Planning for Growth
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister of the 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.
In the early years I desperately wanted our Church to grow and to that end, threw myself into visiting new people, sharing the faith with many and baptising as many as I could. But there was a need to get the whole Church involved in planning for growth and accepting our dreams for the future.
One month I carefully worked over some plans and programs and decided that the time was right to announce them to the Church. On one particular Sunday morning I announced to the Church my plans and dreams for growth. We would attract new people to our Church and expand our Ministry. We would fill the Church week by week with people eager to attend. We would increase our offering so that we would have more money to pay off our debts and then to hire a second minister to help in the work. We would increase our support for missions among aborigines and overseas. We would introduce new music to the life of the Church expanding our choir and introducing more modern songs.
I was certainly enthused but I could tell, while I was preaching the sermon, that the congregation certainly wasn’t.
When you have been preaching for a few years you begin to read the response on people’s faces. I could see that some faces listening to the litany of new things to be accomplished, were saying “Oh, yeah? Who is going to do that?” While another face was saying “I’d like to see you try. We tried that before and it doesn’t work!”
But if the faces of the congregation didn’t tell me that I was on the wrong track then certainly my good members at the door on the way out did.
One of the first out was old Tom Hackett. He was the man who had met me on my first day of arrival when it was raining and we were unpacking our furniture. He was the man in charge of the property who bellowed out to me “Don’t you dare walk on those lawns”. His voice was harsh and he was a grizzled fellow in his sixties. Tom Hackett took the responsibility for all the Church properties and did so in an honorary capacity. He stopped me at the door and held my hand firm and said “Young fellow, I want you to know a few things. You are the youngest minister we’ve ever had in a hundred and nine years. I’ve been in this Church all my life and my father was here before me. My grandmother laid the foundation stone and we love this Church. I don’t care what you do here, but don’t you dare touch a brick of her. And I want you to know something else, I didn’t want you come to this Church. I didn’t vote for you. The other bloke should never have left. It was wrong what they did to him. And I didn’t agree with your coming. You’d be advised not to change too much.”
I could see our Church Treasurer Andy Goodman looking a bit agitated just down the line. When he got up to me, he just gave me an encouraging word and with a hand on the shoulder said quietly “I wish you luck, chum”. The way Andy said that with good intention and promise of support indicating that I might have a battle on my hands to get any changes made. Old Hubert came out. He was reputed to be the wealthiest man in the congregation. He certainly had huge land assets but dressed poorly and kept the family in very poor conditions. He looked me in the eye and grasped me firmly in his narrow bony hand. “Glad you mentioned money, son. I promised my old father I would give two shillings a week and I always have.” He said it with a sense of pride. But I knew that he had promised his father back in the 1930s when two bob meant something. He simply hadn’t changed and no matter what we would do in the Church it was obvious that he wasn’t going to.
Stewart Strong our Sunday School Superintendent who was more adventurous than the rest shook my hand firmly and said “We need leadership, give it to them!”
But I guess the real point came with one of the last people to come out of the Church. She was the leading soprano in the Church Choir. She had a strong voice and had sung the solos for sopranos for many years. Mrs. Lavinia Hackett, was Tom’s wife. She was wearing a big fur around her neck on that particular morning and a bouquet of flowers on her very ample bosom. She took my hand and looked at me with the sweetest of smiles “You’d be well advised to keep the choir as it is. You’ll be wasting your time trying to get younger girls interested. They have no training and no breath control, they’re just not up to it.” And I could see from the way she spoke that any comment about growth or development within the Church or changing to more modern music was not going to meet with a good reception in that quarter.
The following Sunday morning the Choir presented one of it’s masterpieces. Under the leadership of Mr. Stafford, the Choir which had been lead for years by Mr. Valentine Woff, one of the conductors from the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, produced a magnificent “Gloria” by Mozart.
On the first page of “Gloria” the first sopranos have a magnificent run where they sing “Glorious is Thy Name Al – migh – ty – Lord”. On the “migh” of “almighty” they hung on for thirty two beats over eight bars on sustained high G. As they finished the thirty two beats in one breath they continued with “Glorious is thy Name almighty Lord” with nine more top Gs one after the other in quick succession. As the sopranos finished that line Lavinia looked at me sitting in the pulpit with a strange smirk on her face which seemed to me to say “Top that!”
Actually I was learning and Lavinia was helping me.
I was learning about choirs. We did have a good Church Choir and it was very ably led and they were dedicated and competent singers able to sing standard choir music in four parts. They gave of themselves to rehearsals every Thursday night and spent hours in preparing special music for Christmas and Easter and Mothers’ Day and other special occasions. I learned how to work the Choir. I never tried to change it. Instead I asked for challenging music. It kept them going at full bore. I expected much from them and they thrived upon it but I never tried to recruit or add new members or to replace any of those who had served faithfully over the years.
