Speaking in Pictures
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. 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 was always interested in communicating the good news of the Gospel through the media. If people came to church then I wanted to show them in the best way possible the good news and this would involve music, drama, film and audio-visual. If people didn’t come to church then I wanted to find ways of getting out to those people where they are and still show them in pictures or in word-pictures what it was they were missing. In any event the main aim was to communicate through the media the good news of Jesus.
When I was a Pastor of the slums in Ascot Vale and Newmarket we did our presentations as colourfully as possible, except in those days we used slides, lots of thirty five millimetre slides, using the new colour film that had just been produced by Kodak. We even got quite professional at writing scripts, filming actors in a drama and synchronising the slides to a taped script. We also used some young actors with eight millimetre movie film. Some of these were done in black and white so we had the Charlie Chaplin style and effect. And others were done in colour with all the panache of a young film producer and director. Inside the church above the porch we put up a spotlight so that it could be used in evening services to highlight some dramatic presentation and the curtain that covered the double doors could be drawn up and opened revealing a rear projection screen upon which suitable pieces of film or slides could be projected to create the right atmosphere, or very simply to be used as a teaching aid with maps and points presented.
When I became a country parson once more a great deal of energy went into the production of drama, a play for Easter and Christmas, the presentation of good music with spotlights and again the use of movie film. But now technology was marching on and we were able to produce some colour eight millimetre film. How people loved to come to see themselves on the screen in the church, having been featured in some church picnic or youth activity. It was in those middle nineteen sixties that I first was introduced to the mass media.
I was invited to do a number of interviews on television at BTV Channel 6. They were broadcasting at the time in black and white but nevertheless it was television. Radio was in its heyday and I broadcast interview spots and Christian commentary on a whole host of country radio stations, travelling from country town to country town to record material, going to 3BA in Ballarat, then on to 3BO Bendigo, then on to 3CV Central Victoria, down to 3CO Colac and back via 3HA Hamilton. I never did all of the stations at any one time but over a couple of years made programmes on them all.
Then an Executive Producer of BTV Channel 6 rang me in Ararat and asked if I would do a series of late night epilogues. In those days not even the television station had a video recorder and even the epilogues had to be done live. I would drive, usually accompanied by my wife, baby daughter and new-born son down to Ballarat arriving just before midnight in order to get made up and ready for the close of transmission. BTV 6 was running at night with only one staff member present. He would set me up on a chair in front of a set and get the right turret on the four turret black and white camera focused on me and then rushed upstairs until the film had finished. As soon as the film was finished and he had discharged the final two or three ads, it was simply a matter of the red light being switched on and suddenly there was I in living black and white at 12.30 am and speaking to all the countryside that could receive BTV Channel 6.
At the end of five minutes the light went off, the station played the National Anthem and both of us went home. Meanwhile my wife sat in the car waiting, having settled down our little daughter asleep in the back seat and then as we drove back home the hour long journey to Ararat she would heat the baby’s bottle for our baby son by putting it on the car heater. Most cold wintry nights we would have the heater on full blast and so warmed up the baby’s bottle in order for him to have warm milk.
I discovered then in the country town of Ararat that people everywhere in vast numbers watched television, even to the close of transmission. And not a few of my colleagues in the ministry would say, “You’re mad. Fancy travelling all that way to Ballarat in the middle of the night just to be on TV!” I wouldn’t argue with them. But the fact was I was speaking every night in that five minutes to more people than they had ever preached to in all of their lives with every Sunday put together.
When I became a suburban Minister in the Cheltenham Church of Christ a couple of years later, we continued to present the good news of Jesus, using the media in church services. Only now, we used colour eight millimetre film complete with sound stripe. Don Stokie, the young pharmacist, had set up up-to-date equipment and he managed to attach living sound with recorded music and spoken documentary to the eight millimetre films we made of all of the activities in the church. Then when I went as a preaching Evangelist to New Zealand or the United States of America, or somewhere else, I usually took loads of colour film which later on we edited, spliced together and turned into a one-hour special on two reels. Then we invited people to come to our home, on one night all those whose surnames began A to D, the next night E to H, the next night I to M and so on until hundreds of people would have attended the supper and film nights in the manse. These were great ways of getting to know your people and building fellowship with them.
As usual we produced plenty of drama in them, skits and action, again using light and sound to the best of our ability on a limited budget.
It was then that I discovered the State Film Centre and the Canadian Film Library with their magnificent libraries of sixteen millimetre films. Frequently on a Sunday night we would use in the middle of a service a situation out of some film, perhaps only three or four minutes long, just simply to set up a situation against which I would then preach the good news. Every Thursday we would load up the film projector with some film to take off to Cheltenham High School, then on Friday to the Mentone Girls’ High School where we used films to tell the message of the good news and to provide Christian teaching.
On balmy summer nights after Church we had open-air summer film festivals and sometimes over in the church lounge films on particular issues that were topical to that day. But it was while I was a suburban minister that the work that was done earlier on country radio stations and with the black and white four turret camera at BTV Channel 6 in Ballarat started to take hold.
