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News
June 9, 2026

This year’s UnitingWorld Sunday is almost here and resources are now on the website. 

Across the Pacific, Asia and Africa, the Uniting Church walks alongside partner churches doing extraordinary things: lifting families out of poverty, helping communities adapt to climate change, opening up education for children, and standing up for justice. These are people of deep faith and remarkable courage, pursuing the abundant life Jesus promised, for everyone.

This year’s UnitingWorld Sunday is your chance to celebrate our global neighbours and the church family we’re part of. Join churches across Australia on June 28 (or any date that suits your calendar).

The theme is Life, Abundantly, drawn from John 10:10. At the heart of the service is an inspiring video sermon from our National Director, Dr Sureka Goringe, exploring how God is at work through our partners to create extraordinary change (coming soon!).

Explore this year’s resources, including the complete liturgy and order of service, video sermon, a children’s talk, and presentation materials, everything you need to lead a meaningful service.

Explore the resources and liturgy here.

Want to go further? Get in touch with your closest Church Engagement Team member to order printed booklets and donation envelopes, ask any questions, or simply let us know you’ll be using the service this year. We’d love to hear from you!

Let’s celebrate the abundant life God offers, and the global church family we’re part of.

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Campaigns, News
May 13, 2026

UnitingWorld Budget Response 2026 

UnitingWorld welcomes the Australian Government’s decision to protect its aid and development program and modestly increase its funding at a time when too many countries are walking away from their neighbours.  

The investment focus on the Indo-Pacific, climate change, gender equality and humanitarian response is to be commended. Australia’s aid program is a cost-effective investment that saves lives, transforms communities and contributes to peace and stability in our world. 

“At a time of rising conflict, humanitarian need, and major aid retrenchment across the world, Australia’s decision to protect aid sends an important message to our region, that we will continue to show up,“ said Dr Sureka Goringe, National Director of UnitingWorld. 

“Australia’s aid program is an extension of the values we aspire to: love, justice and compassion for every person, regardless of where they were born.” 

However, with aid and development funding falling to just 0.63% of the federal budget, Australia is missing a chance to lead at a moment of profound global need and human suffering. 

“I’ve seen firsthand what Australian aid means to communities across the Pacific and Asia, the schools, the health clinics, the women leading change in their own villages. But the need is growing, and at just 0.63% of the federal budget, we’re not yet doing enough,” said Dr Goringe. 

UnitingWorld continues to call for the Government to chart a path back to 1% of the Federal Budget, a level reached before under both Labor and Coalition governments.  

The need has never been greater, and Australia has more to give.

 

Your voice is powerful.

We invite you to join us in calling the Government to restore aid to 1% of the Federal Budget, through the Safer World For All campaign in partnership with Micah Australia. Help make sure Australian aid keeps reaching the communities who need it now more than ever.  Find out more.

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News
May 12, 2026

Are you an experienced governance leader who is motivated by purpose and the chance to make a lasting global impact?

We are seeking expressions of interest from experienced Christian leaders who would like to join the UnitingWorld Board in the role of Chair.

UnitingWorld is a high‑energy organisation that consistently delivers impact well beyond its scale in locally-led international development. The Board is a highly engaged, skills‑based group, bringing a diversity of professional expertise as well as gender, age and cultural background.

The Chair of the Board leads the work of the Board, creating space for innovation in strategy and ensuring diligence in governance.

About UnitingWorld

UnitingWorld is an agency of the Uniting Church in Australia.

We partner internationally with churches and church agencies to address the causes and consequences of poverty, injustice, and violence through community-led sustainable development.

In 2025, we worked with 22 partners in 15 countries on 29 projects to reach 117,745 people.

While we work with and through churches, our programs include all people regardless of their faith, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, or gender. Our programs are initiated and implemented by our partners.

We translate rigorous sustainable community development principles through the lens of our Christian faith. We help to build leadership and organisational capacity. We partner for the long haul. We strive to build an international community, helping connect our partners with each other and our own church.

We maintain the highest standards for international development practice in Australia by being a member of the Australian Council of International Development (ACFID), a signatory of their Code of Conduct, and by being accredited by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to receive Australian Aid funding. We are also a member of the Fundraising Institute of Australia (FIA), and of the international ACT Alliance network.

Next Steps

If this sounds like you, we’d welcome an Expression of Interest that addresses the role requirements, and your resume by 30 May 2026.

To request a full position profile for the role of Chair, and to submit an Expression of Interest please contact Oli at EA@unitingworld.org.au.  

