My Adventures with God: 53: Public Humiliation

Chapter 53 ... Public Humiliation.

Later in 2003 Nick and Shirley's followers called a congregational meeting of St. Luke's parish. This was not legal under church law, but we were beginning to find out that they thought they were above the law. We were about to find out that diocesan officials also considered themselves above the law. If they wanted a thing, that was enough to make it right, and anything or any one who stood in the way of what they wanted could rightly be brushed aside.

I did not realise at that time that I was now entering a much wider ideological battle. In today's terms it is the battle between traditional conservative morals and progressive socialist morals. But if those terms were in use then I certainly did not know them. I was merely upholding a system of ethics I believed in against what I saw simply as individuals and groups behaving badly. I did not know that it was symptomatic of a widespread moral cancer.

I naively thought I was just up against Nick, Shirley and their followers. I was soon to find that this moral cancer infected people who held opposite views of doctrine and “churchmanship” and made them resonate with each other. I was soon to be fighting the whole diocesan hierarchy!

I hope to expand on this issue of conflict of ethical systems next post because it is the key to understanding not only some of the things about Nick and Shirley, but the looming conflict with the archbishop.

Back to the illegal congregational meeting: I found out about the meeting, and decided that trying to stop it would be as futile as King Canute trying to stop the tide, so I attended it and just asserted my right to be chairman. The meeting was stormy to say the least. The “superspirituals wanted firstly to put the boot into me as much as possible and secondly to get a motion of “no confidence” in me as vicar. I would not let them put the motion as that is just not how the Anglican Church works.

At one stage Jane xxx jumped up and demanded a vote to replace me as chairman. That is within the rules so I put her motion and it was resoundingly defeated. The message was clear: the “superspirituals” did not have the support of most of the congregation - even at a meeting they had called themselves and stacked with their supporters.

The next week I was summoned to see the Archbishop and chastised for not doing exactly what the “superspirituals” wanted. The fact that what they had done in calling the meeting and what they wanted to do with a motion of “no confidence” were unlawful were irrelevant to him. I was rapidly realising that the Archbishop had firmly taken sides!

There is one more interesting thing to relate about the congregational meeting.

Brian was one of the new leaders who had stepped up once Nick and Shirley's people walked oput of all their leadership roles. He had been a friend and golf partner of Nick. But he came to believe that Nick was wrong and supported me. To see him develop from a quiet but very devout person-in-the-pew to a spiritual force to be reckoned with was awsome. I'll tell you more about him later.

At the meeting he made two requests. First was to let the motion of no confidence to go ahead – in the confidence that it would be soundly defeated as indeed the motion to remove me as chairman had been. I refused this because even though it would work in my favour to have this vote – as it would have been - go my way, it was a bad precedent because it was not how the Anglican Church worked.

Brian's second was a strange request in some ways but quite logical - if politically suicidal - from the point of view of a devout Christian and one who was a trained “Prayer Counsellor”. He went to the microphone and said: “David, are you prepared, right now, in front of us all, to ask the forgiveness of everyone you have hurt?”

I was a little taken aback. Did he know what he was asking? It flashed through my mind first the political inexpediency of doing what he asked - I am no politician but even the proverbial babe-in-the-woods could see that pitfall! But I knew Brian was thinking as a Christian and a counsellor. then I also recalled how Jesus had taken a towel at the last supper and washed his disciples’ feet.” The example of Jesus won for me. I said: “Yes, I will.”

A number of Nick and Shirley’s supporters came up and I knelt in front of each one in turn, before the whole congregation and asked their forgiveness for anything I had done which had hurt them.

Shirley refused to take part. Nick came but drowned out my words shouting that it was all a facade and that I had not really repented.

He later put in writing what I think he was then shouting over my words. It was to the effect that he was like a girl who had been sexually abused by her father. The father might ask for her forgiveness, but she could not forgive him until he had repented.

