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This is my Uniting Church

Northcote Uniting Church

March 13, 2024

In this new regular series we're excited to be telling some stories of our local congregations and communities of faith - the beating heart of the Uniting Church!  Find our growing hub of stories here.
 
This week we're checking in with Northcote Uniting Church, in the inner-city of Naarm/Melbourne. After two decades as a growing faith community, they became a congregation four years ago. Rev Alister Pate shares about how Northcote UC is seeking to follow God's calling through periods of growth, change and challenge, from church plant to established community.

"God feeds our heads and our hearts as we draw on different strands of our rich spiritual heritage, from the intellectual to the highly reflective, through study of the scriptures, engaging in a variety of spiritual practices, and silence."

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Share a little bit about your church community.

Northcote Uniting Church is a church plant, who became the official UCA congregation in Northcote, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, in 2020. We inherited a beautiful bluestone church in a lively bit of an exciting part of town. Previously the community had spent something like 20 years meeting in pubs and cafes, mainly in inner-city Melbourne. Currently there are around 20 of us, largely in our thirties and forties meeting together every Tuesday. It can look different week to week, but every Tuesday evening we gather together in the midst of the busy-ness of life to be community by eating dinner together and unpacking what it means to be Jesus’ people in our time and place. We celebrate communion monthly, and the other weeks are a mixture of discussion based and experiential sessions.

What are some of the things happening there that are really exciting for people?

We are growing as a community, which is very encouraging for us. We are pretty excited about the opportunity of having our part time Missional Spirituality Pastor, Anne Pate. We are still working out what that means in detail, but we are excited about how it will bring further depth to our life together, and what opportunities there might be to make Christian spirituality a front door to transformative spiritual community.

What energises the faith of this community?

It sounds a little pious, but we love to gather together, and we love to read Scripture and pray together. God feeds our heads and our hearts as we draw on different strands of our rich spiritual heritage, from the intellectual to the highly reflective, through study of the scriptures, engaging in a variety of spiritual practices, and silence.

Where do you see God at work at the moment?

We see God at work in the possibilities of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus in post-Christendom. Now there is not much social cachet in being a churchgoer, it means that we aren’t chaplains to a world which thinks it is Christian, which frees us up to discover afresh how to collaborate with the mission of God in the world.

Are there any challenges you're facing there?

Unfortunately, we are facing some significant practical challenges with the fabric of the building. The roof of our beautiful bluestone church is falling down and the hall in which we are now meeting also has structural problems. While this gives us a chance to practice being a gracious community and display the fruit of the Spirit to one another, it also leads to hard questions about what sort of community we want to be, and how we best collaborate with God’s work in Northcote.

What can the rest of the Church pray for there?

Clarity of thought, and behaviour characterised by the sort of mutual love that Jesus prayed for his disciples.