The Fellowship of the Right Handers
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.
One of the aspects of the life of a minister at the Cheltenham Church of Christ that drew praise from the unguarded, was the amount of good being done anonymously and without fuss by so many Church members for those who were in trouble.
Like the time I went to visit Mrs. J.B. Brown. Mr. Brown was a fine man only in his fifties with motor neurone disease. Very slowly he wasted away and all of the family’s resources were used up in providing nursing care and support for Mr. Brown at home. Gradually the disease affected him so much that he could neither speak nor move a muscle. Breathing was becoming impossible and it was difficult for him to clear his throat of any blockage, meaning that suffocation was liable at any time. Then unfortunately this is exactly what happened. Immediately I was called I went round to Mrs. Brown’s home and sympathised with her and helped her lay the thin twisted body of her husband on the bed for the undertaker. I rang Arthur Rose from W.D. Rose & Son and asked him to call round. I sat down with Mrs. Brown in the lounge and prayed with her and extended to her the sympathy of us all. I then said “Do you mind me raising a very delicate point with you, Mrs. Brown. I recognise that you have used all of your financial resources to help John through this long and terrible illness. My guess is that you may be worried about the expense of the funeral.” The lady lifted her chin high with pride and made some comment that they would get by. But I knew that she was trying to make the best of a situation that was really desperate. I was there when the undertaker, Arthur Rose, arrived. He talked with her about the funeral arrangements and I could see that she was concerned with the costs involved. I gave Arthur a nod or two and a wink from behind Mrs. Brown’s head and he took up the point immediately. He indicated to Mrs. Brown that the charges would only be nominal and that his firm was anxious to help out. Later I rang Arthur and said “Give her everything she needs for the funeral and I will arrange the cost. We want to get behind Mrs. Brown and help her.” Arthur replied “Well if you meet our basic costs we will do it at cost.” We agreed on a price and I indicated to him that I would arrange for that to be paid.
Later that afternoon I was down alongside the bay visiting some other families. I called in on the spur of the moment on George Hallaby. George was a bachelor and pretty well heeled. I told him the purpose of my call immediately. “You know J.B. Brown has been in a wheelchair these last three years and gradually dying. Well George, the family has used up all it’s money and only this afternoon I have been arranging the funeral. I am wondering if as an act of anonymous generosity you might pick up the account so that the widow doesn’t have to worry about the cost of the funeral”.
George looked at me with a beady stare. “You want me to pay for the funeral?” I gave him a beady stare back. “Yes George I am asking if you would pay for the funeral. You can afford it and it would be a wonderful way of secretly helping another.” George stared back at me. “I’ll pay for this funeral and not only this one. If you ever find anybody else who needs to be supported I’ll be happy underwrite the cost. Just ring me and I’ll make a cheque out to W.D. Rose & Sons straight away. I’m glad you asked me, it’s a privilege to serve.”
I went out of that man’s house walking three feet above the ground. What a wonderful Christian spirit! And over the next thirteen years since that visit first took place in 1966, I called George on several occasions to ask if he would pick up the bill for some other widow or needy person in our community.
The Undertakers W.D. Rose & Sons likewise were very generous. Whenever they knew I was trying to organise a funeral for someone in very straightened circumstances they would charge only the base cost with no profit margin for themselves. I always remember after the funeral that Mrs. J.B. Brown went straight to the office with her handbag containing bankbook and withdrawal slip asking if she could have the account so she could fix it up straight away. Arthur reached in his draw, took out an account and passed it over to her. She stared at the account for some time. It had itemised all the items of their services and then across the bottom it had simply “Paid in Full” and was signed by the proprietor.
Incidentally, W.D. Rose & Sons with whom I conducted more than a thousand funerals over the next thirteen years, was generous to me on one occasion. In 1972 I was going to the United States of America on a fact finding tour trying to learn the secret of how some Churches grew beyond the size we ever saw in Australia. My wife and I had saved for a long time to get enough money to pay for my economy fare and then the Greyhound Bus to take me across the States. One Tuesday afternoon Arthur Rose rang me with a note of urgency. “Can you meet me half way down Charman Road, straight away?” he asked. I realised something had gone wrong. Perhaps there had been some other Minister who had not turned up for the funeral and a cortege was already waiting to leave for a cemetery. This had happened once or twice and I had been able to answer their urgent call. “I’ll be down straight away. Do you want me to meet you just off Station Street?”. Arthur replied “No, just a little further up from that – outside the Commonwealth Bank”. “Okay then, I’ll be there in two minutes” I said and immediately I grabbed my Bible, funeral book and black gown and calling out to my wife flew out the front door and down the street with the gown flapping behind me à la Superman. This was an emergency and I was needed half way down the main shopping street. I stopped outside the Commonwealth Bank and a funeral car pulled up but there was no cortege.
