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!

William Wilberforce: 1797 book condensed

Chapter III Section IV

Wrong Ideas About Being Right With God

“ … in contradiction to the plainest dictates of Scripture and to the ritual of our established church; the sanctifying operations of the Holy Spirit – the first fruits of our reconciliation to God, the purchase of our Redeemer's death, and his best gift to his disciples – are too generally undervalued and slighted.

… our thoughts of the Blessed Saviour are confused and faint, our affections towards him are languid and lukewarm, little proportioned to what they who at such price have been rescued from ruin and endowed with a title to glory might justly be expected to feel towards the Author of their deliverance.”

Why is this so? It is because many people who think they are Christians have superficial, confused and downright dangerous ideas about being right with God.

“With little more than indistinct and nominal reference to Him who 'bore our sins in his own body on the tree', they really rest their eternal hopes on on a vague general persuasion of the unqualified mercy of the Supreme Being; or that still more erroneously they rely in the main on their own negative or positive merits.”

They look at themselves and say: “I'm a good average person, I haven't done the really big sins – or if I did occasionally slip at least I didn't make a habit of it! So allowing for human weakness and all that I think a nice kind of God should let me into his heaven!”

Wrong! The God of the Bible is not some corrupt easy going deity. He is a God who hates evil with a passion, but who in love has provided a means of forgiveness at infinite cost to himself. If you think God will just weigh your life in a balance and are counting on your good deeds just tipping the scale you are dead wrong.

Some go further. There is an infinite graduation between those who reject Christ outright and those who love him and rejoice in his salvation. There are also those who call themselves Christians and seem to have some woolly dependence on Jesus. They have the idea that this gives them a sort of “get out of jail free” card. They think that by claiming Jesus their sins will not be judged too harshly and their good deeds will be rewarded.

The crunch is that all these are at heart relying on their own merits: not on the grace of God and the death of Jesus.

In effect they think that now the bar has been lowered so that they can jump over it and win eternal life for themselves. Wrong!

People who think these things are in the grip of the most insidious of sins: pride. Real Christians have to throw away their vanity and banish their proud hearts until they don't even think of trying to justify themselves before God.

Real Christians know they are desperate sinners, totally unable to save themselves and unable to change and do anything good without God's help. They throw themselves totally and unreservedly on God's mercy. They see Christ's atoning death as their only and most glorious hope. They are so overwhelmed by the magnitude of God's loving-kindness to them that they give him their hearts and their lives forever.

The result of the error of these “Christians” is what you would expect: No gratitude.

In fact they have the cheek to think of it like a two-way contract. They live sort-of-good lives ... God has to let them into heaven.

My point is that when people think their efforts get them into heaven they de-value what Jesus did for them and the magnitude of God's love so that they do not love him in return.

Don't get me wrong: I know eople have abused the doctrine of salvation by grace! They have vainly trusted in Jesus for salvation when their lives have plainly showed they do not love and obey him! I am not advocating that error, just pointing out the opposite error. The tree is known by its fruit. Where there is no fruit of holiness : there is no faith. These people are deceiving themselves that they are Christ's. We know the awful fate Jesus warned of, where at the judgement he will say to such people: “Away from me you evil doers, I never knew you”

The “work which God requires” is firstly to believe on His Son; but this in turn means we are to surrender ourselves to him to be washed in his blood, to be sanctified by his Spirit, to learn in his school and to obey all his commands.

Having denounced this opposite error, let me turn back to the error I fear most at present: People who reduce Christianity to just a set of moral teachings. That is not Biblical Christianity!

What the Bible urges us to is this: Flee for refuge to God's appointed hope; “No one can lay any other foundation;” Only Jesus saves. Let us fall down humbly before the throne of God imploring pity and pardon in the name of his beloved Son. Let us beseech him to give us a true spirit of repentance and a heart truly loving the Lord Jesus. Until we have all joy and peace in believing and daily strive to be imitators of Christ as dearly loved children. And let us study the scriptures to know more and more of who Jesus is, what he did so that we grow in love and admiration for him and then we will want to know and live the sort of life that will please him.

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!

William Wilberforce 1779 Book condensed: Ch III Sect III

Chapter III Section III

Why it is reasonable to direct these emotions to an unseen God.

