Adamstown Uniting Church has had a long association with the arts in Newcastle.
With the arrival of the Reverend Rod Patton, this involvement stepped up a level.
I've been here at Adamstown Uniting Church for just on four years now and the reason
I'm here is the church was looking for somebody with a background in the arts and that's
something that I have a rich background in through my involvement through visual arts
and performance in Sydney.
After finishing high school I went off to art school so I spent four years slaving away
over hot canvases day after day learning to be creative, wondering what I would do with
my life.
I thought I'd become a teacher but ended up candidating to become a minister of religion
in the Uniting Church.
So it's been something of a guiding light for me to have this conversation between spirituality
and religion which is often so conservative and traditional and this other thing about
creativity and light and paint and colour and form.
So that conversation has really taken me through many stages in my life.
I went to Paddington Uniting Church very early on and stayed there a very long time, 17 years
and in that time I created the church from being a traditional building to something
like a studio where we were having concerts and activities, acapella, events, folk music
as well as quite high-end art exhibitions.
I was able to lure artists like George Giddos and John Coburn.
My other big involvement has been with the Blake Prize which is Australia's premier
religious spiritual contemporary art prize.
So I've been in that role since 1992 and I've been an organiser, initiator, an entrepreneur,
a curator.
So I have a lot of experiences which I bring to my work here at Addamstown.
The great joy for me has been to expand what happens here in this space from just music
through to performance and visual arts, installation and other activities.
It's probably that aspiration to create in this space questions and thoughts and perceptions
which engage people with their everyday issues, not just religious issues.
One of the things I delight in is that I think spirituality is interested in the whole
of life.
So we've explored politics, religion, refugees, Palestine, Israel, conflict, all sorts of
issues have been addressed through the arts because I think that's our role to be an
irritant or an explorer of issues that people are dealing with in their everyday life.
I just find it so curious that some people expect churches to be only interested in
religion.
With the visual arts I've been keen to open up the church as an exhibition space.
And so we've had the Newcastle Society of Artists, Newcastle Printmakers and other individual
artists exhibit work here and parishioners really delighted in having the visual as part
of the environment of this space.
And so that convinced them to spend money on tracking for properly hanging works and
putting better lighting in.
But what's been most exciting for me is to actually curate exhibitions or have projects
that really address some concerns for us.
We did that early on about four years ago with an exhibition of work that had been literally
smuggled out of Gaza.
So children's doorings and artists in this community of people who are under siege experienced
quite violent intrusion in their lives.
So here were works which really opened up an experience for viewers about what this political
situation is like.
Last year we had an exhibition of refugee artists, people who've trained in Iraq and
Iran as professional artists who are now living in Australia and they're starting to use their
own creativity to express their identity and also to make a little money and identity in
Australia.
So it was a great privilege to have these works here in this sacred space from people
from diverse religious backgrounds.
I'm looking I think for artists who can help us do that, expand our sense of perception.
Peter Gardner who's a very well-known Newcastle artist had a wonderful suite of his fire paintings
here last year and behind me three large canvases of these nocturnal scenes with trees bursting
in the flames, terrific stuff for Lent when you're supposed to be worried about what you're
doing as your life as a sinner.
Another project that I really enjoyed was working on an exhibition which we called the
Ecological Eye.
Both these artists have quite a commitment to their practice addressing social issues
and they created two wonderful works, Penny's Crunch Paper work which hundreds of sheets
and it filled the entryway of the church as an installation and Andrew's work addressing
the figure of Christ as someone found down deep in the roots of a tree this Christ figure
who connects us to the juices of the earth.
So lots of food for thought for religious ideas but an exhibition which connected us
to a concern for the environment, I mean goodness me, Newcastle is one of the major
ports exporting coal in the world.
We are complicit as an economy in involvement in mining issues and then making an impact
on climate change.
Currently I'm trying to follow up this environmental concern.
The church has just started a relationship with the church in Tuvalu and Tuvalu is a
community of 10,000 people on these small coral atolls and their great claim to fame
is that they will be the first country that goes under as a result of rising sea levels.
So we've developed a relationship and we're funding a project that will help them deal
with what they need to do in the face of this climate catastrophe.
And so next year I'm planning to work with an artist and I'm looking for that person
at the moment an Islander artist who can help us understand what it's like from a Pacific
Islander point of view.
One of the most exciting areas of engagement through the arts has been in the area of music
and Dungeon Jazz has been a label that's been associated here for at least 20 years down
in the dungeon, well-named, we've had an incredible range of performers locally and internationally.
Adamstown's known for its jazz.
In the last 10 years Sunday interlude concerts have explored more of the area of popular
music and like classical music.
So there's a rich tradition which continues and in those concerts there's always an opportunity
for younger performers to get some legs performing in front of people and I think it's really
incubated a lot of the younger talent in Newcastle who've gone on to have great careers.
Bringing the arts into this environment of the church is a risk-taking venture because
you're really asking people to think in diverse ways to be creative, to change, to allow themselves
the possibility that the way they've been thinking has not been the best way.
This is not usually the role of a church in society, usually churches take a role that
well this is the truth and that's what you believe and you are relieved from any questioning
and worry about life.
Well you can probably tell by now that I think the arts teach us about innovation and improvisation.
They give us skills to put our lives together in more interesting ways.
So I've quite consciously been quite creative in the way that I communicate and create spaces
on Sundays, the sort of central core business of the church and we've introduced visual
and performing arts and playful elements into that because what I think I fundamentally
believe is that the church is a studio.
It's a place for experimentation for making mistakes and learning about yourself, growing
up and taking responsibility for the life that you live and living it to the full.
So I laughingly occasionally remind my congregation that we are a factory of joy.
All the activities that are held here in the church and the hall are brought together under
the umbrella of Adams Town Arts so it's a tag that we're now using to express this diverse
number of projects and activities that we're doing.
It's not so churchy, it just says that we're involved in the community in this kind of
creative way.
I think one of the personal things that happened at the beginning of my relationship with this
community is that I told them I was gay and that created a series of questions for this
congregation about whether they would receive me as their minister.
I was clearly well placed in terms of the person they were looking for, it seemed like
a good match but that was a question that some people took offence at.
So when the vote was taken by this congregation to call me to come here as their minister,
approximately 17 people left the church.
So it was a very costly decision that they would call a minister who has a life experience
that probably is unusual in terms of clergy experience.
But in some way that has set the tone for us to become a much more open community, learning
from people who are different.
We're not to be fearful of other people's experience just because they're different
to us but life is far more lived fully when you have a sense of curiosity and wonder and
of course the arts invite that experience.
So I am enormously grateful that to my surprise I've been welcomed in suburban Newcastle by
a congregation who love me and appreciate me for my own life story.