Just Arthur Rose who got out of the funeral car and said to me as he walked passed me, “Come in here for a minute”. I walked behind him into the Commonwealth Bank wondering what was up. The Manager Don Campbell walked across to us full of smiles and pushed toward me a wad of cheques. “Just sign here, your usual signature on the left hand side”. I looked at them. They were travellers cheques in American dollars, each one worth $20 and there must have been twenty in the pack. I looked at Arthur and then back at Don. What was this? Why was I expected to sign? The two men were sharing a secret joke. The firm was just giving me a package of travellers cheques to help me out on my United States trip. Arthur gave me a wink “Just make sure you don’t use them all up in Las Vegas” he said.
That was typical of the quiet generosity of so many Christian people around Cheltenham in those days. Incidentally, I did go by Greyhound Bus to Las Vegas and I sent a postcard back to Arthur telling him I’d had an enjoyable evening in Las Vegas, playing not one poker machine, but I ended up having ice cream for supper after attending a Southern Baptist prayer meeting.
The spirit of doing things anonymously to help others really caught on in the Cheltenham Church of Christ. For example in 1966 I set up “The Ministers Secret Kitchen” in a cupboard in the Sunday School hall. I organised a group of ladies to take weekly turns to visit the Ministers Secret Kitchen and make sure that each box of food was fully packed. Inside this cupboard was a series of different sized cardboard boxes and inside each box were tinned and dried groceries. There were tins of vegetables and packets of cornflakes, biscuits and all the things a family would need except fresh meat and milk.
Whenever I came upon families in need in the area I would select a suitably sized box for a single person, or two people or a family of two adults and two children or two adults and four children and deliver the box of goodies with some fresh meat and fresh milk. The ladies of the Church rostered themselves so that each week any box used would be quickly replaced. These were left simply with a note saying that the Church hoped the family would accept this simple gift. Some of the women were also on our “Casserole Roster”. Whenever a member or a person connected with the Church became ill or went into hospital the rest of the family received freshly a cooked hot casserole suitable for however many were in the family, delivered piping hot every day at evening meal time. There were no thanks expected, no names left, simply a hot casserole usually wrapped in a towel, left on a front door step so that when a family arrived home from school or visiting in the hospital the evening meal would be ready.
There are other members in our Church who carried on the traditions of their fathers in secret giving. The first time I went out to visit George Daff on his market garden, he offered me a couple of cabbage and some fresh onions. George worked his couple of acres as had his father, grandfather and great grandfather before him, growing vegetables and taking them to market in the early hours of the morning, long before dawn. Those market gardeners worked hard. I had prayed with George and his men as they stood in the centre of the paddock with their heads uncovered and hats in hand as they lent on shovels and I thanked God in prayer for good soil that had kept the families going and for these good men who worked so hard. I used to visit all of the market gardeners at their work and always pray with the workmen as they were weeding, sowing seed or cutting cabbage or celery or whatever the crop was.
George walked back to my car with me and as he went slashed away with his long knife packed up a couple of cabbage, a few bunches of spring onions and a lettuce and thrust them into my hand. I made a silly mistake for a young minister. “Oh no George that’s your livelihood. Don’t give them to me. I’m just coming out here to visit you as a minister, not to gain any vegetables.” George looked at me with a straight eye “Never say that to me again, young fellow. If I want to give you a cabbage I will give you a cabbage. It’s my way of saying thank you to God by giving whatever I like to other people and don’t you try to stop me.” I took his rebuke to heart.
There are some people who through their act of generosity are doing a good thing in appreciation to God and I had to learn not just to give in my life but the more difficult grace of receiving.
The Church had a wonderful team of volunteer ladies who visited the homes of the sick and the shutins, the parents of our Sunday School scholars and other Church members. These ladies, elected by the congregation, were known as Deaconesses and under Mrs. V. C. Stafford, the wife of a former minister and then later Mrs. Val Goodman, the wife of our treasurer, these twelve ladies visited the families of the Church constantly. On the first Wednesday of each month they would meet with me for a luncheon and either Mrs. Stafford or Mrs. Goodman would hand out a new bunch of cards to each of the ladies. Each lady received eight cards, two families per week to be visited throughout the next month. The ladies would then report on the eight families they had each visited the previous month. They spoke of needs of families, further visits that were required and of where I should go and pay a visit. They kept me up to date with family illnesses or personal crises where some ministry intervention was necessary. I always came away from those luncheons with a long list of visits to be made. Every month those ladies did more than a hundred family visits – more than eleven hundred families visited each year. And I would take in my turn a dozen or more homes where it was recommended that I should call.
We had other ladies who used to write letters to the aged and to the shut ins, some eighteen ladies who undertook to write a letter to another person on their birthday or wedding anniversary, and a couple of other ladies who every week wrote to the young men from the Church who were away from home training in their National Service Training or who had already been sent to fight in Vietnam.
But I soon discovered there was a whole network of goodness and kindness being exhibited to others. I saw someone driving somebody else’s car and found that it was quite a common event for cars to be lent while someone’s vehicle was out of action. Calling into another home I saw a strange caravan on the front lawn, only to discover that one of the older members of the Church had placed the caravan there so a relative visiting from the country could have some additional accommodation.
