I've been hearing rumbles about a new preamble to the Constitution of the UCA recognising the sovereignty of Aboriginal people for some time. Below is a section quoted by Andrew Bolt in his blog. I went to the UCA web site looking for an official version but I couldn't find it- I only spent a few minutes so it may be there.
According to the version below it seems that the church wants to say that Aboriginal culture was good, that most christians were bad and that Aborigines were saved before the intervention of the church.
Actually life is more complicated than that. Every culture has aspects that point to the gospel because all people are created in God's image. At the same time all cultures contain great evil because we have all sinned.
To use the sort of language that this preamble proposes is just theologising the myth that everything bad that has happened to Aboriginal people is the fault of whites in a kind of self-accusatory racism.
While I am distressed at the poor living conditions of some aboriginal people in remote communities, the fact is that most aboriginal people are way better off than they were 200 years ago. Many have embraced the salvation of Jesus.
Yes, terrible things have been done in the past by white people. Some of those were christians. But let's get beyond this cycle of making ourselves feel good by repeatedly laying guilt on ourselves for the cins of our forefathers.
Here's the proposed preamble as quoted by Andrew Bolt.
As the Church believes God guided it into union so it believes that God is calling it to
continually seek a renewal of its life as a community of First and Second Peoples, and as
part of that to
RECOGNISE THAT
1. When the churches that formed the Uniting Church arrived in Australia as part of the
process of colonisation they entered a land that had been created and sustained by
the Triune God they knew in Jesus Christ.
2. Through this land God had nurtured and sustained the First Peoples of this country,
the Aboriginal and Islander peoples, who continue to understand themselves to be
the traditional owners and custodians (meaning ‘sovereign’ in the languages of the
First Peoples) of these lands and waters since time immemorial.
3 The First Peoples had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the
colonisers; the Spirit was already in the land revealing God to the people through law,
custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally revealed in Jesus
Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God’s ways.
4. A small number of members of the uniting churches approached the First Peoples
with good intentions; considering their well being, culture and language as the
churches proclaimed the reconciling purpose of the Triune God found in the good
news about Jesus Christ.
5. Many in the uniting churches, however, shared the values and relationships of the
emerging colonial society including paternalism and racism towards the First Peoples.
They were complicit in the injustice that resulted in many of the First Peoples being
dispossessed from their land, their language, their culture and spirituality, becoming
strangers in their own land.
6. The uniting churches were largely silent as the dominant culture of Australia
constructed and propagated a distorted version of history that denied this land was
occupied, utilised, cultivated and harvested by these First Peoples who also had
complex systems of trade and inter-relationships. As a result of this denial,
relationships were broken and the very integrity of the Gospel proclaimed by the
churches was diminished....
First Peoples are the Aboriginal and Islander peoples of Australia who are the
indigenous peoples of this land. These peoples are a diverse group with many
languages and communal identities.
Second Peoples are all those peoples who have come after the First Peoples and
who are beneficiaries in some way of the invasion and dispossession of the lands of
the First Peoples. Among Second Peoples within the Church are many whose racial,
cultural and linguistic backgrounds, experiences and expression of Christian faith are
not those originating in Western forms of thought and theological expression.;
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