My Adventures with God Ch 37: More Miracles

Ch 37: More Miracles

To re-cap: From our “back to the drawing board” experience we were re-building the church. Sociology had given us valuable insights, but the actual details came as answered prayer to our little prayer group. Spiritually and numerically the parish was growing. But what the diocese needed to see was growth measured in dollars – lots and lots of dollars.

I had stood firm against fund-raising when people wanted to do that instead of evangelism. But this was different, we had previously done the evangelism very successfully: now we needed some miracle money to convince the diocese we were on the right track. But you know what God is like: he does so much better than we can imagine or dare to ask!

In our family we have a saying “For God two-birds-with-one-stone is still wasting stones”. In this instance God raised money and built up the morale and numbers of the congregation at the same time.

Here is how:

Inez and Sue – but since they were both great prayers I should say “and God” – made a formidable team. Gala events were planned. The congregations were still small but we had huge numbers of people in the community who would gladly help out at grand events.

And grand they were! We believed that these events had to be fun for the workers and give them a great sense of achievement and being part of a winning team. This meant grand scale, good planning, effective team and morale building and really obvious success. People had to have fun and be proud to have been part of the team pulling off such a big successful event.

We might spend sleepless nights, but the team had to know they were supported, valued and they had to believe it would work!

Our first grand event was a Gala Fashion Show (with dinner of course). Now we had a fashion show each year at the flower festival with local women modelling clothes from Sparrows Emporium – a great thing but we were thinking bigger, much bigger! One of Inez’s friends in the district, Dulcie had been a top model in her youth: she still had contacts. We were getting real models, actual high fashion clothes, the correct trappings of catwalk and music. The real thing!

Next came the dinner part: we had lots of volunteers, and all those women who had gone into other churches, and some of the others from those churches who thought we were, as one lady said “A breath of fresh air” cooked and baked (yes including a Uniting Church lady who was the undisputed best sponge baker in the district – Vera of our church was undisputed second best)

For wait staff we put out the call and the town young people rallied, they brushed up exceedingly well in the natty black and white uniforms we got hold of somehow. I think about 30 of them rolled up!

It was stunning! Financially it was hugely successful. In team building it was amazing. In satisfaction level for the gang … you only had to look at their faces! They were exhausted but they had been part of something big!

We only did these really big things annually – the next year the theme was picnic races – still in the Lang Lang civic hall. But people got gourmet picnic hampers, a course of hurdles (and a water hazard) was set up round the hall. For safety riders ran behind their (human) horses with reins connecting them. I am told the town’s real life SP (illegal off-course) bookie was running the betting shop and everyone was given Monopoly money to bet with. Another howling success! I even won the “Lang Lang Cup” cup (I was the horse) elegantly made by one of the parishioners from a jam tin and fencing wire.

In between we catered for weddings with much smaller teams, and put on other social events. The men from the pub who I had talked to in the old days sitting in John’s barn – and their friends turned out to help wash up and things like that – since we often borrowed the glasses from the hotel they had a vested interest in getting them spotless! The barmaid I mentioned earlier was one of the team – the first time she helped at a “do” I remember the look on Jan’s face when she came out in her miniscule black skirt and fishnet stockings and see-through white blouse! I didn’t think people could really turn purple! I also thought some of the old men were going to have heart attacks – but for the opposite reason.

Having mentioned Jan I realise I have been remiss. I have only described the new fundraising ventures. I need to give due credit to Jan and the rest of the Ladies Guild who had for years been faithfully ploughing on, and were still hard at work doing their various fundraisings.

By the end of six months, yes we were still in debt but we were definitely gaining ground. In the analogy I used of a swing we were now on the down-stroke and gathering speed! It was a success. The diocesan bean counters were still sceptical. But we said we’d won our bet. And continuing improvement of the financial position as the months rolled by showed we were right. Also the church was growing, not the rapid expansion of the early days but good solid and above all stable growth. We had proved the sociological research findings right! More important we had been another demonstration that God is faithful. 

My Adventures with God 36 : The Wager

Chapter 36: The Wager

I had thrown down the gauntlet to the received wisdom of managed adaptive decline in country parishes. I believes it was at God's direction. But I really needed God to back it up with a miracle.

