Lang Lang
February 1981.
There is a heatwave and even at 8pm in the brick church which has
been soaking up the sun all day it is an oppressively hot. The
Bishop and diocesan dignitaries duly arrive, the church fills with
both the regular parishioners and the curious, the ceremonies begin
and I am inducted as “priest-in –charge” of the parish of Lang
Lang.
“Priest-in-charge” is a
probationary situation normally for two years in a priest's first
post.
Jump forward
nine years. It is our
farewell from the parish. Doug Hodgson, a parishioner and one of the
most senior Freemasons in the state is giving one of the speeches. He
says “David and Sue were all on fire for the
Lord when they came to us, but we soon knocked that out of them!” .
He was not quite correct, they did not knock the fire for God out of us, but that was certainly not for lack
of trying!
In the first eighteen months or so we
trebled the size of the church. Then it all collapsed. We spent some
years recovering personally and working out why it all went wrong.
Then we started to rebuild something more stable.
I will go through what we did and the
lessons we learned in some detail because it has great instructional
value for any one who wants (under God) to see their church grow
spectacularly.
If we had left
after 18 months we would have looked like “super-ministers”
and the inevitable explosion would have looked like the fault of the
unfortunate who followed us.
Had we moved on after the initial
success might have repeated our success and mistakes in parish after
parish and we would have learnt nothing. As I suspect some
“successful” career clergy do, and don't respectively. But God
protected us from that particular pitfall - we
had to live through the explosion, pick ourselves up off the floor,
work out what went wrong, the pick up the pieces and rebuild. It
nearly killed us. But now we actually know something about church
revival.
The church we left behind after those
nine years was stable, full of spiritual vitality and financially
viable.
Before we left, as an exercise I sat
down one day and wrote from memory the names of people who regularly
received ministry. I counted 413 people.
When we left the age distribution of
the people in the church mirrored the age distribution in the
surrounding community.
In the years after we left much of what
we had rebuilt, particularly the ministry to young people was
dismantled. Other parts of the ministry we had painstakingly rebuilt
were allowed to die from neglect. Both of these, I fear, the result
of deliberate choices made by those in power in the diocese who had
no passion for Christ. They were not interested in saving souls and
certainly not interested in 'the un-churched' and especially not
interested in reaching young people who had grown up outside the
influence of the church.
This meteoric rise, crash then painful
recovery is the exciting tale that will occupy the next series of
blog posts.
To set the scene:
what did we find when we arrived in Lang Lang.
St. John’s Lang Lang, a very pretty
brick church with beside it a small but delightfully “Arts and
Crafts” brick house, all on an acre of land in the township. There
were generally about 12 people at church. All old. There was an
active “Ladies Guild” The current president had patiently waited
her turn for the previous president to die. They worked very hard to
raise enough to pay their share of running the parish. There was no
Sunday School, no youth groups, really parish life began at 70! The
town had 703 people so the signboard proudly proclaimed. It was
centre for a hinterland of dairy farms. There was a single (sealed)
main road lined with shops, and a residential area each side with
(then) dirt roads and wide grassy verges. Being a kilometre off the
highway meant that Lang Lang was comparatively quiet.
10Km down the main road towards
Melbourne then a 1 Km sidetrack brought you to Kooweerup. Once
impenetrable swamp, the hinterland had been drained in the early
1900's to reveal very fertile peat-like soil which now supported
intensive asparagus and potato farming and rich dairy cattle grazing.
St George’s Kooweerup was a smaller
but pretty brick church with a public car park between it and the
railway. It was on the end of the shops on the main street. (actually
Kooweerup boasted two main streets). The congregation was larger; I
think 18 or 20 on a good day. There were families as well. There was
a Sunday school. This had been the previous incumbent’s
“favourite” church.
The town population was about 1,200,
but largely Dutch and Italian so Roman Catholics accounted for 50% of
the population.
Kooweerup had the only high school in
the district and also a little 15 bed public hospital.
From Kooweerup another 10 Km inland
along “Main Drain Road” brought you to the tiny village of
Bayles. Really just a collection of houses with a couple of shops, a
CFA (fire brigade) shed, and the famous “Bayles fauna park”
Bayles had been an important centre
before the little soldier settlement farms of twenty or so cows were
agglomerated into viable sized ones. It even had a railway branch
line and its own station for taking the fresh milk to the Melbourne
market. That of course was long gone. However it was a pleasant
village and about 200 people lived there. In more hopeful times a
“Sunday School Hall” had been built. When I arrived it was unused
except as a venue for combined parish services.
5 Km or so from Bayles along side
roads with romantic names like “No. 5 Drain Road” and “No. 3
Drain Road” brought one to a cute little wooden church standing
forlornly in a paddock. This was St. Saviours Yallock. There had once
been a town there, but it had disappeared. There were fortnightly
evening services there which three to ten people attended.
Ministers generally stayed two years –
'though one cut and ran after 9 months and my predecessor stayed 4
years. Then there was a usually a longish vacancy while the parish
saved up its pennies to pay the next minister. Churchmanship seemed
to vary, with always the previous minister’s being
the best in the opinion of the parishioners!
Memories were long. St. John's
treasurer Vera Glover told me how she walked into the vestry in the
interregnum before I was appointed and saw a relieving minister who
had been rector there many years before. She matter-of factly told
me: “We hadn’t seen each other in 25 years, but I took up our
last argument right where we left off!”
Next
Post: Revival begins
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