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

Gondwana Theology: a trawloolway man reflects on Christian faith (corrected edition, 2024)

My 2018 book, Gondwana Theology: a trawloolway man reflects upon Christian faith, is now available for purchase in a new 'corrected' edition from ATF Press. 

Here are two commendations:

'In this compelling work, Garry Deverell offers a remarkable synthesis of autobiographical reflections, theological analysis and liturgical creativity. Putting aside theoretical jargon and conventional God-talk, we encounter here an Aboriginal voice that none of the churches in Australia can afford to ignore. This is a book that all Australian Christians need to read.'

Professor Mark Brett
Whitley College, University of Divinity

‘In this brief volume Garry wrestles with questions Indigenous Christians everywhere regularly confront. As have others before him he asks, “How does an Indigenous person authentically make the faith that has been used as a means of oppression of him and his people, the ultimate source of his liberation from that oppression?” “Furthermore,” he inquires, “how can he challenge the White Christian world that has all but subsumed his and his people’s lives in theirs, with the need for reconciliation and change of heart, if their own hearts continue to harbour only bitterness, resentment, and anger?” The key concern is, of course, “What will it require of each of us to live together well in the land?” Personal story, embedded with pointed inquiry, and a spiritual pleading for transformation, invites the reader to consider her own way of faith and her own journey toward wholeness. Enjoy in these pages, a work of heart and soul seeking the good way.’

Dr Terry LeBlanc
North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies (NAIITS)

Thanks are due to everyone who helped me get this book to press.

To purchase, please click here to go to the ATF Press bookstore.

Death and Bleeding: Gaza and Israel in Mark’s gospel

Texts: Lamentations 3.22-33; Psalm 130; Mark 5.21-43

You will all be aware of the conflict that is happening in the middle west (or middle east) at present. How could you not? You will be aware that on October 7, beginning at around 6.30am in the morning, Hamas attacked Israel by firing up to 5000 armed rockets across the border. This bombardment was followed by a series of incursions into Israeli society, which resulted in 1200 deaths and the taking of 251 hostages.

The Israel military responded immediately by bombing multiple sites in Gaza. To date, more bombs have been dropped on Gaza since Oct 7 than were dropped on the cities of Europe during the Second World War.  87 percent of infrastructure has been destroyed to date, including hospital, schools and universities. The Israeli military also began a ground assault on Oct 7 which continues to this day. As of June 22, according to the UN, there have been 36,000 Palestinian deaths as a result of these actions, including 103 journalists and 10,000 children. In addition, 224 humanitarian aid workers have been killed.  10,000 people remain unaccounted for, so the death toll is likely to escalate dramatically. On the Israeli side, total casualties stand at around 1,478.

You will be aware, also, that the Israel military campaign includes a blockade of humanitarian aid. Most Gazans are starving to death as they flee the bombs.  The UN’s special raconteur on the conflict, Francesca Albanese, has repeatedly called the strategy of Israel during the conflict as attempted genocide, since a civilian population is being collectively punished for the actions of a few.  

The stories we just read from the gospel of Mark, about the death of a young girl and the haemorrhaging of an older woman, are not unrelated to what we are witnessing in Gaza and Israel.

Scholars say that Mark’s gospel is a theological response to a cataclysm that occurred in Judea in 70 CE. In that year, the Roman Empire, which had occupied Israel and Galilee for 150 years already, finally tired of the many small acts of armed Jewish resistance to the occupation, sending in an overwhelming force to capture and destroy the apparatus of the Jewish state by completely destroying Jerusalem and its temple. The Jewish community was immediately transformed from an occupied but settled community into a refugee community. The population fled, and continued to flee, for the next two hundred years.

Mark’s community, we believe, was amongst those that fled. This fledgling community of Jewish Christians made its way, probably, to Galilee in the north where is found safe harbour. At least for a time. There it told its stories of Jesus as a way of finding the help and comfort of God in a really difficult time when hope seemed scarce.

