about habitat's spirituality centre

Habitat Uniting Church core mission focus is through a spirituality centre ministry at both our sites. This ministry is grounded in the Christian faith and call to link contemplation and action through personal, social and ecological transformation. We recognise openness in Australian culture to explore human spirituality, but a resistance to religion. We seek to provide a bridge between church and community.

theology of hospitality

The Christian Church is called to embody God’s loving presence and, inspired by the Holy Spirit to participate in the extension of Christ’s ministry and consciousness in the world. Habitat Uniting Church seeks to participate in the life of God through sharing in God’s hospitality through a spirituality centre ministry.

When we offer hospitality, we embrace the other. In Greek, philoxenos, captures the vision of God’s hospitality being ‘love of the stranger’. Offering hospitality creates a safe and welcoming space for the other to find their sense of humanity and worth. 

Offering hospitality also contributes to our own evolution. As we welcome the one who is unknown/the other, we are able to welcome what is strange/other in ourselves with more confidence. And in so doing, God draws us towards greater soulfulness.

Offering hospitality to the stranger means much more than merely tolerating diversity. Rather, it implies learning from each other. When encountering the unknown, either in another cultural, faith, person or in ourselves we can then find that God is there already. Our own restraining beliefs, prejudices can be exposed and transformed into new understanding and new experiences of being in God’s grace.

The Habitat Uniting Church and our spirituality centre ministry is for people who search for meaning; seek to exercise their gifts to make a difference in the world; and long to nourish their soul. 

As community in diversity, we actively seek to develop partnership relationships with multi faith groups and networks characterized by Christ-like friendship. Partnerships become a context of mutual respect, to share in God’s hospitality and work on common projects. In this way, we become a hospitable habitat, a home, in which life can be planted, nurtured grow and flourish; return to the earth to nourish the new. 

The Habitat Uniting Church is home to a community who invite others to share the sacred space we inhabit together.