I feel shocked even writing this now, that Nick could think for one instant that him being dismissed from a one-quarter-time post was in any way like a girl being raped by her father! But he did. This mind-boggling self-importance perhaps gives a true insight into his soul.

Yes this was indeed public humiliation, particularly when some merely used it as an occasion to mock me, but I rather think Jesus would have done it had he been in my shoes.

Now I come to a series of public humiliations brought about by the church hierarchy. These actually chronologically straddle the meeting described above, but it seemed efficient to lump them together.

I said that there had been a bishops agent doing what he called “taking the temperature” of the parish. I thought he said at one particular meeting that he was finishing up and sending a report to the bishop. I wrote asking the bishop for a copy of this report. He never answered my letter. I was later asked by the “superspirituals” in vestry what was in the report and I answered truthfully that I did not know because I had not been shown this report. They wrote to the archdeacon. Next I find a letter from the archdeacon being read out condemning me for not being honest and telling vestry what was in the report! Interestingly enough some years later, when we were at suit in the Supreme Court, the Archbishop declared under oath that the diocese had no such report. Yet they had said publicly back then that I was less than honest for not divulging what was in this non existent report!

I also said that I had asked the bishop to tell me if he thought I should not sack Nick, and the only answer I got was through his investigator who said “You’re the vicar, its up to you.” However now the bishop conveniently forgot that minor piece of truth and said how wrong it was for me to have sacked Nick. The Bishop now wrote to me and suggested I resign from the ministry. I wrote back and said “Under the laws and customs of the Anglican Church no bishop can lawfully ask a vicar to resign unless the vicar has been tried and found guilty of misdoing, therefore I decline to resign, and ask for your support as my bishop”.

The bishop in my view should have acted in accordance with the laws and customs of the Church and given me public support. He did the very opposite. He wrote to vestry and had read out in church letters in which he said he had asked me to resign and that I had refused. The letters were clearly couched to insinuate that he had the right to do this and I was “disobeying” a lawful order, which was not true. As you may imagine this gave a great deal of ammunition to the “superspirituals” who were then running an incredibly energetic and thorough campaign to destabilise the parish and foster disaffection.

When it came time for the AGM in November 2003 the Archbishop sent the archdeacon “as an observer” on the pretext that, as he said “I have had complaints about your conduct of Vestry meetings and concern has been expressed to me about what may happen at the annual general meeting…”

The archdeacon came not as an observer but as an agitator. He seized every opportunity to interrupt the flow of the meeting to rabble-rouse. Strong words - but that is what he did!.

At the start of the meeting he gave a speech. In it he said “David Greentree has been asked by the Archbishop to resign. He has refused. He says the archbishop cannot under church law tell him to resign.” Then he raised his voice and hands to the crowd and said “We are not under law but under grace!” Cheers, whistles and applause from the supporters of Nick and Shirley who were out in force. The archdeacon turned to me smiling at his own success.

Can I just stop for a moment? I would like to assume that all my readers would recognise that his “we are not under law but under grace” mis-quote from the bible is so bad that it would make the worst sort of American travelling snake-oil preacher-man blush! But since many of the hierarchy didn’t see it that way, please bear with me while I explain the obvious.

At the place in the letter to the Romans where Paul put these words, he had already pointed out that under the Law (of Moses) “Whoever fails to keep all of this law in under God’s curse. He had also pointed out very forcefully that every human being (save Jesus) had failed to keep this Law and so were rightly under God’s curse. But wonder of wonders, God had acted in the person of his Son to take our place so that we were now brought into the sphere of God’s grace - his unearned benevolence and good favour, and not only forgiven but adopted as God’s sons and daughters with the promise of an eternity with him in heaven. Then what he actually wrote was: “Do not let sin rule over you because we are not under law but under grace”

Would this archdeacon or any of those who cheered him say to the police officer who pulled them over for running a red light; “Its all right officer, I’m and Anglican, I’m not under law but under grace!” I’d like to see them try!

