I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister of Cheltenham Church of Christ Victoria. This Church had the reputation of being a very large and alive Church. This young country parson was soon to discover that the life of a suburban Minister had some real surprises.

It is frequently said that the lives of people who go to church are no different from the rest of the community. That is not so. In fact it’s a scurrilous lie perpetrated by people who want to try to claim to be as good as people who go to church.

In the thirteen years I ministered the Cheltenham Church of Christ I saw that church grow from being a couple of hundred people into many hundreds of people and then to several thousand people in a remarkable programme of church development and church growth. Hundreds of young people were involved every week and hundreds of adults attended our worship services, our activities programmes, auxiliaries, sporting teams and the like. Every Saturday we had several hundred people involved in the sporting teams connected with our church.

The thing about it was that people who became Christians lived lives that were different. We expected from the church that people would be converted. We prayed for conversions. We visited people and spoke about their lifestyle and encouraged personal commitment to Jesus Christ and a life that would be honouring to Him. We also had a very strong work ethic which encouraged people to make the most of themselves, develop their gifts and abilities, not just for their own sake but for the sake of the community and also for God. We taught in all of our scriptural programmes, our youth groups and even in the devotional programmes that were held with every sporting group and auxiliary and club, that people who were associated with the church were expected to live by Christian standards with a high degree of morality and personal behaviour.

And it worked. In spite of the fact that we were such a large community church with so many people involved in all the activities of the church life, and then in turn as Christians being involved in Council, community groups, political parties, the schools and the like, our church family lived lives of exemplary quality and incredible personal discipline.

In thirteen years, involved with thousands of people, we only rarely saw a marriage breakdown. I only knew one person who developed as an alcoholic within the membership of the church and for those several thousand people there is not one person with whom I went to court charged with some major offence.

The fact was that most of my life was being spent with people whose marriages were falling apart and who were involved with alcohol and other drugs and who were being called before the courts on all kinds of charges. But it was not from among the members of the church. The most amazing thing is that the membership of our church practised on Monday what they listened to and discussed and learned on Sunday.

Christianity was a seven-day-a-week affair and members of the Churches of Christ were expected to live lives that were strongly disciplined, moral and obedient to the teachings of the scriptures.

Consequently when someone did go off the rails it was very obvious and, like many smaller denominations, there was then a closing of ranks and a great deal of support went into helping the family which suffered, or the person who erred.

The members were quite open in the fact that we were there to minister to others not just to our own members. It wasn’t our own members who were having problems with alcohol and drugs. It was in the other families of the community and it was expected that we should be of help to them. It wasn’t the families of our church members who were breaking up marriages and ending in tatty divorces and aggressive break-ups but we were there to help those in the community who were going through those dreadful experiences. It wasn’t our church members who were being hauled before the Magistrates or Judges but we were there to go to court with those from the community who were experiencing the clashes with the law.

Many people say that the lives of church members are no different from the rest of the community. But from the closest personal knowledge of several thousand people over thirteen years I know that this is not true. The lives of the members of the Cheltenham Church of Christ were different and they saw themselves there to provide ministry and support for those who suffered all the various travails of fate which they themselves were blessed not to incur.

There was no question in my mind that many of the preventative activities – discussion groups, seminars, teaching programmes on marriage enrichment, quality family life, how to spend more time with your children, raising children within the nurture of the family, teaching people how to relate with each other and communicate – all of these programmes, seminars and teaching, had a very positive effect upon the lives of our people.

In the same way we just didn’t tell young people not to drink, but we constantly provided programmes pointing out the stupidity of drink driving, the physical consequence of alcohol abuse and, what was much more positive, groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union conducted Sunday evening programmes where they set up demonstration tables with the most delicious suppers for young people, showing that they could organize parties, develop tables that looked attractive and inviting and yet were free from alcohol.

All of those life-enriching type programmes and courses, seminars and clubs bore fruit in the quality of Christian lives which we saw in our community.

There were those who started out with great promise and who years later got away from the church or who left their faith and found themselves involved romantically with other people. Marriages did break down among the children of many of our members after they had left our influence and gone to other places and frequently failed to carry out the Christian commitment they had when they were young. That brought great sadness to us all.