Download full Position Description

More about UnitingWorld

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News, Women's Empowerment and Poverty Alleviation (Bali, Indonesia)
May 7, 2026

UnitingWorld has launched our 2026 End of Financial Year Appeal to support the world’s poorest in the Pacific, Asia and Africa

Every morning, before anything else, Semis pounds rice by hand so her family has enough to eat.

“If I don’t do this today, we don’t eat tomorrow,” she explains, as a matter of fact.

Semis lives in rural Sumba, eastern Indonesia, one of 219 million people in our region living on less than $3 a day. Already living with erratic rainfall and an increasingly arid climate, subsistence farming families like hers are among the most exposed in the world to global economic shocks. When costs rise, hunger follows. When the crop fails, there is no fallback. When the rain doesn’t come, Semis and her husband go into the forest to forage wild roots and plants just to get through.

And yet her hopes are as humble as her life.

“My hope,” she told us, “is for my child to go to school, and for there to be enough to eat.”

That’s it. Not wealth. Just enough, and a future for her daughter she never had herself.

This is what UnitingWorld’s End of Financial Year Appeal is about, working alongside local church partners in Sumba to break the cycle of poverty and hunger for families like Semis’s. Not a handout, but a hand alongside: food gardens, water access, agricultural mentoring, health support for mothers and children.

“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” — John 10:10

Your tax-deductible gift before 30 June has up to six times the impact through our partnership with the Australian Government. It’s the most powerful time of year to give.

Find out more and give now here.

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News
April 28, 2026

20–24 April 2026 | Nadi, Fiji

Church and community partners from across the Pacific came together in Nadi, Fiji this week for UnitingWorld’s Pacific Regional Forum 2026, a week of listening, learning and renewing commitment to shared mission.

Participants joined from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Samoa, alongside UnitingWorld staff, and representatives from the Pacific Conference of Churches and Pasifika Communities University.

Confronting the climate crisis together

The forum brought into sharp focus the devastating human and environmental toll of climate change across the region. With tears and honesty, participants shared the lived reality of rising seas and saltwater intrusion across low-lying atoll nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati, where the threat is not distant but existential.

“The rising seawater is contaminating water sources, degrading agricultural land, and deepening uncertainty for families in Kiribati,” said Uniting Church in Kiribati Secretary for Mission, Rev Maleta Tenten.

“We are now forced to import most of our food, because it is so hard to grow in our soil now. The heath impacts are a crisis. Our islands are disappearing. We urgently need to work together to save Kiribati.”

A community visit brought these realities home. Forum participants travelled to an inland village that had been forced to relocate after deadly landslides destroyed their homes and buried a family alive. It was a sobering, powerful reminder of why disaster risk reduction and community preparedness are central to the church’s work in the Pacific.

Hope, action and equitable leadership

Alongside these difficult stories, participants heard powerful accounts of hope,  churches across the region working together to transform lives and communities. Forum sessions also explored how gender-equitable leadership and participation are essential to building communities that are resilient, prepared and sustainable.

In solidarity with these commitments, forum participants marked Thursdays in Black, the global campaign standing with victims and survivors of gender-based violence, and challenging the cultures of silence that allow it to continue.

Walking together

“UnitingWorld’s Pacific partnerships are built on relationships of mutuality, respect, and shared vision,” reflected National Director Dr Sureka Goringe.

“This forum is one expression of that, a space where Pacific church partners lead, share and strengthen the work they are already doing in their communities, and that we are blessed to support.”

 

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Blogs, Campaigns, Community Health & Infant Nutrition (Timor Leste)
April 20, 2026

In the midst of world events that feel out of our control, we take hold of the Easter resurrection story to guide our steps together.

When we turn our attention toward Christ, when we fast, when we pray, when we slow down enough to follow his footsteps, we don’t get pulled away from the world. We get pulled deeper into it.

I addressed churches during Easter with a message of hope and encouragement. I hope you’ll take a moment to be encouraged by watching, and share with others who need to hear again the Easter narrative of solidarity and transformation.

Find out more about UnitingWorld’s Lent Event.

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News
April 15, 2026

Conflict has forced a million people from their homes in Lebanon. Shelters are overwhelmed. Families are going without food, medicine, and water. Will you help today?

UnitingWorld is supporting the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC) ‘Light of Hope’ appeal through the Act Alliance to reach 46,000 displaced families in Beirut and South Lebanon with urgent food, clean water, medicine and basic shelter.

Donate now! 

