Realistic but hopeful- shaping the Synod Climate Action Strategy

In a meeting the other day a colleague remarked she had just finished reading Prof. Tim Flannery’s new book, “The Climate Cure”. She was struck by how the book held together, both the seriousness of the risks posed by climate change, with a positive belief that there are solutions to those challenges, if we can find the will to apply them.

Holding those elements together is also a task for our Uniting Church members who will meet on Saturday, 20 March for the Synod Climate Strategy- Future Directions conference. The purpose of the conference is to shape the next phase of the Synod Climate Action Strategy, which was initiated by the Synod meeting of 2019. Together we will ask what contribution we as a church can make in responding to the challenge of global warming and encouraging our national leaders to take the action our scientists have been telling us is urgently needed.

For us as a church this is not just a question of science or economics or politics, but of care for creation and respect for all the life that God has brought into being. That is part of our identity and mission.

Most of us are aware of the threats posed by climate change. We don’t have to look much past last season’s fires, or the long drought that proceeded it, to understand those.

But the Synod Climate Strategy conference won’t be focussed on the nature and scale of the threat. We will be concentrating on what we as the Uniting Church can do to help meet this challenge. We will be hearing and learning from diverse groups within the church and beyond about what steps we can take to help achieve more responsible, more decisive action on global warming in this country- and globally.

You can see the conference program and register here.

More than 70 people have registered already, but there is room for more! You can participate in person or on-line.

Come and join us on Saturday, 20 March in shaping the next phase of the Synod Climate Action Strategy and beginning the work of putting it into practice.

For as the theologian Jurgen Moltmann wrote, “A theology of hope is a theology of combatants, not of spectators.”

Jon O’Brien