I had declared that I would personally fund half my salary for six months. I had publicly wagered that in ths time the parish finances would recover to the point where it would be able to fund me 100%. If the experiment succeeded, I would return to full pay; if it failed I would quit.

The purpose of this experiment, as I saw it, was to show three things:

1. That God could provide.

2. That for denominations like the Anglican church, accepting decline as inevitable and simply reducing ministry in the face of it was wrong-headed.

3. Lastly to vindicate my belief that the church was – to use one popular story – meant to be a life boat station not a clubhouse.

On #1 and #2 I was challenging their view of God. True they cried out to God for help. True that help was, in so many country parishes conspicuously not forthcoming. But I believed the Bible gave the reason “I gave you cleanness of tooth (famine) in city after city yet you did not return to me says the Lord” is a recurring Old Testament theme. Sure they prayed for help – help to go on being the sort of church they wanted to be. God didn't answer, so they acted as though God could not help them and adapted and kept going as they wanted to. They never said: “The God of the Bible can act. He clearly is not acting – so what are we doing wrong?” To which the obvious answer would be: you are not giving him anything more than lip service; you don't act like he really exists; you don't act like Jesus wants all people everywhere to turn to him and be saved.

On #3, early in our time at Lang Lang whilst studying Ephesians a current application had struck me so forcefully that I felt God was using it to open my eyes to something which was important to him. In the early part of Ephesians Paul was on about the dividing wall between Jew and gentile being demolished and the two being united as one body in Christ. It was brought home to me that we faced an analogous situation. There was a dividing wall between the church community and the general community.

On the side of the church community, they were every bit as introspective as the first century Jews. They were happy to have “outreach” programs to encourage the secular community to donate money (which the general community often did),  for at least the right sort of people to swell the numbers in church (which the general community mostly didn't). What they never considered was that it might be their duty to take the Gospel of salvation to the secular community without strings or ulterior motives. Definitely they did not to allow, let alone welcome, an influx of “unchurched” who might be messy, might change things or want to do things differently or threaten their personal sense of identity.

Christ was not like that! He humbled himself and sacrificed his life to woo us rebellious humans.

As recounted earlier, God had blessed the efforts prompted by this insight with a spectacular revival in Lang Lang. However diocesan officialdom had been openly contemptuous that we had sought to convert young people and those from the less prestigious social classes to Christianity. When the three-pronged attack of the devil had brought an end both to the revival and to visible material success in the parish it was to them proof that we had been wrong to take the Gospel to young people and the “unchurched”.

At the time I opposed the Dioceses decision to reduce the Lang Lang parish to a half-time ministry and proposed this experiment, our church already advancing in spiritual recovery. We had the prayer group I mentioned previously. We had already seen God at work providing as we laid the needs of people and the parish in believing prayer before him. We had seen him take a hand in directing our path as we actively submitted our personal ideas and preferences to his. For Sue and me the devastating effects of her post-natal depression and my own chronic depression were lifting. All round God's hand could be seen destroying those works of the devil which had caused the collapse of the revival.

However, what the diocese saw was just the bank balance and that was going from bad to worse. Money was where God had to demonstrate his approval of us in order for the diocese to recognise it as that. This was the substance of my challenge. Could we with God's help – or more accurately could God, even through us – turn the parish finances around in just six months. That would be a miracle!

My Adventures with God : On Eagles' Wings

Chapter 35 : On Eagles' Wings

God seemed scarcely to have begun directing and enabling us to rebuild the parish when a crisis loomed which threatened to halt everything.

A few years previously the parish had as I said, after a period of truly miraculous revival succumbed to a three-pronged attack by the devil. It seemed that everything we had laboured for and that God had achieved through us and the believers he had rallied to this work had turned to ash.

God is seriously wonderful. When this happened he had protected all his little baby believers. Many of the women converts had already gone into the churches of their husbands' nominal religion in the hope of bringing them to faith. Other believers  God seemed to protect and keep in what almost seemed a state of suspended but alive faith. We thought it was a bit like some spiritual equivalent to preserving frozen embryos to be implanted and thrive when the opportune moment comes.

However in material terms, Sue was put out of action and I was chronically depressed and barely functional, so to any outside observer the parish looked as though it had slipped back to what it was before we came. And before we came the parish couldn’t really pay their minister. They got by because ministers only stayed on average 18 months and then they had a long interregnum during which the saved up for the next one.

