. Well, to answer this (at least in part), I will appeal to the Pauline tradition as we have it in the New Testament: first in the Christological hymn of Philippians 2 and then in the exhortation towards an equitable distribution of resources in 2 Corinthians 8.

So let’s turn, first, to Philippians 2, which says:

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father.

Now, I want you to notice three things about this passage.  

1. It is addressed to a bunch of Christians who are divided, one against another, who are selfish – who look out for their own survival and wellbeing at the expense of others. Does that sound familiar, at all?
2. The Apostle then contrasts this behaviour to that of Jesus. Who, though enjoying a certain ascendency in the cosmic order of things, empties himself (kenosis) of all such power and privilege in order to come amongst human beings as a slave who has no power at all (doulos). 
3. The passage then creates a model, a pathway, which Christian communities are encouraged to imitate and follow in order to be truly alive and vital. It is the path of kenosis. A dying in order to rise to a rather more elevated – thoroughly more other-centred - mode of being. A dying to all that is power-over, power-acquisitive, power-for self-alone. And a rising to power-with, power-giving, power for the wellbeing of others.

So, the question arises. How are you settler Christians, you immigrant Christian communities - you who have empowered and enriched yourselves at the expense of Indigenous people - going to let that power go? How are you going to redress the balance? How will you take the power you acquired by genocide and ecocide and return it to those you wronged, and continue to wrong?  (Note this: if you are Christians, then it can never be a question of whether you return such power. It can only be a question of how. For if you do not imitate Christ in this manner, can you really be called Christians at all?)

So, let’s turn to just a tiny bit of that ‘how’, beginning with some paragraphs from 2 Corinthians 8:

For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. And in this matter I am giving my advice: it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something— now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means. For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has—not according to what one does not have. I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written,

‘The one who had much did not have too much,
    and the one who had little did not have too little.’

Now, the context here is that there are two church communities, one that is very poor and another that is quite rich. And we’re talking actual, economic, resources here. Not so-called ‘spiritual’ resources, intangible things like wisdom or humility. We’re talking money. Money and property.  The apostle appeals to the rich church to share its abundant resources with the poor church by invoking, again, that kenotic Christology. The argument, in summary, goes something like this:

• Remember the story of Jesus. He was rich, but he became poor for your sakes. So that you might acquire some of his riches.  (So far this could be about intangibles. But wait . . .)
• So, like Jesus, I’d like you to hand over your wealth, your money, to the poor church.  I’d like you to act with the same love, the same generosity of spirit, as that you found in Christ.
• Not, mind you, to the point where you become destitute and in need of help yourselves. Think, rather, that the excess you enjoy can provide what is lacking in the poorer community.  This is Paul’s ‘socialism’.
• The goal here is something like a balance, an equality, so that you both have what you need.

Now, obviously, there is no hint in this text that the rich church gained its riches by stealing its wealth from the poor church.  But, this being so, how much more ought the colonial church consider the ways in which it might return its stolen resources to the people from whom it was stolen?

Now, I’ve given talks like this before. And the question that arises, right way, is usually ‘OK, but what would that actually look like for our own local church community, our own denominational organization?’  Well, the answer to that might become the substance of treaty proposals, ways in which the deeply uneven balance of power between colonial and Indigenous communities might be rendered more equal.  So, I invite you, the members of the colonial church, to consider the following:

At the denominational level, plan to hand the properties you were given by the Crown without fee or compensation back their original Aboriginal owners, also without fee or compensation. Where properties were purchased from the Crown, or else from subsequent owners, arrange to vest the title of those properties in the name of the original Indigenous owners under a lease-back scheme. This makes both the use, or the disposal, of those properties a matter of negotiation and careful treaty between Indigenous people and settlers. Where purchased properties remain in the hands of the denomination because local mob do not want to become owners, contribute half of the commercial income on such properties to mob: 25% to local owners and 25% to Indigenous ministries run by and for our people. The same would apply when properties are sold. Split the proceeds of the sale.

At the local congregational level, contribute 10% of your annual budget to ministries run by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, in perpetuity. Whether there is an existing denominational agreement for the lease-back of properties in place or not, approach your local mob with the question: could we form a relationship with you that includes your use of this space for community gatherings and programmes, without fee or compensation?