Melbourne’s leading station, GTV Channel 9, was moving into colour. They needed a new image and a new way of presenting their epilogues at night. In those days ministers used to record the epilogues for showing at midnight or half past twelve in the morning. Because GTV Channel 9 had video recorders, unlike BTV 6 in Ballarat, we were able to record six at a time with five minutes available every night for an epilogue and ten minutes available on Sunday. Most viewers who religiously watched the epilogue didn’t realize the amount of effort that was required in scripting a five minute programme every night on television. But in a way we became well-known to those who regularly stayed to watch the last of the night’s programming. In those days GTV 9 used to say they had a quarter of a million viewers watching. I always reckoned that a quarter of a million viewers were far more people that I could reach with the good news of Jesus than I ever would by just staying in my church waiting for them to come to me.
One day the Executive Producer of Programming at Channel 9 rang and asked “Would you care to come in for a test. We’re looking for some regular Epilogue personality and we’d like to have a look at you on our new colour cameras”.
I remember quite vividly in the waiting room of GTV Channel 9 meeting with the other person who had been called in for the screen test. I was overawed when I first met him. He was a man who wrote regularly in the Saturday papers and was Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral Melbourne. He was a great preacher, a warm friendly person with a smiling rotund face. And there he stood thrusting his hand out to greet me in friendship, wearing a black suit, black socks, black shoes and a simple white collar around his neck. I felt rather awkward. This young suburban minister, knowing that we would be on colour television was wearing his latest outfit. I blush when I think of it now, but I was wearing a powder blue suit with wide lapels and wide flared trousers, white shoes, a red shirt and a wide white tie. It sounds ghastly now, but it was the fashion of the mid-sixties.
Both of us were made up and then the Executive Producer came down to meet with us. I’ll never forget his opening comment. He looked me up and down, then looked the Anglican Dean up and down and then turning to the Dean, a man who has so much wisdom and theological knowledge and an eminent position within the church and said to him quite bluntly, “We have just spent $6 million on colour cameras and you come in here in black and white! Thank you for coming. We’ll call you if we need you.” And so it was that I became the regular Epilogue man on Melbourne television. I wrote scores of scripts which today fill some dusty filing cabinets.
It was much easier to make six Epilogues and one Sunday night ten minute special in one afternoon in the television station and I really enjoyed the work, particularly the art of working without a script and being able to stare right down the camera so that I would look straight into the eyes of those who were watching. Those news-readers who read from the television prompters always gave away the fact that they were reading, not by the tone of voice but by the movement of the pupils of their eyes. I was determined to avoid that.
I don’t know how many Epilogues I made in those years as a suburban minister, but I know they stood me in good stead. Because in the late seventies when we moved to Sydney I commenced a half hour television programme on Channel 9 in late 1979, a half hour programme that runs until I retired some twenty seven years later. This program was shown around Australia, on the Channel 9 network. Over seventy channels presented “Turn ‘Round Australia” twice every week to the largest audience of all religious television programmes.
From that grew Wesley Film Productions and the Ministry of Video and Film Production. We took film crews to Italy, Israel, Crete, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, and Turkey and on hundreds of locations made videos concerning the life of Jesus, the ministry and missionary journeys of the Apostle Paul and the spread and history of the early Christian church. Later we were to make films in China on the spread of Christianity there. Those videos were subsequently purchased by tens of thousands of schools around Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and in other places to be used in education programmes. They were used by the Catholic Church in training priests in French speaking Africa and in many parts of that great land. The films have been screened subsequently on television in the United Kingdom, Africa, the United States of America, Canada, New Zealand and in many other places. A man stopped me in the airport of Atlanta, Georgia, and claimed he’d just seen me on television. A student in the University of North East Tennessee said she had been watching the programmes that morning.
Through the ministry of television week by week we have been able to speak to millions of people across this nation and beyond, and we have followed up with specials produced every year from the Opera House, and our Darling Harbour Christmas, the most watched Christmas programme in the nation. And that all started with the country parson with the black and white four turret, one man operation.
And radio …. we mustn’t forget those early days of starting on 3BA and 3BO and 3CV and the like. When I came to Sydney in 1979 the General Manager of 2CH rang me up and asked if I could do four spots a day on 2CH. The General Manager of 2CH was Mr Chris Brammall. He was a large genial man who said to me with a warm smile of greeting when I arrived to do my first recordings of daily spots, “I hope you do well. Most ministers don’t last on this kind of programme. They run out of material after three months.” I looked Chris in the eye and said, “I won’t.” He looked back at me and with equal firmness said, “What makes you so sure?” I replied “I have already four thousand scripts at home of illustrations and quotations suitable for radio spots and they are typed up and ready to go.”
Through Wesley Mission’s purchase of 2GB many years later I became Chairman of Harbour Radio Ltd and in 1990 I invited Chris Brammall to join us at 2GB where he became the very popular General Manager. When I’m broadcasting on this station, he’s the boss. And he still had me doing four one minute spots a day.
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