PART THREE

TEACHING

*** I went teaching, frankly, not only to earn a living, but to gain skills which might be useful in pastoring or possibly theological lecturing later. I always knew it would be an interim vocation: teaching theology (or a subset like practical theology or apologetics) would be my main life’s work. I’d known that since the age of about 16.

MARRIAGE

My best friend? My wife. The only one who really cares about me. Who asks how my day was and really wants to know…

Jan and I are different. She tells the story of some time early in our marriage when she asked if I’d help with something or other. I said ‘no’. I have some urgent study to do. I’d put sermon preparation or a writing assignment far ahead of fixing something around the house, or realigning physical objects in another configuration. With Jan, my hunch is that if on the Wednesday before the Sunday she’s due to preach she can think of a reason to make pumpkin soup instead of reading a commentary on Hosea, she’ll head for the kitchen.

I remember Barry Jones, Australia’s highest-profile ‘public’ intellectual being asked ‘What do you hate doing?’ His response: ‘Nothing, except moving physical objects – including myself – around the earth!’ I can resonate with that.

MARRIAGE ENRICHMENT

Last year Jan and I led a Marriage Enrichment morning at a local church, Waverly Christian Fellowship. From the feedback, it was appreciated. But Jan and I, in the weeks of preparation before that event, got a lot out of our preparation for it. Our relationship is richer than ever.

Here’s the letter I read to her in front of those 400 people:

A Love-letter to my Spouse

My Darling Jan,

I am continually grateful that you’re my wife. What a privileged man I am. We’ve had 39 and a half years of happiness: in fact as we said to each other the other night, we’ve spent two-thirds of our lives together! You are the mother of our four wonderful children – and you’ve been a wonderful mum. Our love for each other has grown over the years; from romantic love to a mix of romantic and realistic love.

I thank God for

* Our courtship: they were a wonderful couple of years

* The fact that we were both virgins when we married

* Your willingness to go through the physical pain of giving birth to our four children, and your willingness to be sometimes father and mother to them, especially when they were little

* Your giving up your job for us to move to Canada

* The unexpected gifts you have given me – like the pocket watch a couple of weeks ago

* The fact that we can both get irritable – you with the computer, me with slow people

* Our holidays, where we walk together or sit and read in some of the most beautiful parts of the world

* The ease with which we can make decisions about our life together and our family

* Our new flat: we have never enjoyed living anywhere as much as we enjoy living here

* The enjoyment of lying in each others’ arms and talking together – and of course

* Our sexual life: it’s getting better with each passing year!

I love and admire you for…

* Your desire to do God’s will

* Your honesty and integrity: you are more willing than I am to admit a mistake

* Your commitment to our family – our children and our grandchildren

* The way you have overcome being the victim of an abusive and angry father. I love the way you have tried to separate me from your father – particularly when I come on strong or am overbearing…

* Your care of me – meals, clothes: you are a wonderful home-maker

* Studying and equipping yourself for Christian ministry: doing two degrees in midlife is a great achievement

…and there are lots of other things

Please forgive me for…

* Having too great a commitment to ministry outside our home, which I now see was at the expense of our family – particularly in the case of our eldest two children

* Not helping more with the children when they were little – especially when they cried in the night.

* The times I was angry with you, and hurt you deeply, and for not expressing my displeasure more gently – and for not understanding better, particularly early in our marriage, what having an angry father was like for you

* Not helping more in the home

* Putting you down when I thought you should have known something

* Not being more patient when fixing computer problems – expecting you to remember ten complex things in one bang!

I pledge/promise before God that

* I will try to listen to your heart, your feelings

* I will try to be more domesticated

My prayer for you – and for us – is…

* That we shall find our significance in God, rather than in our training or accomplishments or anything else that humans prize

* That in the last few years of our pastoral ministries we will grow together in our knowledge of and love for God and in reaching out to others effectively

* That your beautiful desire to please others and be their servant will not diminish, but will also be tempered by a willingness to be served sometimes… that you will be more free to ask me to serve you

* That in our semi-retirement which is coming up we shall have a ministry together of encouragement to others – perhaps a ministry to pastors and leaders

I love you!

