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Our Congregations
Uniting Church congregations throughout the country are
caring communities to which all people can belong. There are
more than 2,200 of these with 243,000 members and adherents.
Congregations may have hundreds of members, or be tiny
communities of a dozen people; be found deep in the heart of
our cities, and in most isolated and outback towns.
They have many faces. There are older people and young,
families and single people, people of one culture or many -
40 different languages are used in worship in the Uniting
Church each week. There are congregations
that have existed for many years, and new and very different
ones - cafe style churches, groups that find it better to
worship on Wednesdays than Sundays, or who minister across a
region rather than a local area. While our
congregations can be vastly different, each aims to embrace
all people - to unite them with each other and with God.
This is expressed in part in our having an open table for
Holy Communion to which all baptised people are invited,
welcoming children for baptism and being willing to marry
those who are divorced. Our congregations
are communities in which people seek to follow Jesus, learn
about God, share their faith, care for each other, serve the
local community, and seek to live faithfully and with real
joy.
This is the kind of engaging church to
which we belong. |