We should therefore read the stories of Jarius’ dead daughter and the haemorrhaging woman not historically or even psychologically, but theologically.  Reading this way, we would note that Jarius’ dead daughter was 12 years old and that the haemorrhaging woman had been bleeding for 12 years. The number 12 has a specific theological meaning in the text of Mark. It stands for the 12 tribes of the people of Israel. Mark is telling us that the dead child and the haemorrhaging woman represent the suffering, bleeding and dead women of Israel. Those who, in so many ways, bore the brunt of Roman cruelty during the apocalypse visited upon them by Rome.

That Mark uses a dead girl and a bleeding woman to represent the suffering Jewish nation is significant. First century mediterranean social mores would have been offended at the fact. Woman in general, and bleeding or dead children in particular, were marginal to anything that was important. Important to men, that is. For men took to themselves all the major decision-making. When Mark chooses to discuss these women, however, he sees them for what they are: the scapegoats who carry in their bodies all the wounds that evil men inflict. Including Mark’s own version of that evil: forgetting or erasing their names! A reminder that even when we seek to do good, we often find ourselves participating in precisely the evil we are seeking to content.

That Jesus cares for this girl and this woman and is willing to cross rigid social boundaries in order to give them both life and healing, says a lot about the theology of Mark’s community. Jesus is, for them, the very representative of God. One sent by God to assist and help a suffering refugee community as it deals with the genocidal actions of Rome. One sent by God as a sign that God cares enough to reach out and help those who hurt the most: women and girls.

These stories can therefore help us to think theologically about what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. Here the suffering Christian and Jewish communities may represent not only the modern Jewish victims of Hamas, but also and especially the suffering Palestinian people, who have lived under the yoke of Israel and its Western allies since the ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe) that began in 1948. Especially their children and their women who, as is always the case in war, bear the brunt of the damage.  Like Mark’s community of old, we are encouraged to look for the people who represent the goodness and love of God, who walk amongst the ruins and offer a word of care and of healing. Those who, like Christ, can whisper a rumour of hope for the resurrection of peace amidst the catastrophe. Those who have the capacity to raise us from the depths.

In all of this, even woman and girls have agency, according to Mark. Both are called ‘daughters’ by Jesus, which affirms and underlies their dignity in the eyes of God. The woman who bleeds is commended for the strength of her faith, which is her scandalous courage to touch a male Rabbi she should never have touched. Here is the agency that all the people of God are called to. Have faith, take up your courage, reach out and demand the care and attention that is rightfully yours. 

I pray for the people of Palestine and of Israel who mourn this day. I pray for their dead. I look for the day when, like the woman in Imad Abu Shtayyah’s painting, they may rise from the ruins and return to their homes.

Garry Worete Deverell

June 30, 2024,

South Sydney Uniting Church

Reclaiming the Trinity as Kin: a thought experiment on Sorry Day

Texts: Psalm 29; Romans 8.12-17; John 3.1-17

Today marks the 27th anniversary of the tabling in Federal Parliament of the Bringing Them Home report, an enquiry of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission into the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from our families. The report found that the practice, which began in the earliest days of British colonisation, had persisted well into the 1990s and was specifically designed by the state to destroy the indigeneity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The report noted that children removed from their families were far less likely to speak their language and practise traditional culture. At the same time, they were far more likely to suffer the spiralling effects of childhood trauma. Unsurprisingly, if you try to remove the indigeneity from Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander kids and superimpose a toxic form of whiteness in its stead, Indigenous kids grow up with a sense of spiritual homelessness. Cast adrift in a world which simultaneously denies our indigeneity but also loudly and publicly blames us for it, we invariably retreat into the large hole inside ourselves where our country, family and culture used to be. A very dark and lonely place, usually.

The removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids from our families was a cruel and hideous policy which, despite beautifully crafted apologies from church and state in the intervening years, continues unabated. The rates of child removal are arguably higher now, in 2024, than they have ever been. That is why ‘Sorry Day’, which is commemorated on this day each year, must continue to be commemorated. For it reminds the Australian community of both the damage done by past practices and the damage it continues to do.