So at the time in question the parish was back in the old position of not having enough income to pay the minister. I was still getting paid because the diocese had centralised payments. But the parish was sinking into debt. In the eyes of the diocese this could not go on.

At that time country parishes all around were were in decline. Now the policy our diocese had adopted was to reduce ministry. Marginally financial parishes were amalgamated where possible otherwise they were reduced to part time ministry. Our friends at at a nearby town had their parish reduced to part time status, as they had children they left and found work in another diocese.

In hindsight, if you have no hope of a revival of religion this is logical enough. Particularly if you only see the Anglican Church as the comfortable rituals and social organisation of your fondly remembered youth. If you had no vision of spreading Christianity to the masses, then it made sense scale back and at least preserve the assets of the church in case your vision of Anglicanism became fashionable in the future. So there was a rationale to what they were doing. However it was a course of action which the books on sociology of religion I had studied said was a recipe for actually accelerating the decline. I have since found there is a term for this behaviour. It is called “Managed Adaptive Decline”. It is a notable feature of the terminal stages of empires and civilisations, but in their own little way churches are following this pattern.

I had a different vision. I saw Anglicanism as basically (especially in its original doctrines and ideals) a sound church which had just lost touch with God and the community it was intended to serve in His name. From our spurt of revival I believed people were searching for God, and it was our duty to spend ourselves to help them find and be found by God. From my sociological researches I was sure that the measures the diocese were adopting, would merely hasten the demise of the church. That was evident from the case studies in the US research. This research showed in practice the opposite reaction worked. Putting more, not less effort into marginal churches. Never amalgamating parishes or reducing them to part time ministry.

At Lang Lang we were starting to pull out. Although we were in debt, the rate of increase of debt was slowing. To an engineer like myself, used to thinking in terms of integral and differential calculus, what this meant was obvious. Let me try to explain with a common physical analogy:

Suppose you are pushing someone on a swing. You stand behind them, pull them back a bit and let them go with a push. Now stay there and observe: They are going away from you fast – so there is no need for you to move out of the way is there? Then you notice they are slowing up but now they are even further away from you and they are still moving – more slowly now – away from you so there's no need to move out of the way is there? You all know the answer: because of gravity they are continually accelerating in your direction. So they will keep slowing down, eventually they will stop – yes quite a long way away from you; but then they will star moving towards you, slowly at first but then faster and faster. You really do need to get out of the way!

That seemed so obvious to me that it was frustrating that I could not make the diocesan “bean counters” see that since our income was steadily increasing we would like the swing eventually stop going further into debt, turn around and eventually return to a positive bank balance. They could not see past “but you are in debt, and the debt increased last month, and will next month: Panic Stations!”

The bean counters won.

It was decreed that the parish would be reduced to part time ministry from a certain date. The bishop said I was welcome to stay on as part time minister, assuming I could find other part time work to support myself.

From their point of view they thought they were doing the best thing. I did not know what to do. I was thinking, I was doing a lot of praying. The time came when the archdeacon was to address a meeting of all parishioners which had been called to explain it all. Then right at the “eleventh hour” I had an answer from God. It was a sort of “Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? ” answer

It went a bit like this:

Did I believe the sociological research was correct? “Yes!”
Did I believe that the parish needed more effort put into it not less? “Yes!”

Did I believe the parish was even now growing and could become financially viable? “Yes!”

Sue is now working more and more so could we survive a while on half pay? “Well I guess so”.

So why not put your money where your mouth is and prove it can be done? “ Oops … I didn't see that coming! … umm … OK ... Yes”

I told my thoughts to Sue. After the expected “Are you mad” she prayed and agreed. I think we talked to Inez and maybe some others – there wasn’t a lot of time for more because the meeting was upon us.

So the poor archdeacon got up to explain what he thought was a done deal: the parish will only have half time ministry (with me still as minister) until or unless it can be merged with another parish.

Then I got up and said: “I have had a better idea! I believe the parish needs full time ministry to grow. I believe God will grant for it will grow. I believe this so much that I will stay on full time for a six month experiment. I will personally put in the money to cover half my pay. After six months, if the experiment fails, I will leave; If it is clearly succeeding, then I will stay on and stop subsidising myself.”

