St Helens Uniting Church hosted the workshop, ‘The Bible and the Basis’ on Saturday 24th August. This is a ‘hands on’ event where participants seek out biblical sources for the Basis of Union. The event at St Helens followed up the work of the earlier event at Ulverstone, finding biblical references for key statements in the Basis, paragraphs 1, 4 and 9.

Andrew Dutney reports that the Basis of Union is less about abstract doctrine and more about ‘the concrete, imaginative language of the Bible’. He says of drafter, J. Davis McCaughey: ‘It was McCaughey’s conviction that the words of the Bible do something in the community that hears and uses them, just as much as they mean something.’ McCaughey wrote:”A way must be found whereby the Word, and that means the Biblical words – or at least the dominant Biblical images, the scriptural words which have revelatory power – can be released into the life of the Church. A Church which lives by the Word of God must be content to be shaped and reshaped by these images.”

The ‘Bible and the Basis’ workshop operates in this spirit.