Now, as it happens, today is also Trinity Sunday in the calendar of the Western Church. The Church that came to this country as part of the colonisation project. The Church that continues to enculturate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into its spirituality. The fact of this correlation creates an occasion when an Aboriginal preacher, like myself, might engage in something of a thought experiment. And the thought experiment goes something like this: where would Christianity be if Jesus had been removed from his Jewish family and placed in the ‘care’ of a non-semitic culture and society. Would Christianity even exist? Would its God, the God named in the bible as ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ even be thinkable? Now, I rarely answer my own questions with any degree of nuance, but here perhaps is a start.

You will have noted already, I hope, that the trinitarian dogma is irreducibly familial in its language. It speaks of the divine as a little kinship network, a family. The historical Jesus, who apparently lost his father, Joseph, well before he reached his maturity, called his God ‘abba’, one of the more intimate names for ‘father’ in Aramaic. For him, the divine was not simply the progenitor of all creation or, in that very general sense, the father who watched over the Jewish people. For Jesus, the divine was his father. One who cared for him and taught him how to be a responsible member of the community as all good Jewish dads did.

It follows then, or so the trinitarian dogma would have it, that since the ‘daddy’ of Jesus was divine, the creator or all heaven and earth, then Jesus himself, precisely as a son, also had to be divine. That is point of the birth narratives constructed by Matthew and Luke, is it not? Yes, the evangelists say, for all earthly intents and purposes Jesus was Joshua ben-Joseph, the son of Joseph. But at a more profound level, he was also the son of a divine ‘father’: not simply ‘created’ by divine power but ‘begotten’, conceived not by the passage of sperm into his mother Mary’s uterus, but by the action of the Holy Spirit.

This ‘Holy Spirit’ cannot, at one level, be imagined in familial terms at all. Neither male nor female in the basic grammatical constructions of New Testament Greek, the Spirit is variously described in the biblical texts as fire, as water, and as air or breath. None of these images are particularly familial. Not if you are a hurried reader, that is. Dwell a little longer, however, and you will pick up some connections with maternity and with mothering. Take the passage we read from John chapter 3, for example. Here Jesus tells Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council, that entering the region of the divine involves being born of water and spirit. The image here is multilayered. Water is both the amniotic fluid that protects a child until they are born, but also the amniotic fluid of the new birth in baptism, which has been placed in round, womb-like, fonts since the earliest of Christian centuries.

In the same passage, the children of God are said to be born of the breath or wind of God, a more literal translation of the Greek pneuma or ‘spirit’. Here the mysterious breath or wind takes on a decidedly maternal function. The Spirit gives birth to God’s children and then imprints them with a divine identity and vocation. In the passage we read from Romans 8, the children of God are only able to recognise God as their familial ‘father’ because the Spirit cries out a breathy ‘abba’, daddy, within them. Here the children are being led by the actions of Spirit who has given them birth and imprinted them with its own DNA. Just as a mother does with her children.

Of course, in Christian discourse, the Spirit is never simply female, in the gendered sense. Because the Spirit also carries the imprint of the Father and the Son. The texts very often name the Spirit the ‘Spirit of God’ or the ‘Spirit of Jesus’. In this sense, as the Uniting Church version of the Creed notes, the Spirit can be said to ‘proceed’ from the Father and the Son, with all their maleness. This means, in the end, that the Spirit is that dimension or experience of the divine which resists simple binary categories, especially if those categories are gendered, whist retaining a crucial role in the parenting of every single Christian child. The Spirit takes all that is nurturing in the being of God—whether that nurturing be imagined in masculine, feminine or more gender-neutral terms—and makes it real and active for you and I in the nursery that is the church.

So, let me now return to the question I asked a few minutes ago: where would Christianity be if Jesus had been kidnapped from his Jewish family and community, and placed in the ‘care’ of a far way, non-semitic culture? Where would the Christian understanding of the divine be? Would it be anything at all? Well, possibly not.

