PART TWO

BRETHREN

The so-called Brethren (‘Plymouth Brethren’, but we preferred to be called ‘Christian Brethren’) have had an influence on Western Christianity out of all proportion to their numbers. The missionary work they have done in places like the Sahel regions of Africa, Russia, and Argentina, has not yet been fully told. They began in England and Ireland in the 1800’s as a reaction to the formalism and clericalism of the Established Church. Their household names include people like Darby, Kelly, Muller… However, in reacting against the traditionalism of other churches they have fallen into the trap of developing their own hard, unbending traditions. As a result, Brethren Assemblies (‘Open’ BA’s that is, not the Exclusive Brethren) are dying everywhere, if they are not changing.

The Assembly I grew up in met in the Masonic Hall in the Sydney suburb of Oatley. People had to get there early to open windows to let out the smell of beer and cigarettes. It was a semi-open (or semi-closed) Assembly. That is, they believed that non-Brethren Christians might get to heaven (God is gracious) but they couldn’t partake of the Lord’s Supper. We were not encouraged to read anything by non-Brethren authors or attend non-Brethren churches. But when Billy Graham came to Sydney in 1959 he threw a cat among the pigeons. Just about everyone in our Assemblies believed Billy Graham ‘preached the gospel’ but about a third of them believed he was in error in consorting with ‘the churches’, and not denouncing ‘error’ in those churches. But the Billy Graham Crusades were a catalyst, in my memory, for Brethren meeting with, praying with, and counseling with other Christians. That was the beginning of the end of the exclusivism in most Australian Open Brethren Assemblies.

The ‘Morning Meeting’ / ‘Breaking of Bread’ was held every Sunday morning. We sat in a large circle, with those not baptized or received into fellowship, or visitors without a ‘letter of commendation’ from another Assembly having to sit at the back. (I remember the local visiting evangelical Anglican minister sitting back there with us kids one day). The Spirit led various brothers to announce a hymn, or read from the Bible, or pray, and at 11.45 the Spirit led someone to ‘give thanks for the bread’ (always a loaf which was broken and passed around on two china plates), then after some silence another brother would ‘give thanks for the cup’ (always a common cup, and real wine). Then someone would ‘bring a word’. Then at about 12.10 my father, who was termed ‘the corresponding brother’ gave the announcements; someone would announce a closing hymn and at 12.15 (unless there was a visiting brother who didn’t know how the Spirit led us and spoke too long) it would be over.

*** Sunday School was at 3pm sharp! Sunday afternoons. We sang choruses like Wide, Wide as the Ocean, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus, I Will Make You Fishers of Men, Deep and Wide etc. One I particularly remember was ‘Into the tent where the gipsy boy lay / dying alone at the close of the day / “News of salvation we carry” , said he: “Nobody ever has told it to me”… With the refrain: “Tell it again, tell it again, news of salvation repeat o’er and o’er”‘ – and we certainly did. The choruses told us who was in and who was out. For example: ‘One door and only one/ And yet its sides are two; / I’m on the inside, / On which side are you? / One door and only one, / And yet its sides are two; / I’m on the Lord’s side, / On which side are you?’

Every Sunday night there was a Gospel Meeting with messages for the ‘unsaved’. I can’t ever remember any unsaved ever being there (except some of us kids), but as ‘My Word shall not return unto me void’ we believed that such preaching absolved us from any other evangelistic activity (except for a few fervent soul-winners who did it with friends/neighbours or visiting sailors)

Some of the most thrilling experiences each boyhood year were the Brethren Assemblies’ Harbour Cruise. We would land at Parsley Bay in Sydney Harbour and for the only time I can remember would do something (play soccer) with the men. Then there were the Christian Youth Camps held each year at Towradji or Corrimal on the South Coast of NSW, later at Mt. Victoria in the Blue Mountains. I also enjoyed our annual Sunday School picnics at Carrs’ Park in Sydney, with races and games and a man wearing lots of cherries whom we chased.

In our Assembly we never did ‘churchy’ things like saying the Lord’s Prayer or singing ‘The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended’ or reading from written/formal prayers.

*** But my most enduring memories are of one or two of our elders (they were never called that back then, because of the objections of a Darbyite brother who believed elders were no longer necessary in post-apostolic times) weeping as they talked about Jesus’ love and dying. And of Uncle John Clark who always had an open Bible in his home. And of the hot discussions about the evils of radio. (One brother said that as Satan was the ‘Prince of the power of the air’ he controlled radio waves. Later his wife had some sort of nervous breakdown, and the doctor suggested he buy her a radio, so his theology changed at that point). And about whether the ‘warning passages’ in Hebrews meant some who were once Christians may be in hell. And about the program for the second coming and ‘future events’ (though most of them were Darby-Scofield Dispensationalists. P.S. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means: as Tony Campolo says, it’s better to be on the welcoming committee than the program committee for the Second Coming! And as a wise person suggested to me once, ‘Stick to the material between Scofield’s notes’!). There was also the visiting speaker with his model of the tabernacle: it was amazing what ‘truths’ he discerned from such things as the colours of this and that, and even badgers’ skins!

However, my memories of Brethren meetings are not all negative, by any means. David Clines and I used to take copious notes of the ‘addresses’ of G.C.D. Howley, E. R. Rogers and other visiting speakers at Saturday Bible conferences, then type them up. Alfred P. Gibbs was the only Brethren speaker I can remember who had a sense of humour (but, then, he was the only American speaker I’d ever heard!).

