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Recent Submissions

Beyond Crude Rhetoric: Social Justice Across the Sector Divide in Australian Schooling
(2026-12-01) Brennen, Thomas; Australian Lutheran College
All Australian schools hold a legislated responsibility to pursue excellence and equity. Yet public narratives frequently position non-government schools as contributors to systemic inequity through their receipt of public funding and resulting concentration of social justice challenges within government schools. While funding inequality remains significant, the equity envisioned in the Mparntwe Education Declaration cannot be achieved through resource distribution alone. Public debate privileges funding and enrolment demographics while giving scant attention to the everyday practices, relationships and community commitments through which schools pursue social justice. This paper examines how social justice in Australian non-government schooling is constructed within contemporary public discourse and whether these constructions reflect the complexity of practice within schools. Drawing on established markers of socially just schooling (Smyth et al, 1998) the paper employs thematic analysis of mainstream media and stakeholder advocacy, alongside critical autoethnographic reflection informed by the author's experience as principal of low ICSEA non-government schools. The paper argues that while structural critiques of educational inequality remain essential, the binary construction of "government schools = justice" and "non-government schools = injustice" obscures how schools across sectors understand, negotiate and enact obligations towards social justice. It calls for a richer, research-informed conversation that considers not only resource distribution but also the social justice practices through which schools contribute to the excellence and equity aspirations.
Barker, Renae
A Round Church in a Square Hole: Indigenous Theologies and the Challenge of Decolonising Liturgical Space in Australian Journal of Liturgy
(2026) Couchman, Adam; St Francis College
This paper argues that church architecture in Australia is not a neutral backdrop for worship but a form of spatial theology shaped by colonial power. Colonial-era churches, marked by linear and hierarchical design, embody and reinforce imperial assumptions about authority, place, and community. Drawing on postcolonial critique and Aboriginal theological insights, particularly the work of Garry Deverell and the relational worldview expressed in Song Spirals, the paper contrasts these inherited forms with more circular, participatory, and Country-connected modes of gathering. Using Carlson and Farrelly’s framework of topple, preserve, rectify, and rewrite, it outlines practical ways churches might engage their built environments. Decolonising liturgical space involves not only reconfiguring architecture but reimagining worship as relational, situated, and open to the presence of Country.
Between two welcomes: towards an evangelical "second people's missiology: in the lands now known as Australia
(2026-06) Jackson, Darrell; Whitley College
The Cape Town Commitment (2010) is an important summary statement of evangelical mission theology and practice as it is understood in the opening decades of the 21st century. Its emphasis on ‘love of God and neighbour’ as the ethic and motivation towards participation in God’s mission is welcomed by many evangelicals, albeit not unanimously. The Commitment envisages new theologies and practices of mission that value and express a ‘love for God’s world’. Among these theologies and practices is an extended discussion of our care of creation. The discussion, unsurprisingly, is primarily focused on ecological issues. However, the Commitment also makes references to valuing the cultural diversity of humanity as well as hinting at the potential connections between the land on which we live, and the human identity and agency that are intricately connected with the places we live. Such developments lend credibility to evangelicals trying to understand and engage with issues of indigenous theology and aboriginal claims in Australia. However, the recent work of Australian theologian, Chris Budden, raises important questions about the extent to which such theologies should properly be interpreted as ‘second people’ theologies; theologies that are expressed and explored after the fact of invasion and displacement. This paper attempts to state clearly the problem for evangelicals in Australia trying to express and practice ‘love for God’s world’, before self-critically suggesting some ways in which it might be possible to develop a chastened ‘second people’s’ theological approach to issues of justice and reconciliation as these relate to the contested understanding, use, and stewardship of land in Australia.
Putting Christian Leadership in Its Place: Towards a Critical Topography of Religious Leading
(2026-07) Shakespeare, Lyndon; St Barnabas College
This presentation proposes a framework oriented around a central question: Where does Christian leadership come from? The proposal developed here weaves together three threads of inquiry and practice: a topological imagination, a pneumatology of place‑making, and reflexive practices. In brief, these threads correspond to place (topos), dwelling (oikos), and reflexivity (phronesis). Together, they offer a way of thinking about Christian leading that is spatial, communal, and critically self‑aware. Conventional leadership models such as adaptive leadership, transformational leadership, and servant leadership each offer important insights. Yet all three tend to assume that leadership can be abstracted from place and transferred across contexts. As a result, place becomes a backdrop rather than constitutive reality, and the leader’s own embeddedness in place disappears from view. My purpose is to build on and deepen the long-standing concern with contextualization and local approaches to Christian life and practice, and to better align an account of Christian leading with the necessary and growing shift towards questions of place as part of the larger decolonial efforts within the Western theological imagination.