Unlike many other Indigenous people, I was not born to Anglicanism. I chose it. In 2015 I left the community of the Uniting Church, in which I had served for 20 years, and joined the Anglican Church of Australia. I was attracted to Anglicanism by both its valuing of tradition and its respect for wise authority. We Aboriginal people know about these things. We have a great deal of respect for both traditional knowledge and the Elders who are the caretakers of that knowledge. Anglicans, it seemed to me at the time, are great respecters of traditional wisdom as well. And their elders, their bishops, are supposed to be the guardians of that wisdom. By contrast, the culture of the Uniting Church seeks, continually, to repudiate tradition in the name of some kind of urgent modernity. It seeks, also, to minimise the authority of its ordained guardians and govern by committee. Unfortunately, I could not have foreseen that I was entering the Anglican Church at a time when both traditional wisdom and wise eldership were being fundamentally undermined. A new wave of fundamentalists are challenging the notion of tradition as living and active and loving, an ever-new reception of ancient knowledge for giving flesh to the love of God within new circumstances. GAFCON and its many ‘evangelical’ affiliates appear to believe that this living form The Heartbreak of Being an Aboriginal Anglican 90
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