Our objector, even when forced to admit that it is reasonable to feel love, gratitude, joy, hope and trust towards Jesus falls back on the claim that it is still not reasonable to feel these for a God we cannot see.

The objector will say things like: “seeing is believing”. But that does not mean we cannot believe without seeing, just that seeing is a powerful thing. Our human minds are more complex than that.

For instance, “Reason” does not control our feelings. Now the proper objects of various feelings are as follows: excellence of love, expectation of good for hope, apprehended evil of fear, other people's misfortune and suffering of pity. Are these emotions controlled by our reason weighing up the object? No! For example take pity. A moving novel, even when we know it is fiction can arouse more feeling in us than a dry account of a real battle. Again we react more to one murder nearby than to a massacre of thousands in a distant country. So our objector is on shaky ground the moment they try to equate rational thinking and emotions.

Again “absence makes the heart grow fonder”. We know that when a person we love is removed from sight, we do not cease to love them, quite the reverse. Lots more examples could be cited, but the principle is that we can feel emotions about beings we cannot see.

To turn the tables on the objector, what factors do strengthen our emotional attachment? Knowing about them, certainly, but even more knowing them. I mean if someone says how wonderful a person is who we have barely met we may be impressed but we do not become as attached to them as we do to a maybe less “wonderful” person that we have come to know really well.

So what does all this say about God and us? It says that people who make the effort to know about God from the Scriptures and to know God personally in their daily lives can feel love, gratitude, joy hope and trust in a way that the objector who has not bothered to try either of these things cannot understand. So the message to the objector is: “taste and see that the Lord is good”.

“But let us turn our eyes to Christians of a higher order, to those who have actually proved the truth of our reasonings; who have not only assumed the name, but who have possessed the substance, and felt the power of Christianity: who though often foiled by their remaining corruption, and shamed and cast down under a sense of their many imperfections, have known in their better seasons, what it is to experience its firm hope, its dignified joy, its unshaken trust, its more than human consolations. In their hearts, love also towards their Redeemer has glowed; not a superficial and unmeaning (think not that this could be the subject of our praise) but constant and rational, resulting from a strong impression of the worth of its object, and heightened by an abiding sense of great, unmerited and continually accumulating obligations; ever manifesting itself in acts of diligent obedience, or patient suffering. Such was the religion of the holy martyrs ...”

My Adventures with God: ch 32 - A Prayer Group for Growth

Chapter 32 ... A Prayer Group for Growth

I had from my researches a good general idea of what was needed to revive a country parish in terms of sociology. From having run a religious revival soon after we arrived all those years ago I was confident about how to do it in spiritual terms. But I saw clearly that I did not know what God wanted us to do at this particular time in this particular place.

Oh yes. I had read lots of the books on “church growth” with their slick patter about what worked for them. I had enough sense to see that these could not be transplanted into a different setting a different social structure or a different time and place in God’s purposes. No, I had researched the principles, but I knew the actual plan had to be both home grown and God directed.

So we started a prayer group. I advertised it as open to anyone who wanted to participate in working out things we could do to build up the church. I think there were about seven of us who agreed to met each week.

We prayed in general for our parish and its people, we prayed about particular things the church thought it needed, we kept a book of these requests and we logged in the book what happened after we prayed for particular things. We also prayed for God to show us what he wanted us to do. Oh, and we included some bible study and discussion, because that seemed a good idea.

We kept a book of our prayer requests. Without the actual book I can’t give many examples, just the fact that when we wrote down what we had asked God for we were very frequently soon writing down that God had provided. This, seen in black and white was a tremendous encouragement for all the members of that prayer group – and also the things God provided in response to our prayers were a great boost to the church.

This prayer group continued for the rest of our time at Lang Lang, and was I think central to the rebuilding. But it is better, having stated its existence if I leave that and go on to the results God produced in so many ways. Since this chapter is otherwise a bit short, let me tell you about one man who joined our group, Bob Egan.

I met Bob while I was visiting his wife in our little Kooweerup hospital. They were new to the district. Bob had retired as state sales managed of a major oil company. They had bought a “hobby farm” out of Lang Lang. Bob’s wife was now dying of cancer. I visited her each week, Bob left the room so that she and I could talk “religion” as he was an atheist. (He gone to WWII as an 18 year old and after his wartime experiences decided God could not exist).