Consequently when the Church Choir sang Maunder’s “Olivet to Calvary” it was a most moving experience and then over the years they expanded their repertoire to include many of the more modern works of John Peterson and we enjoyed a growing Church Choir with lots of expertise in traditional Church music. Lavinia was right. I was advised to keep the choir as it was.
However, I did want to attract younger singers and needed newer music and so we started another choir. I looked round for some person to conduct it, someone with musical skills but also someone who would be an enthusiast and would quickly recruit members of the new choir. The young woman to do it was Lavinia’s own daughter Jenifer. Old Lavinia would probably make it difficult for anyone else but not for Jenifer. Jenifer was the apple of her eye and she certainly would not make it difficult for her. Jenifer was a self starter, highly motivated, and she used to sing with the Church Choir but she wanted to get with more modern music. She wanted Benjamin Britten, not Kalab Simper or James Maunder or Jude’s Consecration! Soon Jenifer had gathered around her twenty six young mothers with my wife Beverley as pianist and they were rehearsing hard for Mothers’ Day.
When Jenifer brought her Choir into being she certainly did not want it compared unfavourably with the Church Choir and right from the beginning they started with a high standard with four and six part numbers plus a trio, plus some instrumentalists. So came into being the Choir known as “The Lowanna Singers”. Not only did that group start well but it has gone on singing now for forty years since the day it began. No longer are they young mothers but they have been joined over the years by groups of younger mothers and developed into one of the finest female choirs in Victoria.
Lavinia was right – I shouldn’t attempt to do anything with the choir except encourage it and leave it as it was.
But she was teaching me another lesson as well. I realised that I shouldn’t try to mix the content of the Church services. If the 11 am Church Service wanted to sing in exactly the same way and have things done properly and decently and in order then that’s the way it should be. If we wanted to do things differently and include children and drawings and using an overhead projector and having a lot of participation in the service then we should start a new service and so it was that the 9.30 am Service started and very quickly that began to fill up with people. A different kind of person, a younger person with younger children with greater emphasis upon children in that service. Later on I was to start an 8.30 am Service which would be more liturgical and more suitable for those who declared that they were “really Church of England” except they never went anywhere. Then to the 7 pm Gospel Preaching Service we would add a 5 pm Creative worship service with dance and drama and music with guitars. Lavinia was right. I should leave what was well settled alone and start something new and so attract new people.
But the real challenge was to get people to own the idea that our Church needed to grow. How could you get people to come to a business meeting to discuss principles of growth? I invited people to come with all the enthusiasm I could muster but in fact very few of them did and our business meetings were not well attended. I came to realise over the years that poorly attended Church business meetings and annual business meetings were usually a sign of contentment among the congregation. It was only if you started to do very controversial things and caused a rumpus that people turned up in large numbers. But I wanted people to turn up in large numbers in order to catch a vision of the Church’s growth. How could this be done?
I decided to ask a young dentist by the name of Don Stokie who was my own age and an enthusiast for making eight millimetre coloured movies if he would help me. “I want you to film everything that happens in the life of the Church. You waste a lot of your film now going filming steam trains on special trips. I want you to film everything that happens in the life of the Church. Get plenty of people in it, plenty of kids, plenty of old people, lots of laughing faces, get funny bits, kids clowning around, catch people unawares and create something of interest. Then edit it down and at the end of twelve months I’d like to screen it as a sort of “one year in the life of our Church” production.
Don Stokie did just what I asked and for almost a year just filmed everything that happened – our picnics, Sunday School Anniversaries, Special Mothers’ Day Presentations, Church membership drives, Anniversaries and the like. He then edited it, put together a good musical background and I did a voice over and there we had it – forty minutes of colour sound movie which could be projected onto the large screen. We then sent out letters to all of our members inviting them “Come and see yourself, your family and your friends on the large screen in the Church Gymnasium”. There were close to three hundred people at that planning session. We ran the film through. It was a great success. There were cries for more! “Run it again!” “Let’s see it a second time!” But I knew not to spoil something and so we just left them hungering for more.
We asked everybody present to sit in groups of ten, with an Elder or Deacon in each group and handed out some sheets and some pencils. “I want you to fill in these forms. In each group there is an Elder or Deacon who will help you with any question you might have but we want you to let us know what you would like our Church to do. We want to get a picture of what you think our Church could become. Will you please fill out now the front of the sheet”. And on the front of the sheet we had a number of questions and along side each question was the number of persons involved as of this moment and then a column where we asked people to fill in what they would like to see in a year’s time. So the first line read:
“How many people would you like to see attending morning service each week?” And then along side it in brackets we had the number currently attending and then a space for them to fill in the number they would like to see attending.
