Covenants, treaties and the politics of reconciliation

The covenantal precepts advanced in the Uniting Church's revised constitutional preamble have public implications open to instructive contrast with Christian interpretations of New Zealand's Treaty of Waitangi. While there are significant differences between the Treaty and the Uniting Church's Covenant, they both draw religious precepts into the secular political order's engagement with the claims of indigeneity and politics of reconciliation.This paper is concerned not so much with an assessment of the revised preamble, but with providing a comparative indigenous context from which the Uniting Church might add to its discernment of the public implications of its covenantal commitment.