But if the preventative work went on week by week among the members of the church, the rescue and support went on with the community day by day. Most of the people with whom I had contact were from outside the membership of the church. Frequently I went to them because they called in times of trouble, in distress and in need. Like the Salvation Army it was known in the community that we would help people in trouble and consequently people in trouble turned to us. Like the Salvation Army most of our work was done not with our own members, but with those in the community who had need.

One man like this comes to mind. Whereas I normally use the true names of all of the members of our church and the people with whom I was involved when telling these stories, there is nothing of shame or disgrace about any of the people who worked alongside me. But in this case I will change the name of the man involved for obvious reasons.

Our church was on top of a hill and it overlooked the entire community. Facing the church along the footpath was a lovely rose garden, some two hundred feet in length. This was not the entire width of our church because as the years went by and we purchased a number of the adjoining houses for demolition and built three retirement villages as well as possessing a large gymnasium, two tennis courts and five other halls, we gradually covered acres of property covering three blocks. But outside the church and the manse were two hundred feet of glorious rose bushes growing close together to form a rose bush fence. For most of the year these rose bushes flowered magnificently and were a wonderfully picturesque sight with the expansive green lawns behind leading up to the lovely white church with the high white tower.

We used to have a roster of people to keep the rose gardens weed free. But there were occasions when the weeds grew faster than our volunteers could cut them out. And in the long twilight of Melbourne’s summer I frequently found myself, after tea, weeding the front garden. Those lovely rose bushes bloomed constantly but they were a painful garden to weed. Because our church was on the corner of the Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road where there were some thirty six traffic lights and where the Nepean Highway itself was fourteen lanes of traffic wide, papers, beer cans, Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes and wrappers from McDonald’s hamburgers would blow across the Highway and become impaled on the rose thorns. Part of the work of the volunteer gardener and of the resident senior minister every week was to go along the rose bushes and remove the pieces of newspaper and litter that had been caught there.

Just around the corner from our church was a hamburger shop which generated remarkable amounts of hamburger paper and pie bags which seemed to get caught on our rose bushes, and all the wind-borne trash from the busy Highway would collect on the thorns.

It became a habit late at night after the evening meal to go along and collect the rubbish, to clear the papers from the roses and to weed the earth beneath the rose bushes.

One night about seven thirty or so when I was weeding outside the church I noticed a man slowly walking along the footpath up the hill. He was a familiar figure although I did not know his name. Frequently I would greet him as he walked either up the hill or back down into the shopping area. He never paused to speak as many other people walking by did. And when I greeted him he would just mumble a word and keep on walking. He passed every couple of days on his way down to the library and after spending some time in the public library would return to his home past the church just before it shut at eight o’clock in the evening. He always carried a stack of books and took great interest in all of the activities of the library. Obviously he was a great reader. He had no family, neither children nor wife. He walked slowly with bowed head as if bearing a great weight and even in summer time he used to wear a long grubby gabardine coat regardless of the weather.

As I pause to recollect the picture which is so clear in my mind it didn’t matter how hot the days were in Melbourne’s summer, he always wore that coat and carried a stack of books. Frequently he wore a hat of the old fashioned kind and in a way he appeared to be a most old fashioned gentleman.

I gathered from the books he carried that he was a very well read man. On a couple of occasions when I was standing on the footpath with a hoe weeding the earth beneath the rose bushes I actually stood in his way and spoke to him or made passing comments about the books that he had. I remembered him having a large new publication on archaeology, an interest that I had had and a subject that I had studied at university and I made some enquiry about it. But he dismissed my enquiry with just a word or a nod and walked around me and kept on walking.

Although I tried to be friends he never returned the friendship and to tell the truth I did not want particularly to be his friend. But I did pity him because he was an outcast in our community. I felt that someone ought to speak to him regularly and perhaps, as it didn’t appear that anybody else was doing it, that someone ought to be me. I did not know his name and no one knew much about him except a number of people knew where he lived and why he lived on his own.

He had been a senior school teacher in the Education Department but had been dismissed some years before I had come to Cheltenham. There had been a court case and he had been imprisoned. He had sexually assaulted several children from his school. He had taken them away, with their parents’ approval for a Christmas holiday. It was a touring holiday and they would camp out overnight. He had promised this trip to the best girls and the best boys in the class and had spoken with their parents and obtained permission to take four of the children with him on this particular holiday which was to take two weeks and travel down through Gippsland, along the beaches and then up into the mountains. He had the parents’ permission and there was no question about his competence or dedication or love for the children, nor about the care with which he had prepared for this holiday.