In hindsight the poor archdeacon must have felt he had been ambushed, but I did not deliberately do so, it just happened that way. Anyway my idea carried the day at the meeting and it was agreed to by the diocese. I don’t know how they felt about it, but at least outwardly they were supportive and the experiment went ahead.

Working for God is really exciting! There is a bit in the Bible God's servants being carried “on eagles' wings”. Well it certainly is exciting, but sometimes you look down and really hope he doesn't let go!

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!

My Adventures with God - Breaking into Church * Breaking out of Church

Chapter 24

At Lang Lang we had a flourishing Sunday School, a teenage Bible Study, and a large body of new converts. Actually many of the new converts had been fed into other denominations for a profound reason. Women who became Christians naturally wanted their husbands to find the joy they had found in Christ. So where their husband was Roman Catholic or Uniting Church they started going to that church in the hope that it would be easier for him to participate. It struck me then, and still does, as a very Christ-like attitude and so these women had our support and blessing in doing this. Interestingly God used this pool of Christians who had been converted through our ministry but who were now in other churches to help us greatly later on, but that is a story for later!

There still remained a large body of new believers who saw themselves as “Anglicans” who could not get past the “gatekeepers” to come to church.

So we, after much prayer of course, resorted to busting the blockade by force. Not every Sunday. Just on occasions.

The Sunday School kids wanted a means of showing their parents what Christianity meant to them. We had our own youth concert band so music was no problem. So for special occasions we put on “Family Service” with a difference. Not family service to entice young people along but family service for the young people to bring their non-churchgoing parents to!

When a normal Sunday congregation was 12 to 18 souls and an extra hundred people turned up – with Sunday School kids backed by social clout in the form of of Inez and Sue manning the door, the gatekeepers were totally powerless. They were reduced to retreating to the vestry and taking out their frustrations on me!

Jan, the chief gatekeeper threatened that if the Sunday School came to church once more she was leaving and going to the Anglican church in the next town. That was actually threatening to put us out of business since my salary was paid by the money they raised through the “Ladies Guild” and its fund-raising efforts. However on the other side it proved to be an idle threat. They did not do it.

On reflection part of the reason for this was also the reason she was so angry at new people not of her choosing coming into the church – it threatened her identity which was inextricably bound up with her status and roles in the church. Conversely she had waited decades for her turn at Guild President and Church Warden, and was not likely to give that up to go to another parish where she would start at the bottom of the guild hierarchy. (to be fair she was an extremely capable guild president, and chaired a meeting with an efficiency that most bureaucrats could have learned much from!)

While their hostility was very real and given vent, they did not act on it. And I don't think they did even carry out their threats to “go to the Bishop” at that stage. It is interesting that although they did bad things in opposing people being converted and added to the church, they were not bad people and they were in their own way indispensable. More of this – and especially the role of identity issues in church conflict later.

These family services were a thundering success, with an instrumental band (although usually not the full compliment) and so many voices it also was that volume-wise.

As I said these were different to most church's family service at that time. The conventional wisdom was that to entice children and young people to church you had to do a “Sesame Street” version of church. Our young people were already believers, but had no exposure to church services, so “church lite” or full liturgy were equally foreign to them. Their parents on the other hand often had some past exposure to church so expected a church service to be recognisable as such.

So while we had drums, trumpets, flutes, saxophones, clarinets and so on, we sang the old hymns as well as some of Rosalie's songs. My favourite was “Onward Christian Soldiers” to fife (flute in our case) and drum. But all the old favourites came alive to being played and sung with feeling.

Kids did the readings and prayers, and often presented prepared items, but we left the basic liturgy more or less intact.

The fear of new people coming to church was not just at Lang Lang.

Our other main church in this parish was at Koo-wee-rup. In many ways they were as a congregation much more advanced in the Faith than the congregation was at Lang Lang. However there were still serious problems. Some will come out in the next few blogs, one I will tell here.

This tale comes from a parish council meeting – which had six delegates each from Lang Lang, Koo-wee-rup and two from Balyes. I had for some time been trying to enthuse the parish council members with my ideas for evangelism and some of the “flavour-of-the-month” ideas of church growth which I gleaned from books and attending church growth conferences. Always to no avail. This time I wanted to start a ministry in the local high school. Ross and I presented our ideas but there was general opposition.