Alan and Olive Smythe had providing hospitality down to a fine art. Every Sunday morning before she left for Church Olive Smythe, wife of the Chairman, would make a glorious roast dinner with fifteen or twenty baked potatoes and plenty of vegetables with the roast ample for a big crowd going into the oven. Then at Church that morning she would approach every visitor and invite them home for lunch. If a visitor indicated that it might be some trouble she would quite truthfully tell them that she had a couple of extra places already set at the table and the lunch in the oven. Her kindness over the years meant that hundreds of visitors felt a welcome to the Cheltenham Church of Christ and probably a couple of dozen changed from being an occasional visitor into becoming a regular member through the hospitality of Alan and Olive Smythe.
Old Tom Hackett who had given me such a tough time when I first arrived at the Cheltenham Church of Christ telling me that he didn’t want me to come and hadn’t voted for me, but now that I was here he would work along side of me so long as I didn’t touch a brick of the Church, had his own way of being surprisingly generous. He also was a market gardener and through his years at the market had built up a network of orchardist friends. As soon as the peaches or pears or the apricots were in season he would take his green utility and go round and visit all of his orchardist friends loading up the back of the utility to its maximum capacity with boxes of fruit which he took back to the Church kitchens where his wife Lavinia and a team of lady helpers were peeling pears or apricots or peaches and bottling them in never ending rows of Fowler Vacola jars.
Those jars of preserved fruit which came out of the big, big saucepans of fruit boiling on the Church stove were eventually given away to three or four nursing homes and elderly citizens hostels near the Church. On one occasion looking for a story for the local paper which Ari Mitas would print for me I ask Lavinia how long she had been peeling pears and bottling them on behalf of the Church. She replied that she had first started doing this in the nineteen thirties and from the depression years to the nineteen sixties had continued it every year during pear season. I quickly worked out from Tom Hackett how many pears were in a bushel, how many bushels of pears he had in the entire back of the truck, how many years his wife had been preserving and came up with a figure somewhat over a million pears, peeled, sliced and preserved and carefully placed in Fowler Vacola jars and given away to aged people in the nursing homes. That millionth pear which the photographer from Moorabbin Standard News photographed Lavinia peeling made a front page story and was an example of those generous men and women who provided the fruit, picked it up, bottled it and then gave it away freely to aged people in need.
Long before I ever heard of a program to help people stay in their own homes longer than they normally would have, George Welcome and his wife Emma and his good mate Campbell Strong and Doris were a hard working team. They helped renovate the homes of elderly people who had become frail or who had suffered a stroke or had to now sit in wheelchairs. They exchanged hot water services, put in taps with special regulators so elderly people wouldn’t scald themselves, built ramps for wheelchairs and widened access into toilets for the disabled. All of this done without any request of money and done speedily and with great cheer.
It was a never ending stream of good deeds. In our weekly church paper of 3rd July, 1966 I wrote in the column “Your Minister writes”:
“There are always some people willing to point fingers of criticism at the Church and often this criticism goes unanswered by the big heartedness of the good people who continue to work in the face of criticism answering, not with words, but with silent deeds of service. Sometimes the critics are so ignorant that I like to open their eyes a little. Like last week for example, the common round of winter’s ills has placed about thirty of our members in bed for a few days, so I started my week’s visiting with a long list of sick people but as the week progressed there emerged a pattern of helpfulness that has been catching my eye for some time. There is in our congregation a silent conspiracy of helpfulness towards those in need. A score or more of our ladies are doing silent deaconess work.”“As I arrived in one home, another member was there doing the washing. The day before another member was preparing the meals and so on the following day, another was coming to do the ironing. The very next home discovered a cupboard full of groceries after a visit by one member. The next house, where a member had been ill for some weeks, told of a member who had been quietly doing the washing and ironing each week. In another two complete evening meals had arrived from different members on the same day.”
“One member every week visits absent members with cheerfulness and another could count her visits by the score. Another always takes eggs and oranges. Some thirty ladies send anonymous “Get Well” cards, and greetings on birthdays. This week one man rang to offer to pay the substantial hospital of a needy member anonymously. These silent acts of helpfulness happened this week, but they happen every week. No loud talking, just silence service. You critics – stand up and salute the silent conspirators!”
It was one of the most joyful aspects of ministry. After a while I started to refer “The Fellowship of the Right Handers” based on the words of Jesus “let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing”. The Right Handers were the doers and they didn’t let other people know – just silently doing something to help others.
One last thing, Andy Goodman our Church treasurer was the only businessman in the congregation but he had a little habit over thirteen years that endeared him to our children. Just before Christmas Eve every year he came to the front door of the manse during the evening meal and just thanked my wife and I and the kids for being their minister in the Church and then he gave me an envelope with more than a week’s pay in bills and he would say every year the same thing “Now you kids, I’m giving this money to your dad, but it’s not for him and your mum, its a gift for you. Make sure your dad buys you some ice cream on behalf of the Church”. Our kids loved that visit. And there was enough money in the envelope to buy the kids an ice cream every week of the year.
The Fellowship of the Right Handers. It really answered the critics and built a wonderful sense of friendship among the people of our area.
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