Rev Dr Geoff Thompson

Keynote Speaker in 2018

Theme: Fake News and Good News:  Discipleship and Conviction in a Post-truth Age

Biography (from 2018):

Geoff Thompson is Co-ordinator of Studies in Systematic Theology at Pilgrim Theological College, the theological college of the Victorian/Tasmanian Synod of the Uniting Church and one of the member colleges of the University of Divinity in Melbourne.

Prior to this he has been an Agronomist (in Pakistan), a Youth Worker (briefly, and a long time ago), a theological student (in Melbourne and Cambridge), a parish minister (in Melbourne) and, in his first stint in theological education, Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Trinity Theological College (in Brisbane). Geoff regards Systematic Theology as the work of looking at the big picture of Christianity. It explores how the array of ideas that Christianity has generated relate to each other (that’s the ‘systematic’ bit) and produce something like a coherent picture, or vision, of God, the world and faith. It also looks at how that vision engages new questions as it moves from context to context, and how it shapes Christian experience and action in different contexts. All this means the theme ‘Fake News and Good News:  Discipleship and Conviction in a Post-truth Age’ is close to his key interests.