Then one man from Koo-wee-rup put their opposition in a nutshell: he burst out “But if you go into the High School, kids might want to come to our church!” His look of shock and horror was mirrored in many faces around the room.

None the less, Ross and I went ahead and started a Christian group in the high school. Week by week we went and met with kids who came to find out about Christianity. Some of them went on to attend the Bayles Fellowship meetings of a Sunday night.

At Bayles we tried the opposite approach – we broke out of the church mould!

As an Anglican priest I had taken vows to only use the approved liturgy in church. I know many priests did then and do now break those vows with impunity, and at that time I had certainly stretched them, but break them completely I would not

I truly think my fellow clergy who continue to throw out the baby with the bathwater by throwing off the principles enshrined in their liturgy and centuries of Christian experience should re-consider their behaviour. God was really severe in Old Testament times when Israelite leaders took oaths of obedience – even when it was to foreign pagan kings – and then broke their oath. We have taken an oath to use an approved liturgy. We cannot break that oath and pretend we are doing it for God!

However at Bayles we had only a Sunday School hall, not an actual church. So there I felt I could honestly hold services without using the Anglican liturgy. Actually I now think that even if my reasoning was correct – which in hindsight I confess is a bit doubtful – abandoning the liturgy was in practice a big mistake. But more of that later.

So our young people's Bible study which met at Ross and Robyn's house started to put on youth services in this Bayles Sunday School Hall.

We started out as a crispy evangelical youth service. The dozen young people from the Bible study were the nucleus of the new service. I think it was a “one-off” and when that went well a regular monthly event, then as it grew, fortnightly, and eventually every Sunday night. Over time it became progressively more Pentecostal. That was not itself a problem, but in time the church gained some fame, then people who were already pentecostal started coming to it and they brought their own baggage with them. That did become a big problem!

For now I will just sketch Bayles Fellowship at its height. It was a “Charismatic” style service – but naively Charismatic blended with with Evangelical passion for Biblical faithfulness and exposition.

It was a “team ministry” with members exercising their particular gifts. I preached. Ross led the worship. We had a music team – besides Ross on guitar - generally of drums, the two Johns on trumpets (they did some amazing improvisations ), Flute and clarinet, and sometimes saxophone. We had prayer support, and the whole team met beforehand to spend time together in prayer.

When I say it was naively Charismatic I mean in the good sense of “innocent”. We didn't try to act Charismatic – it just happened! When Ross was leading worship he would sometimes go off into a song we had never heard before – sometimes in English, sometimes in a strange tongue. When we had congregational praying in tongues it was not artificially set up – as I have seen in many places – it just happened. And most importantly it did not happen on a regular basis. To me that suggests it really was from the Holy Spirit as opposed to the humanly contrived version which I have seen in other places. As I will relate later, when Bayles became “known” among Charismatics, people came who were not content with that: they wanted their spiritual “fix” every week! That was of course the beginning of the end both of Bayles' innocence and eventually of its existence.

At is best Bayles was filled with excitement so that people who came came back and brought their friends.

We also broke out in many other ways – to reach as many people as possible.

We ran evangelistic outreach meetings – which I know is pretty standard for churches. But my point is that we did not neglect the tried and true methods. We had family BBQ's – again standard church practice. We tried to reach every part of the social spectrum. For instance Inez donated a really sweet little pipe organ to the Lang Lang church about this time. Yes I know that the conventional wisdom at that time was for churches that wanted growth to turn their backs on pipe organs in favour of music groups – which often only consisted of acoustic guitars. But my advice here is: “Don't be so enamoured of novelties that you neglect the traditional” We could beat most churches I've seen when it came to music groups – we had not just acoustic guitar – everything from solo trumpet or clarinet (which can be very effective) up to a full concert band, and every combination in between. But God, through Inez gave us a beautiful little pipe organ, and God used it to incredible effect (that is mostly a story for later).

However the organ provided two immediate benefits.

Our regular church organist was a mighty saint of God – but also a very frail old lady. (OK another story for later). She had struggled back from a serious stroke to provide music for the Sunday services. We then had a pedal-powered harmonium and the effort of playing it took a heavy toll on her. The new little pipe organ was naturally powered by an electric blower, then organ builder put in an extra feature with her in mind. It had some clever circuitry between the keyboard and the solenoids that fed air to the pipes. Flick a switch and Florence our organist could play with her good right hand and the one good finger of her clawed left hand and the organ played the appropriate pedal pipes by itself! (Naturally Jan and her fellow controllers had opposed the new organ and the diocesan hierarchy had sent someone to try to talk Inez out of donating it – but Inez believed God had told her that this was his way of collecting all the offerings she had not paid over the years.)