Make an online donation here or call 1800 998 122 (9am – 5pm) 

Here’s what your donation makes possible:

$25 provides a blanket or baby milk for a displaced infant and family
$60 provides a full food parcel, enough to feed a family through the immediate emergency
$150 provides two emergency food parcels and hygiene supplies for two families
$210 delivers direct cash assistance to a displaced family, giving them the dignity of choosing their most urgent need
$500 provides emergency support to multiple families: food, hygiene, water, and medicines

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Community Livelihood Support, News, Project Updates, Social Empowerment for Excluded Castes (India)
March 26, 2026

UnitingWorld is partnering with the Church of North India – Diocese of Eastern Himalaya to support a tea plantation community in India’s Darjeeling region. A community of 190 people are still recovering from a plantation closure that stripped them of income, housing and food security overnight.

With few transferable skills and increasingly severe climate impacts, including heavy rains, landslides and soil erosion, families have struggled to rebuild their livelihoods.

Senior Project Officer Rose Donovan recently facilitated a four-day consultation and planning workshop with Diocese staff and community members to design a project to help people adapt to the changing climate and find alternative incomes.

“The community took us on a very intimate walk, showing us how they grow their food, their water sources and the landslides scattered throughout the area, and welcoming us into their homes,” said Rose. “They shared their goals and dreams fortheir community, each family longing to shape their own future.”

The Diocese has already employed a local woman as field officer. She had been planning to migrate more than three hours away in search of work, but can now stay and serve her own community.

Over the next three years, our partners will be helping families through climate resilient farming, improved livestock management and access to markets, as well as vocational training and career guidance for young people. They will also be working with the entire community on a disaster preparedness plan, including building awareness on drainage issues, good land management and how to reduce landslide risks.

Diocese Program Manager Sanjay Khaling said, “the community is enthusiastic about working together, and while it is a huge learning process,they are ready to get started.”

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Community Livelihood Support, News, Project Updates, Women's Empowerment and Poverty Alleviation (Bali, Indonesia)
March 26, 2026

When migrants suddenly started turning up in Bali from the nearby island of Sumba, many people assumed the worst. Would they be a strain on housing, jobs and social harmony? One more group of outsiders to be tolerated or pushed aside?

But for Rev Betha and her team at MBM (the development agency of the Protestant Christian Church in Bali), the arrivals weren’t a problem to be solved but an opportunity to love their neighbours in need.

“In our outreach to new migrants, they shared that the primary driving factor for leaving Sumba to seek work in Bali was extreme poverty,” Rev Betha explained.

“Their condition is largely caused by drought, infertile land and limited access to water, which make it difficult for villagers to make a living.”

Climate change sits at the centre of this shared challenge. “These changes have led to reduced rainfall and prolonged dry seasons, resulting in drought and crop failure,” Rev Betha says, with ripple effects across health, livelihoods and family safety.

For many years, MBM has worked alongside vulnerable communities in Bali. But when Rev Betha stepped into leadership in 2023, she felt called to respond more deeply to the plight of new
migrants.

“Climate change and poverty have driven many people from Sumba to migrate to Bali in search of work, often without adequate skills or an understanding of cultural differences.

As a result, many Sumbanese migrants in Bali face a type of ‘double’ poverty. First in their places of origin, and again in their destination areas. These realities strengthened our conviction at MBM that we must expand our ministry to Sumba.”

As well as supporting families who have already migrated, MBM devised a plan to help people still at home in Sumba, before they become stuck in Bali facing hostility and fewer opportunities.

MBM has partnered with UnitingWorld and the Sumba Christian Church to make this work possible, building trust through shared faith.

“We hold the conviction that it is God who sends us to accompany the vulnerable and the poor with compassion,” Rev Betha reflects. “We believe that God goes before this good plan and faithfully sustains our work.”

We will be sharing more about this growing partnership, and ways to support the project, later in the year. Pease uphold Rev Betha and her team in prayer.

 

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News
March 26, 2026

Right now, humanitarians the world over are operating with far less support. A global retreat from foreign aid is happening at precisely the wrong moment.

Early last year, the United States closed USAID and slashed its foreign aid budget by more than 80 percent. Modelling from Boston University suggests this has already caused 600,000 deaths, two-thirds of them children. Other major funders followed: Germany cut aid by 50%, the UK by 40% and France by 37%, all diverted to record defence spending.

We are thankful that Australia’s aid budget was saved from cuts, in no small part by a movement of faithful Christians and church institutions refusing to see aid as discretionary spending, but as an extension of our shared values.

If you added your voice through the Safer World For All campaign, contacted your Member of Parliament, or prayed for and supported us and our partners as they advocated in Canberra – thank you!

There’s still a long way to go. Australia’s foreign aid remains at a historic low of just 0.5 per cent of the federal budget, well below what’s needed to meet humanitarian and development needs around the world.

We will continue to urge the government to restore Australian aid to the modest level of 1% of the Federal Budget, a small step that would have a huge impact.

You can help by joining the campaign at www.saferworld.org.au