A Christian is not free from obeying the laws of the land. An Anglican minister is not free from obeying the laws of the church, which firstly they have sworn before God to obey, and secondly have been made by Anglicans over the years for the good government of the church.

The archdeacon’s attempts to de-rail the annual meeting - and it ran for a very turbulent three hours - had the intended effect.

In the elections - and I point out here that Nick and Shirley had all their supporters enrolled to vote, and had them at the meeting primed how to vote (I know that because several “swinging voters” told me they had been rung up by Shirley & Nick supporters and told who to vote for) and with the archdeacon blatantly advocating for them - Nick and Shirley’s supporters ended up with two thirds of the places on vestry. Needless to say they used their majority in Vestry during 1994 to try to make my life hell and to disrupt as much as possible the normal functioning of the parish.

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My Adventures with God: God Provides ... Yet Again

Chapter 34 God Provides … Yet Again

The prayer group meeting each week for Bible study and prayer, particularly prayer for our church, coincided with God providing extremely lavishly.

We wrote down in a book the matters we were praying for provision or guidance with and the results and over time we saw in black and white the wonderful way God answered. Often the provision was at the same time the means of guidance.

Let me say again that we Christians often fall into the trap of deciding what we think would be best and then praying for God to do it. WRONG! If Christ is the head of his Church he gets to choose when and what and how. Our task is to ask what he would have us do to fit in with his plans. Sometimes this task is to pray fervently for something, for example revival. Then when we pray because the Holy Spirit is like a fire within us to ask for this with all our might, it is no surprise that mighty miracles follow. On the other hand when, as happens so often, we merely think revival or more usually just having our church grow big (and fat!) would be nice, no matter how much emotion we whip up God does not answer! (Well despite this, God is so abundantly kind and generous that often even our feeble and headstrong prayers get answered – though not necessarily exactly how we had in mind)

My first example of how wonderfully God provided for us as we sought to re-build the parish is this:

Flo. who was the faithful and dedicated organist at Lang Lang I talked about earlier, came to me one day and said that she felt she was now too old to continue, and a few weeks later died peacefully. So our prayer group brought this need for music at Lang Lang before God.

God answered in two ways, and provided guidance at the same time.

First a lady who attended a church about 30Km away contacted me saying she was an organist and had heard we had a very sweet little pipe organ. She came and tried out the organ and was delighted. Listening to her play we quickly saw that she was a very accomplished musician. She volunteered to come and play for one service a month, but after she heard about our Sunday School and the family services we had had, she asked for it to be the family service.

There was one problem. She was very “high church” and wanted the new family service to be a very traditional “Sung Eucharist”. We were more on the opposite end of churchmanship, although as I said earlier except for our “Bayles Fellowship” which had a pentecostal service, we used the current Prayer Book services. So our ideas for the family service were certainly more traditional than was the current vogue in evangelical churches, but what our new organist wanted was very much a move in the opposite direction to where “successful” evangelical churches were heading.

The conventional wisdom among “growing” churches at that time was to downplay the “Anglican” and pretend to be “Community”. Services were more and more informal, the Prayer Book alluded to less and less, traditional hymns definitely replaced with contemporary choruses, and even ministers wearing street clothes. This trend has incidentally continued since then – I recently attended an Anglican service where the was nothing recognisable as liturgy from the Prayer Book, and nothing at all by way of a “Confession” or “Prayers of Intercession”.

However we could not escape the feeling that this lady was both God's provision and his means of directing how the family service should be. So we turned our backs on conventional wisdom and went with God!

God's wisdom is proved right by its fruits. These family services – yes done as a formal sung Eucharist – were a roaring success!

The kids took to it like ducks to water, their parents and grandparents came (yes they came initially to see their child doing their bit in the service, but they came) and forgive me if I sound old fashioned saying “and the blessing of the Lord was upon it” because I think that was the defining factor. We did it how God said to for that time and place, he had pulled together the right people for it, and he blessed it – there was just always the most wonderful atmosphere.

