By Michael Zewdie

Inaugural Rev Dr Michelle Cook Lecture connects deep listening with the call to share power, enact justice and learn together.

What does it mean for the Uniting Church to live in Covenant with First Peoples? For Rev Ken Sumner and Dr Rosemarie Dewerse, the answer reaches into relationships, theology, leadership and the sharing of the Church’s resources.

Delivering the two addresses at the inaugural Rev Dr Michelle Cook Lecture, the speakers invited the Church to consider how Covenant might become a lens through which it understands God, Country and its responsibilities to one another. The lecture took place at Nungalinya College in Darwin on 1 October 2026, as part of the opening day of the Northern Synod gathering.

Their shared theme, The Covenant as a Living Hermeneutic: What does this require of us?, brought a theological question into everyday life: if Covenant shapes how we see, how should it change what we do?

The conversation honoured a minister whose life brought these concerns together. Rev Dr Michelle Cook was a Uniting Church Deacon, theologian and educator at Nungalinya College, and had been elected Moderator-elect of the Northern Synod before her death in November 2024. Her doctoral research explored the Church’s covenanting and multicultural commitments through the perspectives of young adults. A committed friend and ally of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress (UAICC), she advocated for First Peoples’ voices, theological insights and authority to be respected within the Church.

In her own reflections, Michelle expressed a love of learning with others and listening to the stories of faith that shaped their lives. She also hoped the Church would hold its collective resources more lightly and share its wealth more widely, recognising that much of it had been inherited through history. These commitments found a strong echo in both addresses.

Uncle Ken began with a clear proposition: “Covenant is not a statement the church makes about relationship. Covenant is a relationship that changes the church.”

He located Covenant within God’s enduring commitment to relationship, while insisting that the Covenant between the Uniting Church and Congress must be understood within the particular history of colonisation and dispossession. A truthful relationship requires the Church to face that history and its continuing consequences.

Central to his address was the recognition, expressed in the Church’s revised constitutional Preamble, that First Peoples encountered God before colonisation. As he put it, “God was already here.”

For Ken, this changes the Church’s understanding of its own place. It comes into relationship with people who already possess spiritual knowledge, wisdom and authority. It therefore has much to receive and learn.

That learning begins with listening that allows the listener to be changed. Ken distinguished hearing sound from the conscious work of attending to another person. Deep listening may challenge familiar assumptions, theological convictions and institutional practices. It asks whose knowledge counts, who is recognised as a teacher and whose voice shapes decisions.

He also emphasised that Covenant can sustain difference. First and Second Peoples bring distinct histories, cultures and experiences to their relationship. Faithfulness requires respect for those differences and a willingness to remain together through discomfort, disagreement and difficult truths.

This has consequences for power. Ken asked whether Covenant changes who holds authority, who sets priorities and who makes decisions. Congress has its own identity, leadership, governance and discernment. The wider Church’s responsibility is to recognise and respect that authority.

He applied the same challenge to money, property and other resources. Covenant calls the Church to ask what it means to share its commonwealth through justice and shared responsibility. Sustainable support for Congress belongs within that relationship, rather than depending on recurring acts of benevolence.

Dr Dewerse approached these questions through her own experience as a person shaped by European ancestry, an upbringing in Aotearoa New Zealand and the privileges of colonisation. She asked what it would take to become the kind of Church with which Congress would want to make a Covenant.

Her theological foundation was kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ described in Philippians 2. She understood this as a call to relinquish power, control and assumptions of superiority, opening herself to the wisdom and guidance of First Peoples.

She described four movements in this journey: leaning into encounter, investing in relationship, enacting justice and expanding theology.

Encounter begins in ordinary ways: greeting someone, pausing, listening and returning. Yet it requires openness to being changed, including letting go of assumptions that another person needs our help or should become like us.

Investing in relationship can bring profound consequences. Dewerse described how listening to Aunty Denise Champion and Uncle Ken and hearing the painful effects of Christian mission on First Peoples, had led her to reconsider a vocation she had pursued for two decades. She could no longer comfortably identify herself as a specialist in mission.

Enacting justice brought these convictions into her work in theological education. She spoke of valuing Indigenous expertise through appropriate remuneration, teaching and publishing collaboratively, and practising reciprocal learning. She also challenged every level of the Church to examine how the Covenant’s promises concerning land, resources, sovereignty and respect become deeds.

Expanding theology meant allowing First Peoples’ knowledge of God and Country to reshape the Church’s understanding. Rejecting harmful theological foundations, she argued, requires serious attention to what will guide the Church’s life in their place.

The two addresses met at this point: relationship must have consequences. Ken named the changes required in the Church’s structures and distribution of authority; Dewerse showed how those same demands reach into personal identity, professional practice and theological understanding.

Their shared teaching offered a practical expression of this connection. Both spoke of learning with students on Country, where listening involves receiving Country as a teacher and reconsidering familiar ideas about expertise.

Together, they invited the Church into the kind of conversation Michelle valued: thoughtful, honest, open to learning and ready to act. The question carried beyond the lecture was one for congregations, councils, educators and individual members alike: what will living in Covenant require of us?