Rowland

CHILDREN

*** We have four wonderful children – Paul, 40-ish, Karen, 15 months younger, then after a ten year gap we got the machinery going again and two more girls join our family – Amanda, now late twenties, and Lindy, 26.

*** Before my mid-life crisis (in Canada), I was a typical male workaholic, who aimed for excellence at my job/calling, and left too much of the parenting to the children’s mother. Our two eldest are still suffering the effects of all that (and they’re not in the church). The youngest two are very close and devoted to us, and to the Lord. Why? Simple, really: I bonded with them in their pre-teen and teenage years. In the year in Canada when Jan was out working and I was home studying, I’d walk down the hill to meet Amanda and Lindy after school. The walk home was precious: I would hear all about their day. When Jan got home and asked about school etc. of course they’d told their story and just said ‘O.K.’ I remember commenting many times to Jan that she got to hear the eldest kids’ debriefings and I didn’t back then, and I – and they – missed out on so much!

*** Paul is quite an outstanding poet. His latest offering to an Internet poetry group (on which he has posted about 150 poems or the 600 he has written):

By Queen’s Park Lake

Posted by Paul on July 10, 2001

a cygnet waddles up to
Jay, aged two, who
almost pats its
blur
of a furry-grey
bobbing head;
as I stand
an exclamation,
and its mother
a question mark

at just
the distances
required of us

by perfect grammar.

http://www.mindfirerenew.com/paulc.html

http://www.mindfirerenew.com/paulc2.html

http://www.mindfirerenew.com/paulc3.html

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/ChideThree/PaulCroucher.htm

One of the recent highlights for me as a parent has been to participate in the 90th birthday celebrations for my mother in Sydney. Our three daughters drove to Sydney for the occasion (first time they’d ever been locked up in acar for two nine-hour stretches!). Karen and Amanda and I drove together to pick up ‘Ma’ as she’s called from her retirement village in Cherrybrook, and it was lovely just relaxing with them as we drove through the suburbs of Sydney…

One of my most cherished parental dreams is to be able to get as close to Karen as I am to Amanda and Lindy, which for various reasons has not been possible during the 19 years of Karen’s marriage…

NARWEE BAPTIST CHURCH (and, yes, Theological College)

This morning I read this on my email text-for-today: ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight. Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent.’ Isaiah 5:20-23

A good warning before I start this section. I had been teaching for four years and had known since youth that teaching was to equip me for pastoral ministry. We were attending St. Thomas’Anglican Church, Kinsgrove, where Rev. Dudley Foord was the pastor. It was terrific: good Bible teaching, effective evangelism, a healthy church. But I was convinced I could not become an Anglican. On a memorable day our two families went to the beach at Cronulla, where Dudley invited me to be the church’s youth leader, and I told him I was entering the Baptist ministry! The Baptists, for some reason (!) wanted me to join a Baptist church in preparation for entering their Theological College, so we went to the nearest Baptist Church at Mortdale. It was the largest Baptist Church in NSW at that time, mostly due, I believe, to the effective administrative and pastoral gifts of the senior pastor, Rev. Colin Campbell.

So two good – and contrasting – churches provided complementary models for me as I entered College. The selection procedures were interesting. I was to read Henry Cook’s What Baptists Stand For (quite illuminating), write out my doctrinal beliefs and the books I had read (by then it was about 1000 so I had to be selective), preach on the text ‘Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world’ to about ten serious people sitting around a table, and answer their questions. Sixteen of us applied that year; I was one of four selected (the others were all my seniors by many years).

The College was going through some turmoil, with the Principal in the gun with the Baptist Union for being ecumenical. (Strange that, as Dr. Roberts-Thompson had already written a book on the subject which apparently none of the nominating people had read). He left after the first term I was there, and ex-Principal George Morling – an amazing man, and something of a saint, but somewhat doddery – came in for a term or two to teach theology.

