General information | |
---|---|
Address | 29 Hughes Street |
Town or city | Potts Point |
Country | Australia |
Coordinates | 33°52′18″S151°13′28″E / 33.871619°S 151.2244486°E |
The Wayside Chapel is a charity and parish mission of the Uniting Church in Australia in the Potts Point area of Sydney, Australia. [1] Situated near Sydney's most prominent red-light district in Kings Cross, the Wayside Chapel offers programs and services which attempt to ensure access to health, welfare, social and recreation services. [2] The centre assists homeless people and others on the margins of society. [3]
The Wayside Chapel's mission is described as "creating a community with no 'us' and 'them'". [2] Its motto, developed during the leadership of the Rev. Graham Long is "Love Over Hate". [2]
Graham Long described the Wayside Chapel's approach in a 2014 interview as not having "any interest at all in solving problems". [4] Rather, the Wayside Chapel characterises its approach in the following way:
"I don’t want you to be a problem that I have to fix. I want you to be a person that I can meet. And I think if we meet you’ll change and so will I. You’ll move towards health and so will I. That’s how it works." [4]
The Wayside Chapel was established in the Kings Cross area of Sydney in 1964. [5] [6] Ted Noffs was the founder of the Wayside Chapel, which was at the time a Methodist ministry (Uniting Church from 1977). [7] At that time, it was only a single room with a dozen chairs in a block of flats at 29 Hughes Street, Potts Point. Within twelve months of his arrival, Noffs had transformed it into a chapel, coffee shop drop-in and community resource centre. [7] The expectations of the church hierarchy—that Noffs's experiment would fail and become obscure and irrelevant—were not realised.
The centre grew until it occupied the entire building at No. 29. Later it grew still further and occupied the block of flats adjacent to the first block. A crisis centre was established in 1971 to handle crises which might arise at any time of day or night, including drug overdoses and possible suicides. More conventional church activities such as weddings were also carried out and the Wayside Chapel became one of the most popular wedding venues in Sydney, along with St Mark's Church, Darling Point.
In the late 1990s, Pastor Ray Richmond and others established a "tolerance room" where people who inject drugs were able to do so in a supervised environment, as an act of civil disobedience. [8] This eventually led to the creation of the legal Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross.
From 2004–2017 the pastor of Wayside Chapel was Graham Long. [9] [10] [11] He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours in recognition of his community work. [12]
The current pastor and CEO of Wayside Chapel is Jon Owen, who has served in the position since July 2018. [13]
In July 2009, the Wayside Chapel received a grant of $2 million from the state government for the purpose of rebuilding its physical facilities. An additional grant from the federal government for $3 million was received in late 2009. The balance of funds were raised by private donation. Graham Long said that rainwater had been penetrating the brick walls and causing bricks to fall out. Forty per cent of the existing buildings had already been condemned, but moves were afoot to start a renovation and rebuilding worth $7.5 million. [14]
On 19 May 2012 Wayside held the grand opening of its newly redeveloped building, designed by Environa Studio, the product of an A$8.2 million investment, five years of fundraising and 22 months of construction. The purpose-built facility features a community service centre, café, dedicated program space for The Aboriginal Project and Day-to-Day Living (a program for people with long-term mental health issues), community hall, offices and meeting spaces for groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. The new building also includes a rooftop garden with over 50 varieties of vegetables, fruit, flowers and herbs, along with a bee hive, worm farm and compost.
Ted Noffs intended the Wayside Chapel to be a place where action came before preaching and engagement with the community was more important than going to church on Sunday. Successive ministers have endeavored to uphold this tradition. Noffs pioneered a number of far-reaching and innovative developments in social welfare at The Wayside Chapel:[ citation needed ]
Raymond Richmond was responsible for:[ citation needed ]
Graham Long attempted to develop the mission of "creating community with no 'us and them'". He described his approach as telling people they are not problems to be solved but rather people to be met. [15] Under Long's leadership the following programs have been implemented:
The Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) was founded on 22 June 1977, when most congregations of the Methodist Church of Australasia, about two-thirds of the Presbyterian Church of Australia and almost all the churches of the Congregational Union of Australia united under the Basis of Union. According to the church, it had 243,000 members in 2018. In the 2016 census, 870,183 Australians identified with the church, but that figure fell to 673,260 in the 2021 census. In the 2011 census, that figure was 1,065,796. The UCA is Australia's third-largest Christian denomination, behind the Catholic and the Anglican Churches. There are around 2,000 UCA congregations, and 2001 National Church Life Survey (NCLS) research indicated that average weekly attendance was about 10 per cent of census figures. The UCA is one of Australia's largest non-government providers of community and health services. Its service network consists of over 400 agencies, institutions, and parish missions, with its areas of service including aged care, hospitals, children, youth and family, disability, employment, emergency relief, drug and alcohol abuse, youth homelessness and suicide. Affiliated agencies include UCA's community and health-service provider network, affiliated schools, the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, Frontier Services and UnitingWorld.