What the parents did not realize was that he, from the very beginning, had an intention of sexually assaulting the children and had chosen children he believed would respond to his favours. I never read the accounts that were in the local papers but they tell me it was quite horrific and his sexual assault was continuous throughout the holiday period. All of the children suffered.

He was convicted and sentenced to jail. After a few years he was released and came back to live in our community although he never again was employed or had anything to do with any community or community activity. He was a total social outcast and the parents of our community were quite united that that particular man would have no future involvement with any children in our community. He was regarded as the “dirty old man” of the community and wore for years, prior to my coming, the approbation of the entire community. I was told once that angry men of the community had one night attacked his house, beating noisily on the walls with sticks, throwing rocks on the roof, and shouting threats and insults.

I was also told by another source that young men, whenever they would see a dead dog or cat along the road would dump the carcass at night on his doorstep.

Yet he never left the district. He just took the community rejection as part of the price he had to pay for the terrible hurt and continuing trauma he had inflicted upon children entrusted to his care.

It was just before Christmas and I was weeding the garden, standing on the footpath with a long handled hoe. He drew close to me and I said, “Looks like some good Christmas reading you have there”. Without slowing down he said, “Yes, I’ve got some good books here. I’ve enjoyed them” and continued to walk around me. “Well, merry Christmas and a happy new year” I said to him and stuck out my hand. He was a bit taken aback and awkwardly shifted the pile of books from one arm to the other so that he could shake my hand before passing on without another word being said. I continued with the rest of the weeding. A little later as I was sweeping up the footpath I noticed something shining in the dirt. It was a plastic covered library card used for borrowing books. He must have dropped it when I shook hands with him.

The library card read simply, “Mr E Swan, 32 Chesterville Road, Cheltenham, 3192”. I knew where that was. I picked up the card and put it in my pocket. Because he, more than anyone I knew, was such a regular attender at the library and I knew he would soon miss his card and perhaps with Christmas coming on books would be his only solace.

After cleaning up the weeds and putting away the wheelbarrow, the hoe and the broom I put on a casual shirt. On that hot Melbourne evening as the twilight turned to dusk I walked up to his place just three blocks away to return his library card. He lived in a small wooden building on a market garden. It was not exactly a house, although many years earlier it had been built as an accommodation centre for workers. The market gardens in those days had harvesters come at various times of the year. Pickers of peas or celery or lettuce would come in at the time of harvest and work for a few days staying in the little workers’ cottage. This cottage had been built for workers and he apparently had lived there for some time.

Probably the little wooden cottage should not have been allowed to be rented. The market gardener who owned it was on the Municipal Council and the officer in charge probably closed a blind eye to the fact that it had a permanent resident.

I walked up the dirt path and knocked on the only door. He opened it, surprised. I told him simply that I had found his library card and held it up. As he realized I was returning his card he stepped back into the cottage and asked me to come in.

I entered. The bungalow consisted of one long room with a single bed and a wardrobe up against one end and a sink at the other end. A kitchen table was against the wall, with just two chairs. In between the two ends there was one lounge chair, a bookcase and a reading light. There were no paintings or pictures, not even a calendar on the wall, but over the table he had stuck up a smoothed out sheet of Christmas wrapping paper. It was the only Christmas decoration in the room.

Mr Swan had just made a pot of tea and immediately poured another in the only other cup he possessed. He seemed quite embarrassed and apologised that he had no milk, but he offered me a slice of Christmas cake. He motioned me to sit down on the chair at the table and he took the other one and with some finesse passed over the cup of black tea and the slice of Christmas cake. It was almost as if he belonged to another era in another world and he was waiting upon me as a special guest. When I had tried to talk with him on several previous occasions he would never have a conversation. However now I was in his home, it was as if I couldn’t stop him speaking. He started from the moment I walked in the door and continued to speak.

“This is the second wonderful thing that has happened today. You speaking to me and then coming to visit me, and before that the ladies up at the library gave me half a Christmas cake. You see, when I arrived at the library earlier tonight I found it had shut early and the staff were having a Christmas party inside. But when they saw me standing at the door, they opened it for me. They invited me to come in even though they weren’t open. The ladies know me because I go there quite regularly. Someone gave me a drink and others gave me some things to eat. But I said I didn’t want to drink or eat, I had only come to choose some books to read over Christmas. They didn’t mind and while they were having their party I walked around and selected some new books to read over Christmas. It was when I was leaving that one of the ladies wrapped up half their cake and gave it to me.”