When I went to Bathurst Teachers’ College in 1957 I had the sort of ‘aha’ experience that happens to anyone in a sect who meets committed Christians in ‘the denominations’. They were godly, prayerful, humble, lovers of the Bible – more so I judged than we were in our Assembly. How could they be like this if they were ‘in error’? During one holiday-period from Teachers’ College our Assembly had a question-session with a renowned Brethren Bible teacher, Mr. Tom Carson. I wrote down several questions for him. One of them was: ‘If the Brethren are the only Christian group that has the truth why are there some very powerful evangelical Christians in other churches? What did Hudson Taylor lack that we have?’ To which the answer, as I recall was: If only he had been one of us, how much more effective he would have been!

I got an email from an ex-Brethren evangelical leader in the U.S. to the effect that many people’s testimonies he’d heard ran like this: ‘The best decision I ever made was to follow Christ; the second best was to join the Assemblies; the third best was to leave the Assemblies!’

TEENAGE YEARS

*** I spent five of my teenage years at Sydney Boys’ High School, a selective school to which I traveled half an hour by train, then 15 minutes by tram each day. What did I learn there? To wonder at the first Jewish boys I’d ever come across – many of them went around like little old men. They were different (and bright). At the beginning of ‘fifth year’ when teachers were recapping last year’s Leaving Certificate, I learned that you say acquiesce in!

Self-conscious; spent quite a sizeable lump of my pocket-money on Charles’ Atlas’s mail-order isotonic exercises, so that I wouldn’t be a 70 pound weakling and have sand kicked in my face. Quite a waste of money, as the exercises were boring, and he could have told me in one sentence what to do: ‘Just push every part of your body against any other part, or the floor or wall, and by exercising all your muscles you’ll grow big and strong and have high self-esteem!’

I was fairly lonely as a teenager, and felt out of it often.

THE OUTSIDER

*** This week I was counseling a woman who began, nervously, telling me she was an outsider in her church. They did not understand where she was coming from. After gentle listening for some time she confessed that she had a confusing sexual orientation, and was probably a lesbian.

People feel ‘outsiders’ for all kinds of reasons.

I’ve felt I was an outsider about half my life since about 13 years of age. Right through high school (Sydney Boys’ High) I did not really feel I belonged. On sports days (Friday afternoons, as I recall) I wasn’t in the school or house rugby teams, but got a run in the ‘Leftovers’. (Ironic that later, at Teachers’ College, I was chosen to play for the Central West of N.S.W. against the New Zealand All Blacks, but it was then the policy of the College not to allow students to participate in representative sporting fixtures).

Now Outsiders do not treat with great respect the group they’d like to be part of, if anger or rejection compounds the sense of not belonging…

On the positive side well-read Outsiders often become ‘autodidacts’ and may have insights into phenomena which elude others. Hope I’m in that category: I have minority opinions on lots of things, and when I think back to some of these opinions expressed 30 years ago, just about all of them are now regarded as ‘orthodox’.

UNIVERSITY AND TEACHERS’ COLLEGE

I wandered – psychologically – through two somewhat wasted years at Sydney University. In the second year I worked at several day-time jobs, including manual labour with the Sydney Water Board digging sewer trenches, driving the lift at the Sydney harbour bridge pylon lookout, tram conductor, door-to-door salesman, and a few factory jobs. All good educational experiences.

But then I found my ‘self’, perhaps for the first time in my life, at Bathurst Teachers’ College. There I was the top male student, president of the Christian Fellowship, earned an athletics blue, played in the first grade rugby union team, and was part of a spiritual awakening in our dormitory when just about all the non-Catholics made some sort of commitment to Christ. One night I fell asleep ‘witnessing’ to one of these men, Don Gray, who became an outstanding convert. My room-mate, Barry Maxwell, committed his life to Christ, and later entered the Anglican ministry in Sydney. Another special friend, who was a Christian before he came to College, was Alan Watson. His humility and prayer-life was an inspiration to us all. The ‘C.F.’ boomed, and they were heady days. Especially memorable were the prayer meetings at the cowshed, when up to 50 people would sing songs and pray together. They were two wonderful years, and the ‘clincher’ was meeting my future wife, Janice Higgs, there. More of that later.

MANHOOD

One of the books I wish I’d written is Steve Biddulph’s Manhood. Now Steve is more liberal than I about pornography and masturbation and a few other things but essentially he’s on to something very important. Indeed in the seminars I lead on manhood I make this global statement: ‘Most of the problems in the Western world can be traced to our inability to create men from boys.’ Every pre-industrial society has initiation rites for precipitating boys aged 14 or 15 into manhood. We in the West have something called adolescence which inhibits/complicates this process. So what should we do? Men should take boys away and talk about being men – the challenges and the problems of manhood – do things together, enjoy recreational activities together, talk about Big Ideas with boys.

If we don’t properly create a rite of passage for boys, they’ll find destructive counterfeits – hence initiation ceremonies in the armed forces, teenage boys getting on to drugs and breaking into houses etc. The Kiwi movie ‘Once Were Warriors’ is the best I’ve ever seen on the destructive aspects of the breakdown of Western families.

Most men don’t have real friends. They don’t know how to grieve with other men. So they ‘burnout’ and have mid-life crises. Their emotional output is not matched by emotional input. And they’ve never properly dealt with their family-of-origin stuff.

Probably most of us males need a ‘mid-life crisis’ to wake up to ourselves. Mine was in Korea in 1977/8 (?) when I spent a night in tears in a chapel in the Full Gospel Central Church repenting of my sinfulness, selfishness, failures in ministry and parenting etc.