Christian clergy from across Queensland will gather in Brisbane today for a joint professional development day to strengthen ecumenical ties and address critical social issues. Source: The Catholic Leader.
The annual Anglican-Roman Catholic Clergy Day, held this year at St Luke’s Anglican Church Hall in Tarragindi, is part of an ongoing commitment to a formal covenant between the two faith traditions.
Brisbane Archdiocese’s Council for Ecumenism and Inter-religious Relations executive officer Margaret Naylon said the gathering was about much more than a single day of professional training.
“It’s part of the building relationships,” Ms Naylon said, noting that the annual event acts as a vital mechanism to encourage collaborative work at the grass-roots parish level.
“Getting the clergy together at least once a year is an attempt to build connections with clergy so they get to know each other, so that they might be more inclined to work together at the local level.”
The event will focus heavily on equipping Church leaders to handle domestic abuse and pastoral trauma.
This year’s workshop will be led by the Reverend Tracy Lauersen, the Anglican Church of Australia’s families and culture national program manager.
The training aims to give clergy concrete tools to identify domestic and family violence, support survivors compassionately and with liturgies to aid recovery.
The annual clergy day is bound to a formal covenant signed by the Catholic and Anglican dioceses in 2009 to mark the sesquicentenary of both Queensland and the local dioceses.
Ms Naylon said the choice of this year’s training theme was forged directly through informal dialogue between Brisbane’s Catholic Archbishop Shane Mackinlay and Anglican Archbishop Jeremy Greaves.
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Annual Anglican and Catholic clergy day will focus on pastoral training to address domestic violence (By Joe Higgins, The Catholic Leader)