The organ and the contacts we had made with classical musicians while it was being built let us do some “highbrow” outreach. We had organ recitals and even hosted visiting opera singers - all to a packed church. It was all great fun and great team building. A number of men who frequented the pub came to each occasion – some because they actually liked classical music, others so that they could help out with things – even down to helping wash dishes.

Next post: The Devil Strikes Back

My Adventures with God: Ch.17

Ch 17: Kids: its really easy

In Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera “the Pirates of Penzance” when Frederic, who was mistakenly apprenticed to a pirate as a boy and now come of age renounces his 'vile profession', an old hand laments: “Besides, we can offer you but little temptation to remain with us. We don't seem to make piracy pay. I'm sure I don't know why, but we don't.”

To which Frederick replies: “Well I do! But alas I may not tell you!”

People in the decades since our time at Lang Lang have often lamented in my hearing: “We just don't know how to get young people to church these days.” It has always reminded me of Frederick, and I have felt like saying; “Well I do! But alas I may not tell you!” Naturally charity and cowardice always won out and I said nothing. But it is such an important point that I will spell it out now.

Reaching young people for Jesus is simple. Hard work, but dead simple.

The reason I may not tell the people who wring their hands and lament that they cannot get young people to church these days is because their motives are wrong! They may fool themselves that they have the right motive but they don't even fool me – what chance that they can fool God!

They do not really want to bring young people to God through Jesus Christ and let them go on together. They actually want to win young people for themselves. They love their denomination or style of church service or congregation. They see its population profile ageing. They see a better future for this thing they love – denomination, congregation or church service – if young people swell the ranks. So they desire to bring young people in ….. but in to a particular human activity as a higher priority that to the one true God!

It's called “Idolatry”. No wonder God does not back up their efforts, and that it also why I would and could not tell them how it can be done!

If you want to reach young people first get your priorities straight!

They belong to Jesus! He loves them. He died for them. He bought their salvation with the price of his own blood! They are infinitely precious. Jesus said “If any one causes one of these little ones to stumble it would be better for them at the Judgement to have a large millstone tied around their necks and be thrown into the sea!”

Smart alpine hikers know the rule: “Don't get between a bear and her cubs”. Church people need to learn: “Don't get between Jesus and his little ones!” There is one and only one permitted reason to reach young people: to bring them into a relationship with Jesus, perhaps under God to help them to grow into the full stature of Christ and then in either case to step back!

If you accept your role as Jesus emissary. If you accept that they belong to Him, not to you or your way of doing church or anything else, then reaching young people is simple.

Here are some of the things we got to do:

School holidays were approaching and we had an idea. I think it was one of those human-but-God-directed ideas. At college most of the students had cut their teeth in evangelism by helping with summer “beach missions”. Officially titled “Children's Special Service Mission” CSSM for short, they were so well staffed with young evangelical men and women who formed attachments to other staffers that they were jokingly re-named: Come Single Soon Married”. However they were very effective in taking the Gospel to children who were normally outside the influence of the church. They operated by offering entertaining activities mixed with low key biblical teaching at popular family beach resorts during the summer holidays.

So we planned to put on something similar during the coming Autumn school break. Lang Lang church had no young people in the church but Koo-wee-rup had a number of young families and a dedicated band of Sunday School teachers. So we did a combined effort with activities at both churches staffed by current church people from Koo-wee-rup and mainly new believers from Lang Lang.

It was amazingly successful. Fun activities in a small country town attract bored kids like flies to a BBQ. RE classes in the schools had paved the way but now God had gone a decisive step further to breaking down the barrier dividing “the Church” from ordinary kids in the town.

We now had an “in” with Lang Lang's kids. The next step was to use it.

We believed that God intended us to use this “in” to start a Sunday School in Lang Lang. We were beginning to realise that the “old” model of Sunday School would not do at all.

Three or four decades earlier churches in general, and Lang Lang was no exception, had large Sunday Schools. Society in general was much more “churched” is was simply more socially acceptable. So parents, even though they did not necessarily attend church themselves, thought Sunday School should be part of their children's education.