Kings Cross is an inner-eastern locality of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is located approximately 2 kilometres east of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of the City of Sydney. It is bounded by the suburbs of Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay, Rushcutters Bay and Darlinghurst.
Baulkham Hills is a suburb in the Hills District of Greater Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. It is located within 30 kilometres (19 mi) north-west of the Sydney central business district mostly within the local government area of The Hills Shire, of which Baulkham Hills was formerly the administrative seat and namesake of The Hills Shire. A small section of the suburb which is located south of the Hills Motorway-Windsor Road intersection is part of the City of Parramatta.
Mission Australia is a national Christian charity that provides a range of community services throughout Australia. It has its roots in the Brisbane sector of The British and Foreign Bible Society’s sub-committee, The Colporteur Society (1869), and Sydney City Mission (1862), but was only officially established in 1996, bringing together a number of city missions across the country. The organisation specialises in the areas of homelessness and housing, families and children, early learning, youth, employment and skills, substance abuse, disability, mental health, and strengthening communities. Sharon Callister has been CEO since March 2022.
Religion in Australia is diverse. In the 2021 national census, 43.9% of Australians identified with Christianity and 38.9% declared "no religion".
Christianity is the largest religion in Australia, with a total of 43.9% of the nation-wide population identifying with a Christian denomination in the 2021 census. The first presence of Christianity in Australia began with British colonisation in what came to be known as New South Wales in 1788.
Coleen Shirley Perry Smith AM MBE, better known as Mum Shirl, was a prominent Wiradjuri woman, social worker and humanitarian activist committed to justice and welfare of Aboriginal Australians. She was a founding member of the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Medical Service, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the Aboriginal Children's Services, and the Aboriginal Housing Company in Redfern, a suburb of Sydney. During her lifetime she was recognised as an Australian National Living Treasure.
Aboriginal Medical Services Redfern, known as AMS Redfern, formerly the Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) is an Aboriginal Australian health service in the Sydney suburb of Redfern. Established around 1971, it was the first Aboriginal community-controlled health service in Australia. It became a key Indigenous Australian community organisation, from which most Aboriginal medical services around the State of New South Wales have stemmed.
The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) is an Australian organisation that advocates for action to reduce poverty and inequality, and is the peak body for the community services sector in Australia. It was formed in 1956.
William David Crews AM is an Australian Christian minister of the Uniting Church. He is the minister of the Ashfield parish in Sydney's Inner West.
Prahran Mission is a not-for-profit community services organisation in Prahran, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. It is largely focused on providing services for people living with mental illness, or in economic or social disadvantage. It operates under the auspice of UnitingCare Australia.
Gertrude Street is a street in the inner northern suburb of Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia.
Theodore Delwin "Ted" Noffs was a Methodist minister who founded the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross, Sydney, in 1964.
The Ted Noffs Foundation is a charitable organisation located in Randwick, New South Wales, Australia. Founded as the Wayside Foundation in 1971 in Sydney by the Reverend Ted Noffs and his wife, Margaret, which provides drug and alcohol services for young people in Australia.
Sacred Heart Mission in St Kilda, an inner suburb of Melbourne, is a medium-sized not-for-profit organisation that grew from the Catholic parish of The Sacred Heart in Grey Street, West St Kilda. It addresses homelessness, social exclusion and disadvantage by providing a range of diverse and creative services that:
Life Education Australia is the largest and most recognised health education provider in Australian schools. Life Ed reaches on average 700,000 children annually where qualified educators present evidence-based preventative health and wellbeing education, along with Healthy Harold, the giraffe puppet and mascot who is the face of the organisation.
Caretakers Cottage is an Australian non-profit, non-governmental organisation based in Sydney assisting children and young adults facing homelessness. Caretakers Cottage is funded by the New South Wales Department of Communities and Justice to provide services for young people across Sydney's South-Eastern district. Services include short-term, emergency accommodation, semi-independent living options, case support and early intervention for young people at risk of homelessness.
Australian Inland Mission Hospital is a heritage-listed former hospital at Adelaide Street, Birdsville, Shire of Diamantina, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1952 to 1953 by Ben Hargreaves. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 17 July 2008.
The Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs (FAA), formerly Aboriginal Affairs Association, and nicknamed "the Foundo", was a community organisation for Aboriginal people in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia between 1964 and 1977. It published an occasional newsletter called Irabina, and in 1972 published four issues of Black Australian News.
{{citation}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)