A more just sharing of the land you have stolen from us, including its commercial value, would obviously make a huge difference to the kinds of programmes Aboriginal Controlled Community Organisations could run to assist our people to escape from poverty and reclaim our rightful heritage as the sovereign peoples of this country.  It would also make a huge difference to our capacity to reclaim and pass on our practical wisdom and spirituality to the next generation, whether Indigenous or settler.  In the church, the sharing of these resources would provide a sure and reliable economic base for the work of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ministries, and for our theological research and teaching.  The fruit of these ministries would make for stronger Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and higher profile for our spiritualities and theologies in the knowledge repositories of our nation. Knowledges that are desperately needed if we are to heal, and form a more mutually supportive relationship with Country. 

But land and resource justice is really just a beginning, a foundation.

At the same time, the churches would do well to allow us – for the very first time! - to set up camp in the centre of your corporate life: to allow us to migrate from the periphery - where we are out of sight, out of earshot, out of mind and heart - into the places where theology is formulated, and decisions made about ministry and mission. Because you need us.  Your churches are in decline because they are seen as either too irrelevant or too corrupt to make a meaningful contribution to solving the many problems that plague us.  Aboriginal knowledges, on the other hand, are on the up. Universities are including our wisdom about the earth, the stars, flora, and fauna, as well as the human body and mind, in their curriculums. Climatologists, botanists, and environmental scientists are consulting with us about how to better manage country. Fire authorities are seeking to learn about our fire-farming techniques. 

The churches need to get with the programme. You need us, and our perspectives, to help you deploy your theological and ministry resources in ways that help and do not harm, in ways that produce patterns of healing and care rather than wounding and indifference.  You need us. So why are we not on your councils, your boards, and your ministry teams? Why are we not amongst your bishops, your general secretaries, your moderators? Why are we not amongst your theological teachers and researchers?

For our theology is really rather different to yours. It is centred in:

• the community of creation, rather than the reduction of community to the purely human
• the ancestral divinity of country, rather than the restriction of divinity to a Palestinian Jew and (in some traditions) his followers
• the ethics of caring for country, rather than a limiting of care to human beings alone
• the governance of people by country (learning to imitate the patterns and processes of the non-human world), rather than the governance of everything by people
• The mission of country together with human community, rather than the mission of Christians
• Rituals which celebrate and make present the ancestral divinity of country, rather than a reduction of the divine to Christian symbols alone

Our theology is much older than yours, up to 120,000 years older. It is also deeply connected to how we live with the earth in general, but to this country in particular. If your theology is to ever leave the shores of the European enlightenment and come to live in this place, some really radical transformations need to take place. And you need us to help you make those transformation. Because to be frank, you don’t know what you don’t know.  And what you think you know is proving quite inadequate in the face of the damage you’ve done since you arrived.

So, let me be so bold as to suggest that the churches are at a 'kairos' threshold of decision: a right, critical or opportune moment. You are at a crossroads.  You can either continue on the path you have taken since you arrived here, the colonizing path: which is to make yourselves the centre of all things and therefore leading exploiters of both this land and its Indigenous people.  Or you can take a different path, a path which would mean decentring yourselves, giving up a lot of that power and status you have become accustomed to, and listening, instead, to the wisdom of country and its children; listening to those whom you have habitually harmed and ignored, to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the people of this land.  

Allow me to conclude by citing the prophet Jeremiah (6.16):

Thus says the Lord:
Stand at the crossroads, and look,
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way lies; 

and walk in it.
Then you will find rest for your souls.

Perhaps the churches might now answer the divine voice differently than did the ancient Israelites? I quote again:

But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’

Garry Worete Deverell

Walking Together Conference

Gadigal country

October 22, 2022

Sober Reflections during National Reconciliation Week

          ‘What I did not steal must I now restore?’ 
                                                                       Psalm 69.4b

In Australia, National Reconciliation Week (NRW) runs from May 27 to June 3 and is immediately preceded by Sorry Day on May 26.  The dates are significant. The 1997 report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, Bringing Them Home, was tabled in the federal parliament on May 26.  Sorry Day has become an annual observance inviting Australians to reflect on the genocidal policies which sought to destroy Indigenous families and communities and to renew community resolve to avoid ever enacting such policies again.  May 27 commemorates the date of the 1967 referendum in which the Australian constitution was changed to recognise the existence of Indigenous people as people (rather than flora and fauna) and June 3 recalls the 1993 ‘Mabo decision’ of the High Court of Australia to overturn the racist legal fiction of terra nullius. Beginning as a week of ‘prayer for reconciliation’ within some Australian churches, the week has now been taken up in some sections of the wider community as a way to encourage the building of bridges between Indigenous and other Australians. 