I was in College simply to become credentialled. I was ‘part-time’ (note the ‘quotes’) pastor at Narwee Baptist Church, which began to take off. We added a full-time youth pastor and his wife (Dave and Mary Kendall), then the following year a part-time deaconess. Although I loved study – particularl theology and Bible – I was impatient with the mediocrity of the teaching staff’s abilities at the College, so I was choosy about which lectures I turned up for. I actually passed some of those exams without studying for them, and topped the College in theology in my first year, got all sorts of prizes for this and that but put most of my time into the church. I had an idea God was calling me to specialized youth, or student, or teaching ministries and I should put most of my efforts into church-building, as it could be the first and last church I would ever pastor. I could catch up on theology later. Lecturers who read from their notes, who could not answer questions outside the written material in front of them, (only one of them had doctoral qualifications) did not inspire me to drive for 45 minutes in peak hour across Sydney! An exception was Dr. J A Thompson in Old Testament (JAT for short), and later two younger staff recruited from pastoring to teach there – Vic Eldridge (Old Testament) and Ron Rogers (New Testament and Greek). Except for Dr. Thompson none of the others had published much…

These were four hectic years: two young children, driving taxis Friday nights to help pay the bills, teaching at both the Baptist College (sneaky that: if I taught Greek I had to be there, right?) and the Sydney Missionary and Bible College (English, Gospels), preaching twice most Sundays, giving a mid-week Bible study, speaking at lots of youth rallies here and there, running summer camps and beach missions, and in the first two years adding an LTh and Dip.RE to the College exams (12-14 three-hour exams in each of those two years!). Crazy – but stretching!

[P.S. The brilliant Ship of Fools website recently had a mystery worshipper visit Narwee Baptist Church – see http://ship-of-fools.com/Mystery/index.html ]

Now I was a very confident young man: leading a Christian Fellowship at Teachers’ College and then a suburban church in Sydney came easily to me. My Brethren upbringing taught me to encourage laypeople to study the Bible for themselves. Dudley Foord modeled enthusiastic evangelical pastoral leadership. And the Narwee folk were very flexible. That church grew in spite of there being nine other Baptist churches within a five-mile radius, and the suburb being built-out. It was the youngest Baptist church in the district, and it’s a credit to the more senior folk there that my somewhat naive enthusiasm was tolerated at all.

But with my confidence came another tendency I have. Somewhere in my past I was injected with pedagogical serum: I am an inveterate putter-of-things-right, which invariably gets me into trouble with those committed to the status quo. If the Baptist Denomination in NSW and its College were victims of their addiction to mediocrity I had to fix that, eh? I wrote letters to the national Baptist paper asking why there were a dozen Anglican churches in Sydney with more than 100 young people in Bible study groups – but not a Baptist church. I challenged the Baptists’ prevailing fundamentalism: why have a doctrine of inerrancy for the Bible if the Bible doesn’t for itself? Etc. Etc. Now you can gauge the response to this. Who’s this young upstart who thinks he can fix everything, and is so arrogant he doesn’t attend half the lectures at the College he’s supposed to? So I developed a reputation as a stirrer… Didn’t really bother me (mostly) as I had regular encouraging feedback from like-minded people and many who were influenced by all this provocation to repent and grow and change…

After College I was invited to become a student Staffworker with the Intervarsity Fellowship (now the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students). It is to the denomination’s credit that although I was ‘bonded’ to serve them for, I think, another three years, they released me, and so far as I know I was one of the few (any?) to be ‘ordained’ (we’ll return to that strange term) to an interdenominational home ministry immediately upon graduation. The three following years were heady, inspirational, and evangelistically effective as I traveled the country speaking on tertiary campuses. More of that later.