But as they say on TV : “Kiddies don’t try this at home”! I must add: Don’t just rush in and try this formula in your church – ask God what his individual plan is for you and your church!

Looking back I can see some of the human factors in the reason for its success. The kids were believers and they wanted their parents and grandparents to find what they had found in Christ. They had Sunday School most weeks with its format which was tailored to their needs and their own very special music. Family Service was where they were doing something for their extended families. Also church itself was so new to them that they saw no difference between “high” and “low” church or even between “formal” and “informal” styles of service. Their parents on the other had a formed idea of what “church” should be. Many of them had attended Sunday School in their youth. They had all been married in a church. They may not have darkened the doors of one since then, but they had an ingrained “cultural memory” if you like of what church should be like. So for them a traditional Eucharist was “proper church”. Besides with the kids doing many of the roles in the service, a really good organist (and really singable hymns!) and the presence of the Holy Spirit these services had real zing! As St. Paul said “God's 'foolishness' beats human 'wisdom'.”

We had organists for the other weeks in the month over time who were a great help, but I want to jump to one other amazing provision. This time God provided the most amazing couple to play the organ at Lang Lang. He was blind, his wife was his chauffeur much needed since they lived some 50KM away and his “partner in crime”.

He came and tried out our organ. “What kind of service do you do?” he asked, and then added “I can play for any sort: I’ve played for Pentecostals, I’ve played for the Grand Masonic Lodge.” I was amazed. An organist that knew their stuff but was prepared to fit in with whatever was required, Wow!

Again a lesson in God's wisdom. Did you pick the “Masonic Lodge” bit. So did I at the time but it was also obvious to us that God had sent this couple. At the time we simply followed where God was clearly directing, but if anyone has problems with this just think about God's people in past times who had to be spoken to on that account. For instance the Israelites about God's choice of Cyrus the Persian as his agent (Isaiah 54) and Peter about being sent to the foreigner Cornelius (Acts 10).

I asked him how he managed to play being blind. He answered “Most things I know by heart” If I am not sure, I run my fingers over the music I have in Braille to refresh my memory, then I play it by heart.” “What about new tunes” I asked. “Ah well” he replied. “I do need a bit of advance notice. You see my wife plays it one note at a time on my organ at home and I transcribe it into Braille music. Then I play it and learn it by heart.”

They had to come some distance. I knew they would need petrol money, and I feared – rightly as it turned out – that the vestry would not come at that. But he was brilliant. I believed God had sent him. So I just paid his petrol money out of my own pocket.

He was the most incredible organist. Ours was only a baby organ but with a very sweet rank of metal pipes and a very mellow rank of wooden ones, and the usual stops to give combinations of pipes sounding from the one key. He could almost make that organ sit up and beg! He just got the most amazing sounds out of it. He also had exquisite musicality and rhythm. When he played you just had to sing. I remember particularly his arrangement of that stirring Easter hymn “Thine be the glory, risen conquering Son”. It absolutely sent shivers down your spine and you just had sing it out with all your heart.

The church was changing and growing, but in quite a different way to anything we could have planned. God's plans really are so much better!

Abortion : Facts and Fallacies

Abortion – Facts and Fallacies

“In most cases abortion is...” This must be the first question.

Until we answer this we cannot sensibly have any moral discussion.

How can we go to the Bible – or any other source of moral wisdom for answers until we know the question. Until we know what current social conditions, motives and supposed outcomes are involved in abortion we don't know the question. We must identify the most common situation. This is the one we need to take for our general rule. We must exclude at this stage the rare, the sensational and the extreme cases. Once we have a general rule for the general case these come into perspective as special cases which may warrant special treatment or even be exceptions to the rule

I hope this seems obvious, because it was thoroughly overlooked in the campaigns to legitimise “abortion on demand” in the 1960's. Perhaps “overlooked” is too kind, this question was more of an inconvenient truth as far as the pro-abortion campaigners were concerned. Fallacies suited their campaign the facts did not. So fallacies was what they peddled.

