A Youthful Church
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister Cheltenham Church of Christ Victoria. This Church had the reputation of being a very large and alive Church. But that was a mirage. The reality was quite different as this young country parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister has some real surprises.
I didn’t want to be known as a Youth Minister. I had come to the Cheltenham Church of Christ at twenty six years of age and I certainly didn’t want to be stereotyped as a minister who was only interested in youth. But we had run those successful teen weeks in Ararat and Portland that attracted so many thousands of young people. I was teaching over a thousand teenagers a week in the two nearby high schools and there were large numbers of young people at the Cheltenham Church of Christ. So whether I liked it or not, I had to be my own Youth Minister.
The nineteen sixties were a great era for Sunday school and Christian education and the Cheltenham Church of Christ had one of the best set-ups that I knew. They had a nursery catering for children up to the age of three, a fine kindergarten hall well-equipped with everything built just the right size for children aged four and five. In another hall the primary department looked after ages six, seven and eight. In another hall the junior primary met for children aged nine. In the big old Sunday school hall that had been built fifty years previously, the juniors aged ten and eleven met. The intermediate department covered children aged twelve and thirteen. Over in the large church lounge the teens met for those aged fourteen and fifteen. They also had a weeknight program. The youth department was for young people aged sixteen to nineteen and they met in the Church Board Room around the officers’ table although some large youth functions attracted up to a hundred and fifty young people. There was also a small teacher-training program designed for people who had completed the youth department and who were now twenty years of age. They were expected to train for one year when they could then be appointed as a Sunday school teacher. Their training came under the leadership of a very fine educationalist and artist.
We had sixty teachers in the Sunday school and four hundred and fifty scholars. One unique feature of the Cheltenham Church of Christ Sunday School was the mothers’ club that, like a school mothers club, consisted of mothers of scholars who held monthly meetings and raised funds to make sure their children had plenty of equipment.
The mothers club has continued to this day and has been the reason behind the wonderful resources used in Christian education within the church.
One year after commencing ministry at the Cheltenham Church of Christ we built the V.C. Stafford Library and Resource Centre which was opened on Education Day 1968. This library not only consisted of a good number of books covering all of the Christian areas of understanding and material that could be used by scholars and teachers alike, but had drawers full of audio-visual material, slide-sets, strip films and plenty of equipment like the epidiascope, overhead projector, slide projector, film projector, cassette recorder, tape recorder and the like. With the funds from the mothers club we were able to keep the resource centre well stocked with plenty of good facilities for teaching the children.
The Sunday school anniversary of 1967, the second year after we had commenced our ministry, was the largest that had been held to that date or ever since. On the Sunday school anniversary a total of thirteen hundred people including scholars attended. During the week we had a school concert with two hundred and thirty two children taking part in a whole series of concert items, choir items, solos, duets, plays and dramas produced by various classes and departments. In addition to the Sunday school anniversary, the delight of the year was the Sunday school picnic. Convoys of cars, buses and open-sided trucks driven by market gardeners took hundreds of children to Kalorama Oval where there were the usual picnic, races and cricket matches. On one occasion we hired a vintage steam train and a thousand people travelled to Mornington. We ordered two thousand five hundred pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken which had newly arrived in Australia and over a thousand boiled eggs, and boxes and boxes of salad. Sunday school, for most children, was quite an exciting and educational experience. It certainly attracted a large number of young people around the church.
There were also a large number of mid-week youth activities. There were three different groups for boys under the name of Boys Explorers. All arrived in singlets, shorts and sandshoes and had a program based upon physical, mental, social and spiritual activities. They passed various tests and received badges along the way and took part in inter-club activities and camping programs. Likewise there were three groups of girls known as the Good Companions – Junior, Intermediate and Senior. They had similar programs based upon four-square development of each child.
A weekly teens program met and they had frequent visits to places to improve their knowledge of community resources and places of interest. I remember taking a group to visit Temple Death Israel in St Kilda where all the boys wore their father’s hats. The teens obviously thought this was quite a lark and before and after our visit spent most of their time knocking off one another’s’ hats. But in the Jewish Synagogue everybody was well behaved and a delightful time was had as the Rabbi took us through Jewish ritual and tradition followed by a delightful Jewish supper.
