Alice Springs

Alice Springs Lutheran Church welcomes lots of children to services, but we don’t run a Sunday school. Don’t we care about our young people?

With the Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) document in hand and copies of the RAP poster, Marilyn Wall returned to Central Australia in October. The purpose of her visit was to discuss how best to share this information with the Aboriginal members in the Lutheran communities.

Yirara College in Alice Springs is ahead of the curve in ensuring education is delivered to its students who can’t attend school due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Term 2 at Living Waters Lutheran School in Alice Springs has been quite different. Students and staff returning to school have had to adapt to social distancing.

‘No gathering for Easter worship’. Is that a disaster? Not when we work together to find creative solutions.

Nine siblings of the Smart family travelled to Titjikala from all over Australia to be with their extended Aboriginal family to lay a memorial stone on the grave of their foster brother, Lincoln ‘Brother’ Boko, who passed away in 2014.

Each year, 24 Year 11 students and six staff members from Luther College in Melbourne travel to Alice Springs to engage with the student community at Yirara College.

Living Waters (Kwatja Etatha) Lutheran School has strong Christian values, supports students to learn, and acknowledges and understands students’ connections. The school has a great tradition of supporting not only the Indigenous students but also the Indigenous people who are employed at the school

Every Thursday the Aboriginal ladies from the Alice Springs Lutheran Congregation meet at the church for Bible study and choir practice. They are known as the Mission Block Choir (or Kwatja Etatha).

Since Alice Springs Lutheran Church founded Living Waters School over 30 years ago, the school has seen a steady increase in Aboriginal student numbers, now at 16% of the school’s total enrolment.