I have to say that, to this Aboriginal Christian leader, National Reconciliation Week appears to be struggling as a tool to extract a more just settlement for our people. It is struggling, I think, for two reasons. First, instead of encouraging the colonial establishment to address issues of justice for First Peoples persistently and all-year-round, NRW has become a way in which organisations may signal their virtue in this area for one week per year, largely for PR reasons, but effectively ignore our concerns at every other time. Second, it has become increasingly clear that it is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people themselves who are expected to do most of the work of Reconciliation Week, just as we are expected to do most of the work of reconciliation itself. Which means, simultaneously, that our prophets grow weary and sad at the lack of progress on justice for our people whilst our colonial gubbas congratulate themselves for their virtuous attention to the politically correct, all the while refusing to lift a finger to actually change anything.  Which leads us to ask, with the Psalmist, ‘what I did not steal must I now restore?’ Must we who did nothing to create Indigenous suffering now be the ones who must do all the work of healing and restoration? Why cannot those who have benefitted from the dispossession of our people take responsibility for putting things right?

Many others have written about the consequences of conservative government for the reconciliation cause, pointing to the extraordinary lack of progress on matters like treaty, incarceration rates, health outcomes, family integrity, meaningful employment, access to country, housing and the preservation of language and culture. I don’t intend to add to that commentary. Rather, I want to point out that the very churches that initiated the week of prayer for reconciliation have now, very clearly, abandoned the cause in any meaningful sense. 

The Uniting Church has long enjoyed a reputation for leading the way on matters of reconciliation. And there are plenty of signs that it continues to do so. Its national constitution has a preamble declaring that First Peoples enjoyed a relationship with God prior to the coming of Europeans. The Constitution also recognises and gives formal institutional authority to a national ‘Congress’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander members of the church who are able to run their own affairs (up to a point).  The church also funds a small number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ministries around the nation and has handed some of those ministries land and property for their beneficial use. The church has an interest in a registered training organisation, based in Darwin, specifically designed to offer certificate and diploma level education to aspiring First Nations pastors and church workers.  In addition, the church each year provides worship and other resources on Invasion Day, National Reconciliation Week and NAIDOC Week for the nourishment of its members in the ongoing work of reconciliation.  All of which is terrific, at least to the naked eye.  

Of course, as someone who was involved in the Uniting Church as a Congress member for 20 years or so, I can tell you with some experience that the gains of our people over that period were hard-won.  The church authorities were very good at managing public perceptions, offering fine words of apology and commitment at the very time they were also steadfastly resisting our overtures for greater control of our affairs and a more practical investment in our ministries. I personally witnessed the official and institutionally sanctioned persecution of a Congress minister. Many First Nations leaders fell into despair and illness along the way. I, myself, eventually left the church becaue I could not find meaningful employment and because the battle to find a secure place to stand within the church was making me sick. Behind the glossy presentation of the Uniting Church’s leadership on matters of reconciliation there remains a fairly common, everyday racism.  I still come across UC leaders who have never read a book about the true history of this country, have never had a respectful conversation with an Indigenous person, who have never studied with an Indigenous academic or theologian, and never felt the need to do so. To date, the senior leadership of the church remains overwhelmingly white, and there are no Indigenous people on the permanent teaching staff of any of its theological colleges. In my observation, it is still the case that Australia’s most progressive church on these matters harbours a fundamentally white-blind membership that cannot really see what the problem is.

The Roman Catholic Church appears to have both a national and state-based apparatus to address matters of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander concern. There is a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council reporting to the Bishop’s Conference, and a funded secretariat that functions nationally as well as on a state-by-state basis. Most states and territories appear to have at least one funded Indigenous ministry, with Tasmania being a notable exception. In addition, anecdotal evidence would suggest that Catholic schools and welfare agencies often form enthusiastic relationships with Aboriginal organisations and communities, Catholic and otherwise. These bodies collaborate happily both on curriculum and policy materials and on the building of relationships between people from Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds. Certainly, most of the Indigenous Catholics I know are reasonably happy Catholics. For all this good work, it appears that the church has still invested very little in the development of indigenous theologies, theologians and clergy. The Roman Church is exemplary in its multiculturalism, not least amongst the clergy. But there are still no Indigenous bishops or tenured theological teachers and precious few deacons and priests. There are still, in other words, almost no Indigenous voices where they count most: amongst the pastoral and teaching authorities of the church.