For the Christian experience of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is predicated upon the experience of a thoroughly semitic Jesus with the divine, an experience almost entirely derived from his formation as a Jewish child, raised in a Jewish home, according to the nurturing practices of his Jewish parents in their Jewish homeland and kinship networks. His experience of the divine as a nurturing family—male, female, and neither male nor female—draws deeply from the well of semitic culture and spirituality. Were Jesus removed from this environment as a young child, he may not have become the spiritual teacher who was able to imprint his followers with that experience and understanding. Were Jesus to have been kidnapped by an invading force, for example, and placed in a society where the divine was understood not as a nurturing family but as an emperor . . . well, Christianity may have ended up being an imperial religion of war and of conquest rather than a trinitarian religion of family, and of care, and of kinship.

But wait! Isn’t that precisely what happened with Constantine and with Charlemagne and with the colonising empires of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries? Did they not kidnap the kinship religion of Jesus and put it in prison? Did they not absorb it into a patriarchal and colonial religion of empire and of force that gave rise, in the end, to the practices of child removal that have so damaged the Indigenous children of Australia and many other places? Well yes, actually. Yes.

On this Sorry Day, perhaps we should remind ourselves of the faith and spirituality of Jesus, whose religion was deeply imbedded in a particularly semitic experience of family, of kinship, and of care. And perhaps we should remind ourselves, on this Trinity Sunday, that the dogma of the trinity is essentially about being part of a loving and caring family and the blessing of having one. And finally, perhaps, on this Sorry and Trinity Sunday, we should commit ourselves anew to practices of nurture which allow our Indigenous children to become who they are. Proud Aborginal and Torres Strait Islander kin.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Garry Worete Deverell

Pitt Street Uniting Church, Warrane/Sydney, 

Sorry Day/ Trinity Sunday 2024

Apologies, Equivocations and Handwringing: Church Leaders at the Yoorrook Justice Commission

Full disclosure. I’m a trawloolway man from northern lutruwita/Tasmania who also happens to be an Anglican priest and theologian. That means that I came to today’s hearing at the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria with a certain amount of baggage, namely a long experience of churchly handwringing over their brutal history with Aboriginal people, my people.

That history, it seems, is not in dispute. Not, at least, by protestants. The Anglican and Uniting Church leaders who gave evidence at the commission—Bishops Blackwell and Treloar along with Moderator Fotheringham—agreed that their churches had willingly participated in the genocidal work of the state in the ‘missions’, ‘protection’ and ‘assimilation’ eras of the colonial project.  This work included the forced dislocation of mob from our lands, cultures and spiritualities, as well as the removal of our children and their use as indentured labour. At the same time, with the enabling cooperation of both the state and the Christian squatocracy, the churches received large grants of land stolen from Aboriginal nations. The church leaders also acknowledged that the consequences of this history for contemporary Aboriginal people were catastrophic across every social indicator of health and wellbeing.

Archbishop Comensoli, of the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne, seemed more equivocal with this ownership of this history. He was at pains to point out that Catholics ran no missions in Victoria and had very little to do with the setting of Aboriginal policy at the level of colonial administration. Here he made a convenient and - in the wake of public enquiries into the sexual abuse of children - now familiar distinction between the Church acting as an institution and Catholics acting as private citizens. A distinction which means little when one considers that Catholics, like all Christians, tend to act as their churchly imaginations allow.  And the churchly imagination most dominantly at play in this country was, and remains, profoundly racist and deeply colonial. Even when Christian settlers intended to do good, they did evil instead. For their version of 'goodness' was deeply imbedded in habits of mind and heart that took black inferiority and the virtue of white Christian civilisation for granted. And, as we shall see, this is still the case.

So much for the truth of our shared history. Now to the handwringing. 

Under several lines of questioning from commissioners and from counsel assisting, the church leaders were invited to report on what their churches were doing about their intentional involvement in this attempted genocide. Were they owning their responsibility? We they handing back stolen land? Were they making reparation? Were they empowering Aboriginal people to heal, to grow and to determine our own futures? Well, not really. Proportionally speaking, the church leaders made it clear that they were doing barely anything at all when one considers the scale of ecclesial culpability for the damage. 

