Pilgrim People: A Theology of the Uniting Church in Australia

The Household of Faith: The Christian Traditions of AustraliaWhat is the gospel? What is a church? What is mission? Behind every strategy meeting and every program review, these questions wait to be answered. Most of the time, the Uniting Church in Australia answers them in passing, on the way to something else.Pilgrim People takes the questions seriously.In fifteen chapters, Graham Joseph Hill works through the foundational theological questions facing the UCA today: the gospel, the church, mission, worship, Scripture, the sacramental life, ministry, discipleship, covenant, reconciliation, justice, the pilgrim character, the blended ecology, stewardship, and education and service. Each chapter draws on the documents the Uniting Church has already given itself: the Basis of Union, the ancient Creeds, the 1994 Covenanting Statement, the 2009 Revised Preamble to the Constitution, and recent Synod strategic frameworks.The result is a book that says clearly what the Uniting Church in Australia believes, why it matters, and what it asks of those who belong to it. For ministers preparing sermons, for lay leaders shaping their congregations, for students learning the tradition, and for anyone who's ever asked what the Uniting Church actually stands for, this is a book to read, return to, and pass on.Pilgrim People opens The Household of Faith, a series on the Christian traditions of Australia. Each volume presents one tradition from the inside, on its own terms and out of its own documents, so the churches might know themselves more clearly and know one another better. Hill writes from a life lived across these traditions: church planting within Pentecostalism, ordained among Baptists, a former college principal in the Churches of Christ, now serving the Uniting Church, and formed theologically in Pentecostal, Evangelical, Catholic, and Mainline Protestant contexts.