Birthdays and anniversaries are a matter of perspective.

When I was twenty-one, part of celebrating my birthday was to consider the adult I was (hopefully) becoming, and the journey unfolding before me; there were promising comments about aspects of my developing character, and where my path might take me.

When, more recently, I turned sixty, people affirmed the journey we had walked together, in various stanzas. There was a strong sense of established character – for good and otherwise – and the resources I had with me for the journey yet to come. Part of the celebration was acknowledging where I had been, as well as the future.

They give praise for God’s gifts of grace to each of them in years past;
they acknowledge that none of them has responded to God’s love with a full obedience;
they look for a continuing renewal in which God will use
their common worship, witness and service to set forth the word of salvation for all people.

Looking over our shoulders at what has been is a labyrinth into which many of us wander, and we can be lost there. The lure of what we remember, the scent of nostalgia, can be deceptive, inviting us to live when “things were better”.

Then, rather than looking over our shoulders, we turn and face the past, deciding that is where we want to live. Nostalgia becomes narcotic; things are only right when they look and feel like they did then.

There are disciples in every faith tradition, every congregation, who wish things hadn’t changed, or that everything could return to how they remember things feeling at that best moment. That is not our vocation.

Our Uniting Church, being a younger faith community than many others, has an affection for our anniversary, as we wind our way to the half-century. We have the mixed blessing that many of us remember our beginning, whereas our celebration of the Council of Nicaea – 1700 years this year – encounters different, and more diverse, reflections.

My grandfather was one of those keepers of the gate as the Uniting Church was formed in the fifties, sixties and seventies. However, his model of gatekeeping, like so many of our grandmothers and grandfathers, was to open and unlock as many of the gates as possible so that the uniting churches would be formed for the current times and the future, and not only be shaped by the past.

To this end they declare their readiness to go forward together
in sole loyalty to Christ the living Head of the Church;
they remain open to constant reform under his Word;
and they seek a wider unity in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Across the Church, we have become easily enticed by orderliness and structure, by measurable mission outcomes and risk registers, by loyalty to our benefactors, and thus reinterpreting, or even eschewing, our discipleship to Christ.

We endlessly plan and reflect, when we know where our birthright and our future truly reside. On occasion we even look for excuses, or escape clauses when we mis-speak of mission, or theology, rather than the rigour and wonder from which those terms arise, and into which they lead us. 

To whom does our Church belong, in its multiple sizes and shapes? Is it to all those faithful people who have worshipped and witnessed and served over the life, and previous lives, of our Uniting Church?

Not for a moment. We belong to Christ.

The Basis of Union reminds us that we do not belong to history, we do not belong to our past, we do not belong to Scripture; we are Christ’s, entirely. It is in Christ we know ourselves, and the future into which Christ calls us.

In entering into this union the Churches concerned are mindful that the Church of God
is committed to serve the world for which Christ died,
and that it awaits with hope the day of the Lord Jesus Christ
on which it will be clear that the kingdom of this world
has become the kingdom of our Lord and of the Christ, who shall reign for ever and ever.

Blessings for our years ahead, under Christ.