The Uniting Church is clearly the best of them, on the evidence presented at the hearing by Moderator Fotheringham. Nationally, and according to the terms of a 'covenant' between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members of the Church, the Church has set up a semi-autonomous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ‘Congress’ which receives some funding from the church to run its own ministries. Some members of that Congress sit on decision-making bodies that belong to the church as a whole. The church redirects a small portion of property sales to the Congress, which also enjoys an annual budget which is administered by State-based Synods. Let the reader be aware, however, that the Congress in Victoria in effectively either dead or dysfunctional and that it is also struggling at the national level. The reasons for this are complex, but in the opinion of this writer they come down to a lack of concrete specificity in the so-called 'covenant' concerning the responsibilities the parties have towards each other. This means that the Church can get away with generating good PR about the virtue of its covenant in lieu of actually having a covenant. Having spent a views years reflecting on the nature of covenants as part of a doctoral project, I would suggest that effective covenants need to be local, concrete, realistic, goal-orientated, time-specific and outcome-measurable. The 'covenant' of the Uniting Church and its Congress is none of these things.

Turning now to the evidence of Archbishop Comensoli, the Catholic Church funds an Aboriginal Ministry which runs out of a property in Thornbury. This ministry, run by a single Aboriginal manager and a small number of loyal volunteers, acts statewide to educate the Church, along with its school and welfare arms, about Aboriginal ways. A key instrument for such education is the 'Fire Carriers' network, by which Aboriginal children are empowered to learn more about their culture and to share it with their schools and churches. The Church also funds a small number of scholarships for Aboriginal students who wish to study at Catholic schools through a fundraising project known as 'Opening Doors'.  The bishops of the church are also ‘considering’ longstanding requests from its National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council to include Indigenous people in both the design of church policy and the training of ministry leaders. Let the reader be aware, however, that the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry in Victoria is struggling at present. On the retirement of its last manager, the Church has not, to date, been able to recruit a replacement. And the volunteer base, which for many years was mostly composed of religious sisters, is now shrinking rapidly along with the religious congregations from which these volunteers were drawn. There are no visible plans to more substantially support the ministry by, for example, employing a team rather than just an individual. Or by supplying the team with a budget that is more adequate to their very onerous responsibilities across the entire State.  Additionally, when one looks at the national picture, the long-term aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholics towards a more substantial presence in the councils, theological colleges, welfare programs and holy orders of the Church still seem a very long way off.

Turning to the Anglicans, Bishops Blackwell and Treloar testified that the dioceses of Victoria have, between them, employed three Aboriginal priests to work with Aboriginal people in part-time roles. Two of these roles are in Gippsland, and the other is a newly created Province-wide role which remains a bit unclear with regard to focus and purpose, although the bishops disclosed that the role would be partly about the development of some kind of Aboriginal body for the Province. Bishop Blackwell disclosed that the diocese of Melbourne once sold a property to help fund the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Anglican Council, which was created by the General Synod of the Church in 1989. The church is also ‘considering’, according to Bishop Blackwell, a 2018 proposal from the Anglican Council of the Anglican Province of Victoria to contribute 15% of all property sales to a mixture of local Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations and Aboriginal ministries. Let the reader be aware, however, that with the possible exception of Gippsland and Bendigo, Aboriginal clergy have found it enormously difficult to gain any traction with diocesan leadership. Our invitation for the Church's senior leadership to consider 14 'aspirations' which would improve the lives of our people immeasurably (tabled in several forums during 2018) were met with silence, the effective sacking of a sitting Reconciliation Action Plan committee, and constant deferrals. Our attempts to keep the aspirations alive in the hearts and minds of the Church and its leaders have left us exhausted and disillusioned. It is clear that the Church has no concept of what justice for mob might look like, nor is it inclined to give it much thought.

So, to summarise the evidence given by these distinguished moral leaders at the Yoorrook Justice Commission, the Anglican, Catholic and Uniting churches feel very sad about what they have done to our people and are showing how much they care by throwing a few scraps, a few crumbs from their tables, the way of the small handful of Aboriginal people who remain members of their churches. 

The commissioners asked if the churches had ever contributed, directly, to the welfare or support of Aboriginal people beyond their churches by means of, for example, reparations paid to traditional owner groups or Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations. 'No', they had not.