The Anglican Church of Australia, likewise, has established a national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander council, which reports to the General Synod. This Council, of which I am a member, consists mainly of representatives appointed by the 23 diocesan bishops. Several bishops do not appoint anyone at all. Some apparently appoint non-Indigenous people.  The General Synod funds a less-than-1.0 EFT national secretariat and an annual meeting for this Council, but it does not fund any on-the-ground Indigenous ministry of any kind. That is left to individual dioceses, which vary wildly in their engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The Diocese of Melbourne, for example, employs no-one to engage with Aboriginal people.  There are two Aboriginal priests in the diocese, one who works in a parish and another (myself) who works in academia. Across the church, nationally, it would be fair to say that almost all Indigenous church workers, ordained or not, engage in ministry with, or on behalf of, our people on our own time and at our own expense. The number of funded Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ministries can be counted on one hand. The Anglican Board of Mission is allowed by its charter to fund individual projects that engage with Indigenous peoples, but that same charter prohibits the funding of wages or stipends, which effectively means that ABM cannot support Indigenous ministers, lay or ordained, to do long-term embedded ministries in Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities.  It is sobering to note that, whilst the General Synod can in principle appoint national bishops for both the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, there is currently no funding allocated to do so. The national Torres Strait Islander episcopate is therefore vacant, and the national Aboriginal episcopate is currently being funded on a part-time basis by Anglicare in South Australia.  

One might additionally note that pleas for a more meaningful engagement from the Anglican Church usually fall on deaf ears. Since its establishment in 1998, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Anglican Council has sought on multiple occasions both a meaningful covenant or treaty with the rest of the church, and a more substantial funding base to underwrite its aspirations. Neither have been forthcoming. At the local level here in Melbourne, the overtures of Aboriginal clergy towards a more practical approach to reconciliation are routinely ignored by church authorities. And, as with the Roman Catholic Church, it is still the case that there are no tenured Indigenous theological teachers in the mainstream theological colleges of the church, and less than a handful of Indigenous voices on diocesan councils in the whole of Australia. One can only conclude that reconciliation in the sense of restoring some measure of voice, dignity and justice to First Peoples is effectively terminal in the Anglican Church.

Notwithstanding these realities, churches routinely call on us in National Reconciliation Week or in NAIDOC Week to participate in symbolic acts of reconciliation, usually within the context of worship services run by white people who appear to be engaged in virtue-signalling. I, for one, find that this invitation, when it comes, is very often the ONLY invitation I receive from a church in an entire year, and it arrives just a few days before the proposed event because that is how long that particular church has allocated to planning. There is no relationship with this church. There has been no foregoing process of story-sharing or relationship-building, in the midst of which the particular event or worship service might actually take on some genuine meaning for the community that gathers. Furthermore, precisely because of the lack of conversation with the church in question, one cannot help but feel that there will be little to no positive outcome from the event for our people. There will be no commitments made, for example, to hand back some land, or pay the rent, or fund an Indigenous ministry, or engage in ongoing conversation with an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander organisation. To make those kinds of outcomes even remotely possible requires a long conversation, much education, and the fundamental conversion of racist hearts and minds.  All a one-off event can usually achieve is a self-congratulatory feeling of virtue in the hosting organisation for broaching such ‘complex’ issues and giving ‘difficult’ people like me a platform.  

All of which leaves us Indigenous Christian leaders in a place of considerable dilemma. Most of us are already exhausted by this point, because we have already endured many weeks, months and years of scorn, ignorance and indifference: in casual conversation and on media, both social and traditional. We are deeply sceptical about the value of doing what is asked of us. But we feel we have a responsibility to our people, especially our kids, to keep speaking out, to keep fighting the fight as our elders did before us at great personal cost, even though it is so very, very difficult to do so. So, we pull ourselves together, put on a smiling face, turn up, do our little bit and hope for the best. We pray that God will give us patience to answer all the hurtful and disrespectful questions without losing our cool. And we go home even more exhausted, and usually just a little bit depressed. Depressed because the questions have not changed in years, depressed because the church seems stuck in a time-warp when it comes to addressing the question of justice, depressed because like everyone else, we long for signs of light, but we rarely see it appear.  And really it is just oh so hard to keep the whole thing going.

In spite of all this, or most probably because of it, I am a person of prayer. I pray not because I am serene, I pray because I am desperate. Without the water from the well, which is the word of the suffering Christ, I would surely succumb to the floods of despair with which I am overcome at every reconciliation event. ‘Help me ancestors, help me Jesus, to stay alive, that the promise of your justice and peace may stay alive in me’.  That is my prayer, and most days – especially during Reconciliation Week - that is about the best I can do.