What is the Church Council Chat?

Shawn Whelan explains during Notices on 15th June 2025.  See below the line for the latest update.

Listen here I’m Shawn from Church Council and want to give um the first in what will be a new series of occasional updates from Church Council.  We’ve heard that people want to hear more from us and want to see more of us and so different members of church council will report back to you just very briefly a couple of highlights from each church council meeting.

Also in the lead-up to each church council meeting we will give you a sense of what we might be discussing, invite your prayers and any contributions or ideas.

14/9/25

Mick Pope offered the September update. Listen here or read the paraphrase below.

Morning everyone. I’m Mick, with my Church Council hat on, we met on Thursday over curry and red wine and considered the usual reports. I want to thank everyone who puts in a report every month. They are read in detail.

The one thing I want to talk about this morning is the ongoing mission and ministry review that we’re going to be conducting as a church. As the church council thinks about the different ways in which we approach that in the next little while you’re going to be tapped on the shoulder. We’ve all been delegated some people to speak to the congregation and hopefully we’ll cover everyone. So if in a couple of weeks someone hasn’t spoken to you, please tap one of us on the shoulder. What we want to do is to build and extend relationships between the elders of the church and the congregation to seek out your thoughts and feelings.

There’s a great deal of lived experience in this congregation from 15 months of being here to to many many years. We want to know what you’re thinking and feeling about the way church is going at the minute and your thoughts about the future and the second part of things is to give church council a better understanding of where you’re at.

So, expect that in the next little while. We’ve got some questions which is not a rigid kind of script but we’re trying to get the general vibe.

17/8/25

Nicole Mugford offered the August update.  Listen here or read the paraphrase below.

My name is Nicole. I’m one of the church council members. So, just as is becoming our regular practice, I wanted to give a quick update um as we met on Thursday night. Most of our conversations for the night were focused around the discussion details of today’s congregational meeting which is being held after worship.

We also received an internal review from the Olive Way ministry and the discussions there are ongoing. The First Nations core documents will be circulated to all of our groups and our leaders so that we’re all familiar with them as that as part of our core business.

As always if you wanted to share your thoughts, your hopes for this community and this church, feel free to get in touch with any member of church council. You’ll see our smiling faces up on the board at the back or um on the website and we’re more than happy to have conversations with you.

Rev Cath James shared news of planning for the Ministry & Mission Review.  Listen here or read the paraphrase below

In addition to all the things that are happening that you’ve heard about already and more to come we are in the process of doing a ministry and mission review of our life together. And I just wanted to give a brief outline about what that actually means and what might happen as it progresses.

It’s a very broad overarching process and it has three phases.

  1. The phase that we’re in at the moment is the ‘gathering information and sharing it’ phase. So over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing stories of the bigger picture of what happens here.
    If you were here last week, Julie began this process beautifully just by listing all of the things that happen in our buildings. And for some of us who have joined recently, that was really news. Some of us it might be very obvious but we’re going to share with one another about what happens here so that we can all get a bit of a picture about what our life together looks like.
    We’ll also be sharing the bigger picture of the Uniting Church. The annual Synod meeting is in a couple of weeks is. There’s a whole lot of processes going on at the national, state and regional levels that will affect us whether we like it or not and it’ll be good to share some of that information as we go because that will affect where we end up in terms of our priorities as well.
    We’ll also be having conversations with one another and that will take place over time.
  2. The second phase will be a ‘discernment phase’ where we’ll pull all of that together and work out what is our priority here.
  • What is God calling us to in this place and time?
  • What does it mean to be on Sydney Road in Brunswick with all of you gathered?
  • And how might we live out our worship mission and service in this place together.
  1. And then the third phase will be the ‘decision-making process’.

Because we’re such a busy congregation, we’re going to need to make some time to do this. And that’s a difficult thing we’re realizing. So, there’s no specific timeline yet, but we’ll keep you informed.

13/7/25

Carolyn Wallace offered the July update.  Listen here or read the paraphrase below

I’m here on behalf of our Church Council. We have a great initiative we’ve recently set up which is that before each meeting someone from council lets you know what’s coming up and afterwards we follow up.

So, we met on Thursday night (second Thursday) here in the church or in the Olive Way. And one of the things we did as a newish council, with some people staying on, is we went through all of the committees that exist in this church. And there’s an amazing array. And what we checked in was who’s on a committee. Do they have a liaison person? So, that’s all been sorted out. So if you are on any of our many committees, you will already know who your church council liaison person or is if you’ve got someone new like me, I’ll be giving you a call soon.

So that’s a great thing. Also, I don’t mess around. We talked um just filling in all of the positions. We’ve got Jess as our long-serving chair, Shawn as our treasurer. They also really wanted to have a co-chair and that’s ended up being me. So that’s a great thing to really support the church council doing that as well. And Rosie is our secretary.

Other things we agreed is to proceed with the next steps for renovating 4 Merri Street. And um you’ll be pleased to know we also made what might seem like a background decision, but for our amazing Christmas in July, we can choose one event apparently per year to be GST exempt. Voila. So all of that hard earned cash will definitely go to where we want it to go. Not that paying tax is a bad thing, but you know, it’s good to keep it for us if we can. So that’s it for church council this month.

15/6/25

Shawn Whelan offered the June update. Listen here or read the paraphrase below.

The first meeting of the new church council happened on Thursday night and besides thanking Dan and Helen for their wonderful time with us and welcoming all of the new folks in we did quite a bit of work.

A couple of the highlights for me coming out of all of that:

  1. We have a new Church Council Secretary – Rosie O’Reilly. She is the one who you’re going to be getting emails from and sending emails to when communicating with church council
  2. We had a good rich conversation about how we might go about the ongoing sort of the ministry and mission review – What are the next steps that need to happen?
    A working group has been formed to identify and start working with an external facilitator. If anyone has any particular ideas about who would be a really good external facilitator to help us think about our mission and  ministry in this place please see me or Cath or Nic Batch
  3. Another working group that was set up was to start thinking working on renovations to the cottage, so much more mundane in some ways but also very important. We are looking for a couple of people to join the working group, if you have experience in this area please let us know.

You can look forward to reading more in the Olive Branch when it gets next published and of course come and talk to any of us at any time about things that might be on your heart.