== Dave was part of a ‘Youth Crusade’ in our church from ‘Ambassadors for Christ’ and in conversation I got the impression he was open to a call to youth ministry in a local church. The church had no spare money: when they called me they had to increase the stipend to support a part-time married pastor, and also purchase a manse (in Bonds Road). So one memorable night, after Jan and I committed ourselves to raising our tithe to a fifth of our small income, I divided the congregation into four segments, and got on the phone. (The four groups: those with money and teenagers; those with teenagers but not a significant income; those with money and no kids; and finally the young people themselves). By the end of the night we had pledges, for just one year, sufficient to cover a married full-time pastor’s stipend, plus renting a house and purchasing a car. This method of ‘financing by faith’ we used again at Blackburn Baptist Church to call Robert Colman. The rationale for all this can be found in my book, ‘Your Church Can Come Alive’ (see also http://jmm.org.au/articles/11529.htm ). Dave and Mary were with us for two and a half happy years – a time in which many young people came to faith in Christ, and quite a few left for Bible College training and missionary work. (Remember John Stewart, who went on to a significant ministry with Gospel Recordings?) The Youth Choir under Dave’s leadership was also quite a feature in those days! (Remember Dave singing ‘Roll Jordan

OTHER MINISTRIES

Central Baptist Church: Halfway through 1971 the deacons of the Central Baptist Church in downtown Sydney – Australia’s first-established Baptist Church – approached me and asked if I would conduct an interim ministry for them. They were looking for a pastor, and wanted someone to be the key preacher/pastor in the meanwhile. It seemed God’s will, and a good idea all around, and we had eighteen happy months there.

One of the challenges for this congregation was to continue to reach out to the Chinese community in Haymarket – which I feel they did well. The services were translated into Chinese and every Sunday we joined the Chinese people for lunch in the basement. But with the experience I had had with students I challenged the church to reach out to the thousands of nurses and students within their catchment area. Because I did not intend to stay I believed it was my job to ‘open the windows’ and prepare this very conservative congregation for change. We loosened up the services, I preached on topics of interest to students… and they started coming in dozens. On our last Sundays eighteen months later the church sanctuary and the gallery were full.

But these new people were not members, and had no power in terms of selecting a future pastor. About 8-9 months into our ministry there the deacons unanimously invited me to consider the full-time pastorate at ‘Central’. I was hesitant, and I told them I would not have led in freeing up the whole place if I knew I’d be a candidate for the pastorate. The deacons insisted: so I agreed for my name to go to a meeting of members for a vote. I have a document which was agreed upon: continue to write church radio news for the Christian Broadcasting Association a half-day a week; continue to study for the Master of Education degree; and be free to preach elsewhere one day a month – particularly among students – Australian and overseas – and nurses. Proposed salary: Stipend $100, Car Allowance $16 per week, Manse (or rent of $40 per week), Telephone $4 per week (approx!).

Here’s an interesting paragraph in the Statement: ‘Some changes in the church organization and methods which may assist in the further development of the church as a whole and which should be thoroughly examined by the diaconate are: (i) a possible split of the diaconate into two sections, an Administrative group and a Pastoral group; (ii) the work of the Church Council transferred to the full diaconate with committee leaders reporting directly to them; (iii) Any venture which is outside the church programme and budget but approved by the church should be proceeded with in faith; (iv) a Communion Service in a revised form to be reinstituted on Sunday evenings.’

That meeting was interesting: people who there whom very few knew: but, yes, they were on the roll; and obviously phoned for the occasion. I just lost the 2/3 vote, and the deacons were disappointed. So much so that they came back to me and asked for me to stay on anyway, and they would re-submit my name later. I told them I would pray about it.

In the meantime three ministries ‘headhunted’ me: the South Australian Baptist Union to be a Christian Education officer; Carey Baptist Grammar School in Melbourne to be their senior chaplain; and Blackburn Baptist Church to be senior pastor. I did what I’ve only rarely done: put it all into four columns, listed the variables down the side of the page, and prayerfully weighed up he pros and cons. BBC came out on top, and rest, as they say (again) is history…