The Great Lizard
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 things a new young minister worries about when commencing a new ministry is that in the church to which he has been appointed is his predecessor, or some other senior person who continues his membership in the church in which you are called to minister. It is almost like having the senior school prefect behind your back all the time you go through school, or like a foreman who is watching over your shoulder while you are working in the factory.
When I decided to accept the call to minister at the Cheltenham Church of Christ, several people said to me “Isn’t that where V.C. Stafford is?” Mr. Vivian C. Stafford had been a lecturer in our Theological College and was a full time author and editor of educational materials for the denomination. His membership was in the local church at Cheltenham where he took an active part. It was rumoured that he had a poor relationship with my predecessor and the two men rarely spoke.
One of my closest friends to whom I had confided that I was thinking of accepting the call to ministry at Cheltenham, said to me “You will have the Great Lizard looking at you every Sunday”. I said “The Great Lizard? Who’s the Great Lizard?” He replied “Viv Stafford.” “Why do you call him the Great Lizard?” “Because haven’t you noticed that when he looks at you he doesn’t blink. He just stares right through you like a lizard looking at you.”
I must admit I had never considered Mr. Stafford to be like a Great Lizard but it certainly put the wind up my sails.
I decided that I should accept the call to the ministry and that I would try to work out the relationship with Mr. Stafford.
Mr. Stafford certainly was very welcoming of me on our first meeting and over the next couple of Sundays indicated to me that he thought my preaching was good and that he would like to encourage me, indicating that if I wanted any special choir music he would be prepared to produce it because he was then the choir master.
In about my second week of ministry I decided that I should visit Mr. Stafford at the Federal Board of Christian Education where he worked and was editor-in-chief. I entered the Board offices, greeted the various secretaries and the receptionist and introduced myself. Eventually I was ushered into the great man’s workroom – an office of meticulous neatness with all the books he had written and published on one side, and on the other side a pile of manuscripts he was working on. He jumped out of the chair and came round and thrust out a hand and greeted me warmly. He called all the staff together and we had morning tea together and then he introduced me to other tenants in the same building – the dentist, the doctor, the solicitor down the way, and anybody else who happened to be nearby. He seemed to be proud of the fact that I was his minister, and introduced me with a greatly exaggerated account of my abilities.
I could not have wished for a more warm or enthusiastic introduction and I puzzled at how I could have such warmth when my predecessor apparently didn’t share that favour. It was while I was walking back to my car and he was seeing me off the premises that something slipped out in conversation. “It’s been wonderful to have you here to see what we are doing. You can count on my support” the Great Lizard said. “It really is wonderful to have you come and show an interest in what we do here. Do you realise that your predecessor never once visited here in eighteen years. He was not the slightest bit interested in the work I do.”
I then realised what was probably the cause of the estrangement between the two men. One was expected to be supportive of the other and yet felt no support in return. I was only to have Mr. V.C. Stafford in my membership for two years before his untimely death but in that period of time I came to honour and value him as few men that I have ever met.
Vivian Stafford was a West Australian. He came from Cottesloe and worked as a clerk in a department store before being called to the ministry, entering training at the College of the Bible, Glen Iris, in 1926. He trained with a great team of men who were going to become the senior statesmen of the denomination when I was a young man. He graduated in 1928 and married Muriel Jeffrey who became his lifelong partner and mother of his five children.
Muriel and Viv ministered together in Taree, and then in New Zealand in Invercargill and Wellington, and then had come to Cheltenham at the beginning of World War Two where they had stayed right through to the middle sixties when I became minister there. He loved the Cheltenham Church of Christ and gave himself into the work. But early in his life, he was given a vision of producing Christian education materials by another grand old man of the denomination who had been the founding editor of graded lessons for Sunday School scholars.
In 1947 Vivian C. Stafford became associate editor of the Austral Graded Lessons and the foundation editor of the Federal Board of Christian Education of the Churches of Christ, and in that he had found his life’s work.
Many people want to be writers and many people display gifts of writing, but for every hundred writers there is only one good editor. And Vivian found his life’s work in editing other people’s work. He was a writer and author himself, and produced hundreds of studies, Sunday school lessons, dramas, booklets, pageants, songs and hymns.
But it was in the weekly task of writing lessons for tens of thousands of children of various age groups through hundreds of Australian Sunday schools, that he made his mark. He was greatly honoured for his work in Christian education, being President of the Council of Christian Education in Victoria, President of the Australian Council of Christian Education, Secretary of the International Council of Christian Education and International Secretary for the 1958 Tokyo Convention and the 1962 International Conference in Belfast. He was highly honoured among many denominations in his ability to write good materials for teaching children and yet in his own denomination he was a “prophet without honour”. And in his own local church he was not honoured as he ought to have been.