The second question was: “How many people would you like to see attending our evening service” and likewise a space for them to put in the number.
“How many new members would you like to see us add to the Church this year?”
“How many children do you think we should have altogether in our Sunday School?”
“How many children do you think we should have in our kindergarten?”
“How many women should attend our day group, evening group, mothers’ club?”
“How many young people should attend our Teens Group? Youth Group? Young Adult Fellowship?”
“How many people should be in our sporting teams, cricket? football? tennis? table tennis? badminton? netball?” and so on and on the questions went with people filling in what they saw as a significant growth factor for the year. The last questions were simple:
“How many dollars per week do you think we should be giving to local activities?”
“How many dollars per week should we be giving to missions and to the wider work of the Church?”
It took a little while for everybody to fill out the forms but chattering away people wrote down a number, asked advice from a neighbour to see how much they had put down, put their own on and so on. But eventually everybody had filled in that form. It was then I asked them to do a simple thing “Would you now turn over your sheet and fill in the other side. You will notice a series of questions on the other side and we want you again to fill in some numbers”. On the other side of the sheet were these questions:
“How many people will you undertake to invite to our morning services?” with a space for a number to be written in.
The second question was: “How many new people will you undertake to invite to our evening services?”
The next question: “How many non members will you ask if they will become members?”
“How many children will you recruit for our Sunday School?”
“How many women will you invite to come to our women’s groups?” and so on the questions went right down to the last one:
“How many extra dollars will you give each week in your offering?” and then simply the statement:
“Sign your name and date it”.
As people read through this second page a remarkable change came over the meeting. People who started to fill in suddenly stopped filling in, they would turn the paper back over, see what they had written on the first page, go down through their list of numbers, turn back to the second page, see what was required of them, go back to the first page and see what they had written down and then inevitably all over the gymnasium nearly three hundred pencils crossed out all the numbers they first wrote down. They then redid the first side of the page putting in new numbers, now they turned to the back side and chewing the ends of the pencils hard went down and mentioned the number of people they would bring or invite or recruit or encourage and how many additional dollars they would give. The pencils were chewed, the hair was scratched over the ears, there were furrowed brows, but people were committing themselves to helping our church grow.
During the week a couple of volunteers from our Church worked through all the sheets, averaged out all of the goals and then we presented them to the Church the following Sunday. These were their goals, goals that they had set and the goals they had undertaken to fulfil.
A remarkable enthusiasm began to take over the congregation. Lavinia was right. It was best not to touch the Choir or the first service or anything else that people loved and which was a stable part of their life. It was much better to start a new service, a new choir, a new music group. To be sure there was some healthy competition but this only improved the quality all round. We had dreamed a dream and we had shared it and other people had come to own it.
I glance down now at a list prepared at the time which said “New developments this year so far”. Apart from the normal busy life of our Church these new developments have taken place and there was a list of things that had already happened in that particular year.
1.Six thousand copies of our Church Growth was sold together with cassettes.
2.Our ministry was expanded with the calling of Jeff Benson, Stanton Wilson and Joy Rainey to the team.
3.The Summer School for Successful Ministry was launched with eighty eight ministers and over five hundred lay people attending sessions.
4.The Church Media services were expanding with a thousand cassettes sold, $3500 television production facility purchased and a $4,500 printing plant installed.
5.The School for Continuing Education was running well with seventy lecturers teaching over five hundred people who had enrolled in twenty eight courses.
6.The Christian Retirement Centre had been built with over a million dollars being spent on twenty three units on one and a half acres, a new bus had been purchased for an outreach ministry for $20,000, a new village for retired people consisting of fifteen units on one and a half acres was under way and stage two was planned for a further three and a half acres.
The new 5 pm Service was using the talent of people in worship, a New Guinea work party had headed off to build a school, a house and an airstrip in a remote jungle. Sixty pre-school children were in day time activity groups, a new manse had been built for the senior minister, two new houses purchased for other ministers and a communications centre opened. There were new members added to the faith and the membership of the Church every single week of the year. There was a record number of sixty two teachers in the Sunday School, our income had increased the previous over four years from $26,000 to $44,000 to $67,000 to $127,000. And that was in 1970s dollars. The Church equipment was being replaced. A new IBM golfball typewriter, dictaphones, copying machines, office equipment had been purchased and so on the story went of what had happened. It was a story of a Church on the grow. A Church that had caught a vision that it could grow.
Lavinia was right. It was best not to meddle with anything going well. If it wasn’t broken then don’t try to fix it. Instead start something new which would challenge other people, capture their enthusiasm and harness it in the direction of the Church’s goals.
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