The Christian Youth Fellowship was by far the noisiest of all consisting of a very large number of teenagers. They not only had the usual kinds of social and sporting programs, but on one occasion had a weekend visit to Hamilton, where they loaded bags of sheep manure from underneath the shearing sheds on properties owned by church members. A whole semi-trailer load of bagged sheep manure then came to Melbourne and was unloaded at the back of the Church where we sold bags of sheep manure to garden-lovers in the congregation and to the community. The young people worked with enthusiasm and everything they did was always in a good cause. In those days no-one seemed to mind working for the benefit of others, working to raise money for missions or for some elderly persons rest home.
The Young Adult Fellowship used to meet on a Sunday night after the evening service and many of their programs centred around contemporary issues. I note the program for 1967 and see that on one night there was a debate “That Our present policy on Vietnam be deplored”. The next week’s church paper indicates that some fifty young adults were present and the debate became extremely heated. I forget now which side won.
A healthy mind and a healthy body were certainly part of the belief of the suburban ministry. The idea of muscular Christianity was very popular and sport was to be encouraged within the churches. There was not a great deal of emphasis upon dancing, because in that era dancers were still not approved by most of the older generation. But, at the Cheltenham Church of Christ, every kind of sport was encouraged. The Church had two tennis courts of its own and there were fifteen teams playing each week. The large gymnasium had many pennants hanging around the walls, each telling the story of victories in competitions. There was a table-tennis club where those who liked to play tennis on a smaller area were encouraged and a small group of people who played badminton. In fact the fine gymnasium owned by the Church, the largest I’ve ever seen on a Church property, had a very high roof, eighteen feet in height, to allow for those who liked to play badminton.
The Cheltenham Church of Christ Cricket Club had had a long and very successful innings. There were five senior teams which played in competition in A,B,C,D and E grade, plus an under-sixteen Saturday morning boys competition. Consequently there were always players who were able to move up through the ranks. One of the Church elders for many years was the backstay of the cricket team. He had been for many years wicket-keeper in the A grade and then, as he got into his fifties, slowly moved down through the grades as his reflexes became slower. However, I’ve never seen a braver man. He would stand up close to the wickets looking for a stumping from even the fastest of bowlers. The trouble he had with his knees in later life and his bent and broken fingers were all tribute to his love of cricket.
Each Monday night the girls gymnasium met. They started straight after school with the earliest of groups and had a graded program for a couple of hundred girls going right through to late at night when the most senior girls and young women took part. The girls gymnasium was designed to help young women develop poise and deportment and to live a healthy lifestyle. Afternoons and evenings of a Monday were constantly busy as cars went in and out of the car park dropping off young girls in gymnasium uniforms for their class.
The Church was filled with young people and youth activities. My diary for 1968 shows that I led or attended some four hundred and twenty five youth meetings or activities over a hundred and twenty days. It was an exhausting round of functions. I did hope somewhere along the line it also kept me fit. Unfortunately this was not the case and something more had to be done. A couple of other young fellows in their twenties were joking with each other one day about our growing waistlines when someone declared that we ought to train for football. That would keep us trim and fit! And so we began the Cheltenham Church of Christ Football Club. We played Australian Rules and to the amazement of everybody won or first match. From that moment on, training was rigorous every Tuesday and Thursday night with match meetings Friday night and the game Saturday afternoon. I played with the team, but constantly had to come off at three-quarter time in order to race back to the Church to conduct somebody’s wedding. There was many a time a young suburban minister dressed well in suit and tie, wearing a black robe conducting a young couple’s wedding would have been shown up for his true love if someone had discreetly pulled up the legs of his trousers to reveal the black, yellow and red football socks of the Cheltenham Church of Christ Football Club. In three years’ time the club had three teams competing in three grades and by this time the standards had become too high for most of us and success had gone to our heads. No longer were they teams full of young fellows who wanted to keep fit and kick a football around on a Saturday. Success and winning a premiership had become serious business and talented football players were recruited from far and wide.
It was all a very exhausting round, but it certainly brought and kept a great number of young people and children close to the Church.
I did not want to be seen as a Youth Minister. I wanted to make a significant community contribution as a mature minister of the gospel, not as some minister in his middle twenties being concerned with young people. I wanted to be an evangelist, get involved in social welfare, be a counsellor to people who were troubled and perplexed, be an educator to teach people the Christian way, be a pastor, care for people in their need. In short I wanted to be a suburban minister.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that in ministering to the youth I was discovering and developing all of those aspects of a suburban ministry.
That night in my study I spent some time writing up my journal and looking out of the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road, that wide intersection that was dominated by the lovely white Church with the high white tower noting down the events of another day as a suburban minister.
GORDON MOYES