As I said in my previous blog-post, I once put a motion regarding “abortion on demand” to our church synod (Gippsland diocese, Anglican Church of Australia) that caused so much commotion that discussion was gagged. This was done as a motion that the matter being referred to the “Social Responsibilities Committee” of the diocese for the production of a report to synod in due course. I was at the same time invited to take a place on this committee.

At the first meeting of this committee it seemed obvious to me that the chairman was an accomplished manipulator of committees who had every intention of ensuring that the eventual report was strictly pro-abortion.

By about the third meeting I had also read some of the material from other dioceses in Australia and the U.K. That the chairman had circularised to members. They were an absolute disgrace! Even had I agreed with their jaundiced views I would have expected a better standard of thinking in a high school essay. So I started to spend my days off at the nearest university library reading up on what more intelligent people on either side of the debate had written.

Sure enough, there were secular moralists putting serious arguments for both sides of the debate. They were interesting, and made it all the more embarrassing that the churches – who should have had some ideas on moral issues sprouted such ill-informed ill thought-out nonsense that then betrayed their traditional beliefs!

There were also secular researchers interested purely in discovering sociological or epidemiological facts pertinent to the issue. Mostly they were not concerned with making moral observations let alone judgements. They were just interested in real scientific facts Their findings were fascinating, and I will introduce one set of results in this post.

Thirdly there were pro-abortion campaigners. Interestingly, did not bother with the moral arguments developed by the philosophers who agreed with their views. They just went for the emotive propaganda.

So here I am going to set against their main emotive issues the facts from genuine unbiased research. Once we clear away their propaganda lies we will be able to define what the morally relevant attributes of current abortion practice are.

PS the statistics I will quote are from reports of the health department of South Australia covering periods from 1970 to 1984. This was a time when abortion was legal in that state, but certain statistics had to be given by doctors to the health department. As the researchers pointed out, even though abortion was by this time legal, the natural tendency was for doctors to provide a stronger reason for the request for an abortion, so these figures will tend to be conservative.

What were some of the emotive issues raised by the pro-abortion lobby?

1. The pregnant schoolgirl. Images of 13 year old girls in late pregnancy tugged at the heart strings, but was this a typical issue? No! Less that 7 abortions in a thousand were for girls under 15 years of age.

2. The harassed mother of multitudes. At the other end of the spectrum were the images of women ground down by poverty and seriously large numbers of children. As an argument for social services maybe it had merit. As a pro-abortion pitch it was misleading: less that 4 abortions in a thousand were for with women with seven or more children.

3. Saving the mother's life: Here was an argument pushed relentlessly in movies: The young mother tragically dying because she was refused an abortion. Now this is a situation we will examine later because it really is a special case and one where abortion can be clearly justified. However it is precisely that: a special case. It is also a rare case: less than 8 abortions in a thousand made any claim to be in response to a serious medical condition affecting the mother.

4. Foetal euthanasia. Yes this was pushed as an argument. But ask someone whose mother was advised to abort them because they had at foetal stage evidence of some disability how they feel about that one! In any case it was a factor only in a small number – 14 in a thousand – of actual abortions (and included in this number will be foetuses diagnosed with a medical condition which indicated they actually had zero chance of survival, which is a morally different situation).

5. The woman who had been raped. True this is a really heart rending situation and one most of us would quail at advising on. But don't you think it is odd that the same social progressive doctrines that support killing the innocent life brought into being by a rape at the same time vociferously condemn killing the rapist!
But however one deals with this extreme situation it is mercifully so rare – only accounting for one abortion in a thousand – that it has no bearing on considering the morality of current abortion practice.

So all those emotive arguments which were used so effectively to engineer public opinion and make abortion seem like an attractive option for a whole generation were fallacies.

Over 96% of abortions are because for some reason it is inconvenient for the mother to carry her child to birth. That is current practice and that is the situation we will turn to the Bible for guidance on.