By the 1980's there had been a gradual but decisive social change. Church attendances were falling. Congregations were ageing. Sunday Schools were becoming a thing of the past.

It seemed to us that to try to prop up a failing institution was wrong. We had to find a new way. A way that worked now. A way that worked with kids who knew nothing of “church” but were curious about Jesus and his love.

PS: STRATEGY TIP ... We didn't know it, but the way God was directing us, which we thought was something new we were discovering was actually tried and true military strategy! For the benefit of readers I will briefly sketch this strategy. It is called (in Australia at any rate) “Surfaces and Gaps”

What happens when rain falls on parched cracked ground? It runs off the hard baked surfaces but it seeps into the cracks!

The military analogy is this: Where your advance is meeting stiff resistance is the “surface”: where your troops are advancing easily is the crack (or gap). The temptation is to throw more resources at the “surface”. That is a mistake. Sound strategy is to throw your extra resources where you are succeeding.

Church people are continually falling into the temptation of throwing more and more effort into propping up activities and institutions which are failing. Let them go! Put, under God, your effort into what is succeeding, or into something new which will succeed.

So we developed a radically new model for Sunday School. It was exciting. It was different. It succeeded.

Be patient. It will be another two blogs before I get to give you the details!

My Adventures with God Ch.15 - Revival Begins

Ch 15: Revival Begins

We did a great deal of praying. We had this new personal zeal for God, and we were trying to open every part of our lives to the Holy Spirit.

Sue had run a ladies Bible study in Morwell using a book that was popular then What Happens When Women Pray and saw an opening for one at Kooweerup. A group of women there of all ages seemed keen to grow in their faith. A couple of them were already very mature Christians although they went about their service of God without any fuss and without drawing attention to themselves.

So this group got under-way. Sue was expecting God back up the message about his son Jesus by giving demonstrable answers to prayer. God did.

The ladies would all nominate particular situations – usually family matters – for the group to pray about. One lady asked for prayer that her daughter who was childless might conceive. So the group prayed about this and God answered their prayers: the daughter became pregnant. The woman instead of being overjoyed revealed a further problem. Her daughter – who lived in another state – had indeed been told by doctors that she could not become pregnant because of a medical condition. But that was not the full story. She had also been told that even if she did become pregnant, there was a very high risk that the baby would be deformed. So the ladies prayed about this also.

We underestimate God continually. One salutary story I remember from college days was this: One of our friends, whose husband was in my college year suffered terribly from Crones disease. Praying one day, God said to her: “If you ask me I will heal you of the Crones.” She replied: “but even if you do – the steroids I take for the Crones are masking … (I can't remember the name of the additional condition).” To which God replied: “Naturally I would heal that too!” She was healed. She stopped taking the steroids and there was no sign of the other condition surfacing. God healed completely just as he had said!

So Sue's Koo-wee-rup ladies prayed for the next problem. In due course a healthy baby was born to the daughter.

This and other answers to their prayers did much to build the faith of these ladies. There is, however a sad ending to this particular miracle. You recall how Jesus found when he was on earth that even when people saw the miraculous signs which were God's way of confirming that Jesus was indeed his beloved Son, not all believed. You remember in the Ten Lepers story – all were healed – only one came back to thank Jesus! So even now, even when God does do miracles to confirm the message that Jesus is risen from the dead and is Lord of all, not all believe. Some proudly turn away from him.

In this case although the faith most of this group of ladies was strengthened by God's answers to their prayers, not all believed. The lady who had asked them to pray for her daughter – even though what God did was medically beyond reasonable hope, put it down to “coincidence”. After all God did, she chose to close her heart against Jesus. Naturally having made her choice she gradually drifted away from the group who were devoting themselves to the teaching about Jesus and growing in their relationship with him through his Holy Spirit..

Exciting things started to happen in Lang Lang too.

One day a lady telephoned me to say that her father had just died and she wanted to make funeral arrangements. This is unusual for people outside the immediate congregation. The fact is that generally the first a minister hears about a bereavement is from the undertaker – who has already seen the family and made the arrangements. In country towns with a good local undertaker this does have an up-side. Our local undertaker always gave me a sort of “situation report”. What state the family was in. Who was related to or having a feud with who. The family's attitude to religion, and so forth. Going to see a previously unknown family in a state of grief was much easier with this sort of preparation!