To my mind, none of this is surprising. But it remains deeply and profoundly sad, to me, that organisations that claim to follow the Jesus of the gospels cannot find it in their heart to repent of their sins and to love their neighbour as they love themselves. For repentance is not only about naming the truth of one's misdeeds and saying 'sorry', It is about amendment of life, it is about doing all you can realistically do to undo the harms and heal the wounds that you have inflicted upon another. And loving one's neigbour involves far more than PR exercises or the sharing of leftovers from more important ventures. It is at the heart of the Christian vocation. It is about placing the neighbour at the centre of your world and inviting them to drink deeply from the very same wells of gracious provision which you, yourself, are privileged to enjoy.  The paradox, here, is that Aboriginal people - most of whom have nothing to do with the church anymore - are very often better at following Jesus than settlers are. Our own dreaming traditions teach us to share what we have with others, to pool resources, so that everyone may live both sustainably and equitably on the gift that is country.  And God knows we have done far more than our fair share of forgiving.

The Christian churches, in my long experience with them, very rarely get beyond ‘considering’ advice from mob about anything at all. Even the advice of their own Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander members. For the language of consideration is almost always code for disinterest, denial or indefinite deferral with regard to the claims of the Aboriginal neighbour. Often all three. Given the enormity of the damage done to our people by churches, this situation remains both ethically indefensible and a cause for continuing heartbreak and trauma. The crimes of the past are ugly as hell. But the refusal of the churches to adequately address the present consequences of that past are equally heinous. 

As far as I am aware, this is the first time the churches have agreed to offer evidence about their own abusive histories with mob before a public truth or justice commission.  It is well past time that their crimes, both past and present, were brought into the cold light of public scrutiny. At least that way, the churches might finally be called to account for both their actions and their lack of it.  I thank the commissioners for their work, and look forward to its bearing fruit in treaty.

This article was written on the same day as the hearing of the Yoorrook Justice Commission with the churches. May 1, 2024. A full recording of the hearing can be found here.

An affirmation of faith for the blak church

Let us rise to affirm our faith,

the faith of the blak church.

The dreaming was, is, and will always be.
The dreaming is the great pattern that
    forms our world,
    gives the lore,
    and gifts us to each other in kinship and love.
The dreaming is before us, and around us, and within us.

In the womb of the dreaming is our ancestor Christ,
bone of its bone, flesh of its flesh,
bright radiance of the dreaming’s glory.
In country Christ walks among us,
    sharing the lore,
    healing the broken,
    teaching us to care.
As seed, Christ falls to the ground and dies.
In the harvest, Christ rises to feed and sustain all living things.
He comes in glory to greet the living and the dead.

With the dreaming and with Christ is the Spirit of country,
who animates and enlivens all creation,
who knits us all together in love and in kinship,
who births our church and fills it with daring.

This is our faith,
the faith of the blak church.

© 2024 Garry Worete Deverell 

May be used freely with attribution

This stained glass window was designed by Kathleen Kemarre Wallace for Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church in Mparntwe/Alice Springs

‘Hold not thy peace at my tears’

Texts: Psalm 39; Isaiah 2.2-4; Acts 10.34-43

If you’re anything at all like me, you may wonder at God’s apparent inaction in the face of genocidal mania. When one group of people decides, whether out of trauma from their own histories or because of sheer racism, that entire populations of other people deserve little else but starvation and death, what, exactly, is God up to? Why, as the Psalmist intimates in verse 13 of tonight’s lection, does God hold God’s 'peace' whilst suffering is rampant?

The Psalmist’s phrase, ‘hold not thy peace at my tears’, brings our study of peace to a rather more uncomfortable place than we have been before, in this series. For here we are encouraged to consider the ways in which the word ‘peace’ may come to signify, in certain settings, a fundamental indifference to the suffering of others. 

Take, for example, the experience of the Palestinian peoples at this moment. They suffer, they cry out in pain at the wholesale destruction of their society and the death of their children. They cry out even in the streets of Melbourne. But the reaction of the global north is largely one of indifference. In the face of starvation, our governments cut off aid. In the face of infanticide, our governments cancel visas. In the face of genocide, our political leaders keep their ‘peace’. 

