‘A Mission to the Urban Community’ began in 1989 when Catherine Wasley, a 17 year old Christian youth worker thought it would be great to do an inner city “mission”, living as a community for a week in the Perth city, and sharing the gospel with people who lived on the streets and in welfare agencies around town. It ran for 3 years under the Uniting Church with from 15 to 30 participants from all kinds of Christian backgrounds. While very successful, it struggled to find campers for a couple of years after that.
In 1997, several previous campers and the coordinator of Baptist Youth Ministries met together with the aim of relaunching AMUC. It was observed that AMUC had become more about learning from people on the streets than speaking to them, and so the name became AMong the Urban Community as the acronym was too good to lose.
After much effort to find a venue, cooks and campers, it ran in 1998, sleeping on the floor of a youth work agency at night, and moving to a church for the day program, and cleaning both up in between! Since then, it has run in January every year to 2007 in more comfortable locations.
For the last several years we have hosted interstate speakers for the morning study sessions that bring particular insight to the many issues of being disciples of Jesus, “incarnational” mission, and church for the here and now. The afternoon workshops focus on issues from the perspective of visiting speakers who have particular experience or expertise – regardless of their spirituality.
AMUC has evolved to become a holistic, multi-faceted Christian discipleship experience. It provides a bottom-up view of the society we live in by the experience of meeting and being among real people with a very different experience of life to most Christians. It has attempted to provide a gospel-based framework that enables active and sustained engagement with our world, both recognising the call to “follow” and to “be still”.
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For more specific Information regarding the 2010 Camp, go to Camp Info.