So when Rosalie rang I talked a bit on the 'phone and made an appointment to call on her. We organised the funeral service and I talked conversationally about the things God had done in Sue's and my life. The funeral came and went. A few days later Rosalie knocked on my door and said: “I've decided to become a Christian – what do I do next.”

God had just given us our (well no, not 'ours' … his) first convert from outside the church. I didn't know what to do!

Asking her to come to church was an obvious “No!” With one exception she was about half the age of the youngest of the congregation. Also spiritual and welcoming temperature of the church was still sub-zero. What Sue and I hit on was to ask to her hang out with us and learn apprentice style.

She hung out, so to speak, talked with Sue and me about Christian things, saw how we lived our lives as Jesus' followers, and how we dealt with the problems of everyday family life.

This developed into a way of growing baby Christians.

You recall how Jesus told Nicodemus “You must be born again!” It seemed to us that as people decided to put their faith in Jesus as their Saviour and to commit to obey him as Lord they were the spiritual equivalent of new-born babies. They needed what babies need: Food. Warmth. Protection. Socialisation.

In new Testament times the local Christian congregation provided these – plus apostles like Paul protecting and nurturing a whole number of congregations and their ministers.

At Lang Lang this was not the case. Sending a new Christian to church would have been like throwing a newborn out into a blizzard! God helped us find ways around this problem! When, in the mercy of God we see revival in this country this will likely be a widespread problem, so in coming posts I will further describe the solutions which we found worked.

Excursus on my grief at the present state of churches

The reason I believe the poor spiritual state of congregations will be a problem when revival comes is this:

It is a plain fact of history that “the church” became corrupted in the decades after Jesus died and rose from the dead just as in the Old Testament times its equivalent did.

There is this constant refrain running through the Old Testament to this effect: “the priests are only in it for what they can get out of it, the official prophets are making it all up so they can stay in a job and when God sends real prophets they kill them!” Ultimately when God sends his own beloved Son, it is the religious establishment who oppose him and demand his death!

Church history paints a bleak picture of organised religion.

By the grace of God the light of the truth as it is in Christ Jesus was indeed handed on from generation to generation down to us, but at many times the light burned very dimly!

During my own lifetime the size of congregations of mainline churches in Australia (and many other western countries) has dwindled. As a proportion of the population the number of regular church attenders has plummeted! These are facts no one seriously disputes.

The “why” is a matter of debate. The conclusion I am now coming to believe is this: Every generation needs its own revival and reformation. I am of what they call the post WWII “baby-boomer” generation and just too young to remember the Billy Graham revival that swept the English speaking world. Our generation has resisted revival. We have let the fire of faith burn down to embers.

My theory is that even among religious professionals – priests, bishops, theologians and the like there has been a loss of belief in the reality of God, the power of Jesus to save, the moral right of Jesus to command our obedience, and the reality of everlasting judgement: that some will rise to eternal life; others will rise to hear their doom.

This loss of vision of God's reality has left a spiritual vacuum. Consciously or unconsciously we Christians, “the Church” have looked for something other than God to fill this vacuum.

I have recently been re-reading Exodus. While Moses is up on the mountain talking to God the people of Israel lost their vision of God's reality amazingly fast. Within weeks they said to Aaron: “We don't know what has happened to this fellow Moses who led us out of Egypt; make some gods for us...” So Aaron makes a golden calf and announces: “Here are your gods that led you out of Egypt”

So my generation lost its vision of the reality of God and looked for some convenient “golden calves” to fill its place.

We have worshipped every “...ism” that came along. My former denomination, the “Uniting Church” took up socialism, pacifism and aboriginal rights-ism. The Anglican church that I am now part of was slower to fall away by a couple of decades. However it followed a similar course and added feminism, multiculturalism and environmentalism climatechange-ism and assylum-seeker-rights-ism to the list of things it has become passionate about instead of the one true God.

Today political activism has replaced proclamation of salvation and new life in Christ.

One way and another, the problem of churches being so dysfunctional that they would either turn away or kill the faith of any new believer who joined them is still with us. Hopefully the solutions we found at Lang Lang may help in the future.

Next Post: Schools and Miracles

My Adventures with God Ch.14

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