I was eating a piece of that cake. The rest of the cake sat there on his table with just two slices taken from it and the paper that had wrapped it up had been smoothed out and had now been pinned above the kitchen table. That was his Christmas decoration. It was at an angle and I could see one of the ladies had written on the paper, “Happy Christmas Mr Swan, from the library ladies.”

His obvious delight was centred on this Christmas gift. In fact I think he had several Christmas gifts that evening – a returned borrower’s card, half a Christmas cake, and a sheet of wrapping paper now stuck on the wall bearing a warm greeting.

But beyond that there was something else that was different: some very kind ladies had spoken to him nicely and had offered him some Christmas celebration. They offered to open the library to him even though they had shut early. And now someone from the rest of the community had come to his house and had been his first visitor and first guest.

Mr Swan’s Christmas that year was beginning to look better than many other Christmasses that had been before it.

If we were writing fairy stories there would be a fairytale ending of his rehabilitation and welcome back into the community and taking up his life again and using his skills and his great learning to repay the community. That’s the way fairytales end. I found out in discussions that I’d had with various members of the community that when someone hurts the children of a community, the innocent, the very young and the very vulnerable, then the community closes ranks and with one accord the offender is cast out. Mr E Swan – I didn’t even know his Christian name – had been cast out.

It’s the role of the church to reconcile and to bring people back in repentance and to help them find a new life and a new beginning. It is the story of the Christmas gospel that God came into the world in Christ to rescue sinners and to bring them back.

But our community was not yet ready to do that and whatever period of time Mr Swan had spent in prison was, in the minds of the local people, not long enough.

What did change was Mr Swan’s attitude towards me. From now on whenever he walked past the church there was always a very quick greeting with him nodding his head with quite a degree of excitement and whenever I was driving past I would toot and wave and occasionally pick him up if I was travelling in the same direction. The conversations were always hurried, only a few sentences long, but he did know that I was willing to talk with him.

The ladies at the library told me that he was always quiet and courteous and that while they had no time for what he had done they had found him to be quite a pleasant man. We never advanced beyond the briefest of greetings.

Then Mr Swan died. One winter, a year or so afterwards, he caught pneumonia, was unattended in the little workmen’s cottage for a week or more, until eventually he got a message out somehow and an ambulance called to take him to hospital. He died alone and certainly not missed by many people. His Will was found and he left his meagre possessions to the Salvation Army and he asked that I might be approached to see I would consider giving him a burial.

He was buried in a pauper’s grave in the Cheltenham cemetery, in the old part with only Arthur and Laurie Rose, the Undertakers, the grave digger and myself present. It was a cold winter’s morning when we laid the simple coffin bearing his mortal remains into the bottom of a clay grave that was rapidly beginning to fill with water. The grave digger wanted us to move quickly so that he could get on with the job of filling in the grave. I gave Mr E Swan the dignity of a complete burial service, even giving my own word of tribute and testimony to a man who was our local leper. The other three present were not very impressed. This service was done very early in the morning so as not to take the Undertakers from attending to any paying clients.

I have thought over the life and death of Mr Swan many times since and have chided myself for not being more pro-active and aggressive in seeking to reach him, to welcome him and to help him find forgiveness. Even though we are ministers of religion, we are also creatures of our culture and more than we realize it are captured by the spirit of our community.

I tell you the story of Mr E Swan simply and with sorrow more than anything else for those sins were great. Our reaction to his sin left much to be desired. He had failed in his responsibility and he had failed in his duty and had failed in his commission as a teacher, but we failed him also.

Mr Swan has troubled my conscience ever since. What was far worse than the terrible crimes he committed was our inability to relate with him and to help him at a point where he needed us. And with all of the smartness and sophistication of a new generation, I’m not sure that the reaction of the people of Cheltenham or of my successor would be much different if the story was replayed again today. I bear in my heart the heavy burden about Mr Swan and those like him in this world. Somehow God expects us to be bigger people than what we are.

That night following his burial 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

Thursday, 7th April, 2005, 1:32 pm | A Suburban Minister, Australian Short Stories