Peter Cameron (minister)

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Dr Peter Cameron was born in Scotland, read law at Edinburgh University, and studied theology at Edinburgh and Cambridge before being ordained as a minister in the Church of Scotland.

Cameron and his family moved to Sydney at the beginning of 1991, when he was appointed Principal of St Andrew's College, and thus became a minister in the Presbyterian Church of Australia.

In 1993, Dr Cameron was convicted by the Presbyterian Church of Australia of heresy. The charge related to a sermon that he preached on 2 March 1992 called 'The Place of Women in the Church' to 300 members of a Presbyterian women's organisation. In the sermon Cameron supported the ordination of women to the ministry, criticised the church’s hard line on homosexuality, and attacked fundamentalist Christianity in general (Jensen, nd)^[1](de Maria, 1999)^[2]

In Australia, most congregations of the Presbyterian Church had left that body to join the Uniting Church in Australia. The thirty-six percent of congregations that stayed tended to be more conservative or fundamentalist than the majority that left. This meant that the Presbyterian Church in Australia was a far more conservative body than its 'parent' the Church of Scotland. Thus, Dr Cameron's opinions were far more remarkable in the context of the Australian church than they would have been in the Scottish context. Church spokesman Reverend Paul Cooper noted that "though the views that Dr Cameron is spouting would be acceptable in Scotland, they are not acceptable in Australia." (de Maria, 1999)

The ordination of women was a particularly 'live' issue at the time. Seven months after Dr Cameron's arrival, the General Assembly of Australia had decided to reverse a seventeen-year-old policy of ordaining women (de Maria, 1999).

Dr Cameron's 'conviction' did not have any legal standing, only standing within the church itself. Thus the worst consequences for him would have been deposition (exclusion from the ministry) or excommunication (expulsion from the church). However he withdrew his last appeal and and resigned from the ministry on 1 August 1994. He returned to Scotland in January 1996, and left the Church of Scotland to be ordained in the Scottish Episcopal Church (the Anglican Church in Scotland) (de Maria, 1999).

Dr Cameron is the author several books, the most well-known of which, Heretic, ISBN 0-868-24544-5, gives his account of the trial.