Bob's wife died. I took the funeral. Next Sunday who should I see in church but Bob. He said straight out that he had gone home and thought: “What if Christianity is true? What if my wife is in Heaven and I miss out and never see her again” So he said he was still an atheist but he had come to check it out.

We invited him to the prayer group. He was a very quiet gentle man (I know that does not sound right for a sales manager, but it was true). He was very sharp, many times in the bible study part he saw straight out things in the text which I had only got from commentaries! One meeting he said in his mild way that he had an announcement he wished to make. We listened. He said almost inaudibly “I have just become a Christian”. We were all delighted.

Bob was a tremendous help. For a start he had great natural talent, and huge experience. For another he won the hearts of the ladies like Jan and Vera: They still hated change, but if Mr Egan thought it was a good idea, well then they would support it too! Our whole family loved Bob dearly, and he was indeed a very dear man.

As I said earlier, the group of men who had opposed us from the Masonic Lodge were as good as their word to be supportive. Here is an example. Doug, who was the third most senior Mason in the state at that time and had earlier said to me "I've got rid of more ministers than you've had hot dinners - and you're next" had a son who was advancing in the corporate world. He arranged for his son to come and sit down with me and analyse the church in the town as far as our strengths, the needs of the town and the possibilities for building up the church were concerned. It was in one sense a secular business approach so not everything was applicable but many of the principles involved were, and it was genuinely helpful. It was also a much appreciated and fine action on Doug's part.

The diocese belatedly started to try to be useful. They had employed a very keen and pleasant young man to go around and try to encourage parishes. He called on me several times and we had long discussions. Unfortunately a lot of his ideas fell into the “already tried that” category. But it was a positive attempt.

William Wilberforce 1779 book condensed: Chapter III Section II (Part B)

Ch III Sect II (part B)

Many people who object to emotion in religion have simply confused the issue. They are thinking in terms of some sort of empty hysteria. I am talking about something totally different. Hysteria can of course be whipped up in a crowd. In an individual “emotion” can be just a sham – like the man who puts on a big show of how much he loves a woman but then treats her badly. True emotion must be judged by two things: what it is based on, and the actions it produces.

Basis : Is the person stirred to their religious emotion by a deep knowledge of the great truths about God, or is it something whipped up out of vague and ignorant ideas?

Actions: What does their religious emotion produce? Are they joyfully devoting themselves to prayer and praise, contemplation and study or are they content to neglect these religious activities? Do we see them struggling to increase their self control, and continually improving their behaviour and way of life in accordance with the scriptures? Does their religious emotion have the effect that they diligently fulfil their duty to their families, their employer and their community? Anything that does not produce these is fake.

This - the evidence of its fruit - is the only real test of true religious emotion. As Jesus said of love: “If anyone loves me they will obey my teaching”

Now back to the objector who points out that religious emotion can go up and down over time, and also be shown more by some people than others. That is all true – but it is no ground for an objection to religious emotion per sec.

Look at it this way: giving money to charity is a good thing, right? We would laugh at an objector who said: “No, you can't say that! Some people can afford to give heaps, others can only afford to give a little, so until you can specify how much each should give you can't say giving to charity is a good thing” Similarly we should laugh at an objector who says that because people feel religious emotion more or less strongly at different times, and some people more strongly than others we cannot say that religious emotion is a good thing.

I have another thing to say about the importance of religious emotion: we need it! The Christian life calls for total commitment and vigorous and continual resolution, self denial and activity. But we are surrounded by distractions, and the temptations and false glamour of this world. If we give in to the objector and throw out our religious emotions as “against Reason” we are fighting these with one hand tied behind our back.

Take an example. Suppose you are a parent and your child has convinced their school to let them represent it in a big competition by boasting that they can win it. Suppose you know that if they work really hard they have the potential to win, but you also know they are not good at knuckling down and doing the hard yards. How would you encourage them – remember it means praise, honour and all the rest if they win: humiliations galore if they fail. Wouldn't you try to get them really fired up to do their best. That's right you would engage their emotions, not just rely on a cold intellectual appeal. Well if that works in ordinary things why deny it in religious pursuit? As Jesus said “The people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light”

So it is completely reasonable that when God has given us emotions to help us we should use that help. It is now a simple task to show that Jesus is the proper object of these emotions.