Not that indifference is out of character for the nations of the global north. For the wealth and power of these nations is largely founded on the subjugation and subsequent exploitation of the global south.  You cannot unleash suffering on that kind of scale unless you have a particular talent for indifference.

The theological question remains, though. For those of us who would like to believe in a better power, a divine power, a power more loving and caring than most of our governors, what are we to make of God’s apparent inactivity in the face of all this pain? Does the indifference of our governments actually mimic an indifference from God?

The Christian answer is ‘no’, absolutely not. God is not at all indifferent to our suffering. God does not, in fact, hold God’s ‘peace’ whilst the whole world is burning.  Here I would like to draw your attention to the preaching of St Peter in the Acts of the Apostles:

God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the holy spirit and with power; he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him . . . they put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day. (Acts 10.38-40)

The God you meet here is not one who is ‘at peace’ with suffering, but one who acts to do something about suffering. God chooses a human being, one Jesus of Nazareth, to be the sign or icon in the world of what God is doing. Jesus goes about doing God’s work, making God’s compassion real and practical. He does good. He heals the sick, he welcomes the outcasts and the victims of powerful but indifferent men, he strengthens the weak and all who live in fear. He casts out the various traumas that bind and hold them in chains. 

By doing so, Jesus of course attracts the ire and then, finally, the murderous intent of those who own his society, those who benefit the most from the status quo.  He is captured, tortured, and put to death for treason.  But that is not the end. At just the point at which Jesus’ divine mission appears to have been put down for good, God vindicates his cause and raises both it and him from the dead. His disciples then carry his mission forward. His spirit so animates what they are doing that the divine mission can ever after be located not only with Jesus, but also with all who seek to follow him, to imitate his ways.

The point here, if you didn’t catch it, is that God acts, that God unfolds a compassionate influence in the world on behalf of the poor, the broken and the marginalised. Not by magic, the waving of a divine wand. And not, indeed, through the application of a naked and irresistible power, such as that attached to empire. If the divine acted like that, then God would be little more than a bully, another instance of the global north's exercise of power, which so regularly kills and maims and destroys. To be different to that, God must exercise God’s power not by edict, but by persuasion. Not by force, but by love. Not by legislation, but by parable. To be God, as the theologian Karl Barth famously argued, God must act like Jesus.

So what does that look like in our world, the world that we much live in? How does God turn ‘swords into ploughshares’ and ‘spears into pruning hooks’, as the oracle from Isaiah puts it (2.4)? Like this. God invites human being like you and I to place the story of Jesus at the centre of both our social and ecological imaginations, thus giving us the opportunity to act as Jesus would act and to speak as Jesus would speak. For the gospel of Jesus is as a stranger and a sojourner in the world. Without our bodies, it can never gain traction or weight in the world. It can never become real. Without our assent, it can never leave its mark. God therefore needs us to be vessels of the gospel. Such is God’s lowliness. Such is God’s love. 

The gospel leaves it mark at precisely the point at which we need it. And our needs can be vastly different. If we are beneficiaries of all that the global north has accumulated from the poor of the world, placing Jesus at the centre calls us to live simply and to share what has come to us with those who have nothing. To crucify ourselves for the sake of the downtrodden. If, on the other hand, we are poor or ill or broken inside by all that has befallen us in life, then making Jesus central calls us to embrace the power of the resurrection to be all that we can be, to stand up and take pride in who we are and claim both the respect and the justice that God desires for all creatures.

So, whomever you are, and no matter how you think about the ways of the divine, hear this, please: God is not indifferent. In Jesus we learn that God is irrevocably for us and for the world. So don’t you be indifferent either. Do something. Act. Out of love for both yourself and others, do something good. And keep doing it. For the way to a real and genuine peace goes not by the way of indifference, but by an active participation in both the cross and resurrection of Jesus. This is the way. The way of Christ.

Garry Deverell

Evensong, St Paul’s Cathedral

Lent 5, 2024