In the very early days of the nineteen fifties Vivian Stafford had a vision of the denominations uniting to produce material that could be used in all the major denominations of Australian churches. He argued for a joint board of Christian education for both Australia and New Zealand, involving Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, Anglican and Churches of Christ. He worked for years to bring that about and eventually headed up not only the denominational Federal Board of Christian Education, but took a leadership role in the inter-denominational Christian education programme, The Joint Board of Christian Education which provides the vast majority of Sunday School teaching programmes and Christian education and study books in Australia today. His leadership was expressed in curriculum planning and understanding the great insights of educational principles.
He had the responsibility for editing and writing eighteen different books every three months. He provided the material for hundreds of Sunday School lessons, as well as study books, youth fellowship conventions, discipleship training materials for church membership. And in all of that time his work in Christian education faced many difficulties.
One of the greatest was that there was always insufficient finance for Christian education. He worked with limited budgets and small salaries, and with financial problems that even the best business men would find difficult to solve. Yet such was his commitment to the field of Christian education that Vivian Stafford made sure, for the funds he expended, that only the most dedicated worked alongside him and that from little resources great amounts of material flowed.
But I guess one of the more difficult situations he had to face was that you can produce the finest educational material available and yet still have unimaginative churches where Sunday schools struggled with poor facilities and teachers with conservative theology would give minimum time to learning and would be unwilling to use creative materials.
Vivian Stafford told me on dozens of occasions when I visited him and his co-workers at the Federal Board of Christian Education that Christian education was the Cinderella of the church work which was left to children to finance with their sixpences and shillings in the offering.
I’d received such a willing welcome from the Board of Christian Education that I returned on a regular basis, at least once a month over the next thirteen years to provide an unofficial friendly pastoral visit. The people at the Board became some of my closest friends. So it was only natural that I should be asked to start writing material that Mr. V.C. Stafford would edit.
I accepted the challenge and started to write material for young teenagers in Sunday school, and then for older teenagers, young adults, and then as this material was used by tens of thousands of scholars throughout Australia in different denominations I was invited to write material which could be used by all young people and adults coming into membership of a number of churches. This discipleship material was used by thousands of people to explain the Christian faith and the significance of church membership. Without realising it Vivian C. Stafford had developed my skills and abilities as a writer and soon I was writing study materials on a regular basis. I received a small honorarium, which put me into the category of a “paid author”.
Later on, I was to write and publish a score and more of books and another score of booklets, but it was V.C. Stafford who taught me the basics of being a good editor. In the years that have gone by I have maintained my role as editor of the award-winning magazine “Impact” which is read by some fifty thousand people each edition, and have edited materials of many other persons since I learnt every aspect of that craft at the hand of the Great Lizard.
Mr. Stafford had other interests. He was the foundation president of the Churches of Christ Choral Society. He loved music and for many years was assistant conductor to the legendary Valentine Woff, who was choral conductor to the Melbourne Conservatorium. He was responsible for producing a new hymnbook for use in the denomination and for organising national youth conventions at which hundreds of young people found their lifelong companions.
In the local church he taught Sunday school, superintended a department, led the choir, edited a journal, and served as Elder. A humble and unassuming man, he loved life, poetry and music. He had a great sense of humour although it was never obvious to us when we were learning principles of Christian education, but I soon found that in my mailbox was frequently slipped a cartoon cut from an American or British publication that had some funny comment on an aspect of my life as a minister. In two short years I developed a friendship with a man old enough to be my father but one of the most valued I have ever experienced in my life. To this day I look back upon a man who had been presented to me as strange and aloof, but I remember him instead as an encourager and an inspiration.
The great work that Vivian Stafford was to bring into being, the Joint Board of Christian Education, linking all the other denominations into one great publishing house which has now served the Australian churches for the past thirty years.
He had a three-line poem on his desk:
“God give me work
Until my life shall end
And life until my work is done.”
God answered that prayer and when he unexpectedly died, he had life until he had completed everything on his desk.
Vivian Stafford was a workman for God who needed not to be ashamed. I would that he had lived longer and enjoyed a robust retirement with his beloved Muriel. It was not to be. He died quietly. His last edited material was passed to the other side of his desk ready to be sent to the printer. God had given him work until his life had ended and until his work was done.
Those in the church who were older could not remember a life such as this, and those of us who were younger would never see his like again.
When this suburban minister commenced his ministry he did so fearful of the Great Lizard. The Great Lizard turned out to be one of the most inspiring characters it has ever been my privilege to know and a great workman who taught me the craft of editing material – that rare craft that enables the work of other people to read well. I honour the memory of Vivian C. Stafford and I marvelled about that first day when I went down to his office and found my fears were totally unfounded and instead lifelong joy and friendship were discovered.
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