The emotions we are talking about are these: Love, gratitude, joy, hope, trust.

If these had no objective basis they would be sham, but each one does have a solid and reason-based foundation in Jesus our Saviour.

Love: We love him because he first loved us

Gratitude: that for us and for our salvation he “who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross...”

Joy: that “to us is born a saviour...” by whom God “has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have received redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

Hope: What can compare to “Christ in you, the hope of glory”

Trust: Can there be a trust to be preferred to the reliance on “Jesus Christ who is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

…............................

Sorry, no posts for the next two weeks …

I will be away on holidays

My Adventures with God: Ch 31

Chapter 31: Back to the Drawing Board

Why had it all blown up? Why had we not been able to increase the size of the church and still have it stable? Why could we convert people to Christianity yet not have them in church? These and similar questions needed answers.

When I was studying engineering I quickly learned that studying failures led to advances. For instance one of the most repeated film clips in documentaries is that of the failure of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Seattle. It is a dramatic example of forced (by wind in this case) vibration. It is great footage. The suspension bridge writhes snake-like until it finally shakes itself to pieces. Actually a young engineer had warned soon after it was built that given a certain wind strength and direction this would happen. He was dismissed as a nut case. After the failure of the bridge, his work was re-visited! Wind bracing then became standard on large bridges. The engineering world had learned something important from this failure.

This phenomenon of learning important lessons from studying failures is seen in all branches of engineering – and probably most spectacularly in air crash investigations advancing aircraft safety.

In our church we had run a dynamic revival, something rarely seen in those days in Anglican country parishes. People with no church connection had come to faith in Christ. ... But ... Firstly we had not been able to bring the new converts into the existing church structures. Secondly the parish had all spectacularly blown up.

We realised that if, like many career minded ministers we had moved on to a more prestigious parish while things were going well, we would have looked successful and the inevitable blow-up would have happened later and been blamed on the next minister. We could have (and perhaps many clergy have) gone through many parishes making the same mistakes and sowing the same seeds for disaster each time. In his mercy God had kept us there to see the outworking of the mistakes. So we believed it was our duty to find out why.

So, once we started to recover I set out to do some research.

Since we had no difficulty converting people, I decided the problem lay in the area of human rather than spiritual factors. (Apart from the triple whammy attack by the devil described earlier. The books and seminars on church growth had not prepared us for that attack, but we had since then worked out the lessons). So I set myself to study sociology and especially the sociology of churches.

I need to do a flash back here to show why I thought I was the sort of person who could find out anything valuable, or find any solutions. The answer lay in my past experiences working as an engineer.

Theologians and other theorists can indulge themselves in fantastical theories in their ivory towers – they can hardly ever be proved wrong. They don’t have to stare reality in the face. Engineers do not survive long if they believe post-modern rubbish like “truth is relative” or “language has no objective meaning". ... Reality always wins!

Kids playing at “Superman” and jumping off the garage roof have universally found that gravity puts a painful end to their pretence. Engineers likewise deal with the real world where if you are wrong the laws of physics will tell you so, sometimes very painfully. I had been trained to think under this discipline. I also knew I had a track record for getting it right. It was not pride, it just was. Let me illustrate.

I first worked in a government department that designed buildings that were more in the “special projects” line. I was in mechanical building services – air conditioning, noise control, any anything else “mechanical”. It soon became apparent that while I still had a vast amount to learn from the older engineers (and even the draughtsmen!) about the art of air conditioning, I had this quirky ability to solve baffling problems and to be able to invent new things where needed. So if there was something outside the square, I got called in. If I then left the office (we were right in the city) and spent a few hours wandering round the botanic gardens sniffing the roses, no one minded. They I knew I would come back with a problem solved.

Just one anecdote.

We were designing a new printing works for the Reserve Bank. Yes, printing money! This needed a vault which would hold about three months worth of Australia’s currency – at that stage paper money had a short life in circulation before it was so tatty that banks sent then back to be exchanged for new notes. The bank was understandably concerned about security. A successful theft of that magnitude could cripple the country.

One day our chief engineer showed me a proposal for this vault by a world famous safe company. “Look at this” he said “but don’t worry about the details of the vault door. Bank-vault doors are just a trap for young players; any smart thief goes for the wall.”

I read their glowing accounts of the performance of their patent system of vault wall reinforcement. My attention was grabbed by the assertion: “One third of an ounce of pure Nitro-glycerin exploded on the surface had no ill effect” This made me suspicious. So I studied up on explosives and called up a relative who was in army intelligence and quizzed him (he was most enlightening). My suspicions were confirmed.

For fun I drew a cartoon of how I would crack this vault if I were a thief (terrorists were not an issue then). I had it lying on my drawing board when one of the Reserve Bank chiefs walking past chanced to see it. He was not amused! But I was given funding to have a model of a safe manufacturer’s device for ventilating the vault and a model of a device I had invented and have them tested as part of tests being done by army engineers. After the sappers had done their work they picked up pieces of the safe manufacturer's device 200 metres away. Attacking my device they cut into it and exploded five kilograms of plastic explosive (so much for a third of an ounce of Nitro-glycerin!) as I intended, it “failed to safety” leaving only a hairline crack in the vault wall.

My point is that from that and many other escapades I knew I had proven ability to research new disciplines and come up with solutions that worked!

So I set out to study and apply Sociology.

I read the renowned “fathers” of sociology, Weber and Durkheim. I took my self off to the nearest university library pouring over books. I took a course at the university taught by noted sociologist who was also an Anglican priest. I talked to him and he set me a reading list, even lending me some of his own books.

It was absolutely fascinating! The top sociologists were remarkable people. I remember avidly reading one sociological study of a small town 70 km outside Washington DC made some 30 years earlier. The team had visited the town over many months, looked at all the institutions and groups and just looked and listened until they understood. Then they wrote it up.

As I read a verbatim of a church council meeting I found I could do more than identify with it, I could put names of people in my parish council to the ones whose words were recorded in the book. They were just the same! It was just what they would say! (and often had said!)

When I read about the town groups and how it all worked it was just like Koo-wee-rup (which was a town the same size the same distance from the big city, likewise a farming area - just in Australia and 30 years later!) It was a revelation.

One thing I will mention – and it is why I commented that the men in our church “rebellion” had all been Masons. The study observed that the Masonic Lodge had men in key positions in every church in town “whose apparent function was to control the minister” – the sociologists were not making a religious or value judgement – just a scientific observation. An observation which was particularly relevant to me!

I went on to read sociology of churches – works like David Moberg’s classic and some Australian studies of rural church life. From the latter I found out why I had met opposition from the stakeholders in the church as it had been. The sense of “Identity” for people like Jan (and others) was strongly bound up in their church leadership role. Any change to the church let alone their role was a threat to their sense of “identity”. They might not be able to see let alone verbalise this as the reason. But they would fight to the death to protect their vital sense of identity. It was, the books informed me, no surprise I had encountered hostility and opposition. One book I recall was titled “Conflict and Decline - Rural Churches in Australia”. According to their findings, the real surprise was that I had survived! In their studies, ministers who had tried what I had tried had uniformly perished in the attempt (generally suffering a breakdown in their health and/or marriage and leaving the ministry). So now I knew!

From Moberg I found even more fascinating things. The problems country churches were facing in my part of Australia were not new. They had happened (probably many times) before. Here were studies of exactly the problems we were facing. Here were studies of the various solutions which had been tried, analysis built up from many case studies that pointed to which solutions worked and which made things worse. It was a gold mine!

In country Victoria rural churches were in decline. The situation was universally acknowledged as most serious. Bishops were lamenting the decline of country parishes and wringing their hands and running around saying “What will we do in this new frightening situation”

I don’t know why but the bishops and church leaders, faced with a new perplexing problem never stopped to think that someone might have faced this problem before. They held endless conferences but never wondered if better minds than theirs might have actually found a solution. They never considered that someone somewhere might already have invented the wheel!

I tried to tell the head ministers in our diocese that I had done some research and found that our problem was neither new nor unique. I told them that up to 50 years ago these same problems had occurred, had been researched, and that solutions had been found, tried and proven in the US. I tried to tell them that the solutions they were putting into practice were precisely the ones which had been found make the situation worse. As with the young engineer who tried to tell the experts that the Tacoma Narrows bridge would fail, I was dismissed as a nut case.

How could I prove that I was right?