I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister 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 standing around outside the Church talking to a number of my members just a few Sundays after we had begun. It was a glorious Melbourne summer day and I was talking to a tall slim young fellow of my own age who was training to be a pilot at Moorabbin Airport. Unlike most of the trainee pilots he lived nearby with his family. Geoff Wildman was laughing in a good natured way as young men do about the fact that he was putting on weight. I made the comment that when I got married I was 9 stone 6 pounds and that since marriage I had also put on weight. Geoff looked at me “We need to get into training together, start running together each night, doing some exercise, perhaps we ought to join a football team, that will keep us fit!” Well that comment of Geoff’s started us off talking.

Why not have a football team? We could gather other young men our own age in the Church and put together the Cheltenham Church of Christ Football Club. This is exactly what we did. I played with them for several seasons and acted as coach. Geoff was a fine young man and one Tuesday night I went to his home to talk to him about faith in Christ and membership in Church. He introduced me to his mum and dad, George and Olga. They were fine looking people. George insisted that he sit in on the discussions about Geoff becoming a member of the Church.

As I sat in the lounge room with an open Bible on my lap talking to Geoff about what it means to believe in Christ as personal Lord and Saviour and then commit yourself to Him through being baptised, his father George kept nodding his head in agreement and making statements like “It just makes sense to believe in Christ and if you believe in Him then you ought to be baptised in obedience to Him and be part of His Church”. I never had anybody who was not a member of the Church taking such positive agreement in everything that I was saying. At the end of a short discussion Geoff indicated that he accepted Christ as his Saviour, would like to be baptised in one of our Services over the next few weeks and come into the membership of the Church. In a most matter of fact way George looked at me and said “You can put Olga and me down as well. We used to be Christians and go to a Presbyterian Church when the kids were young, but we have gotten away from it and haven’t been for years. I have often felt that I should recommit myself to Christ and get back into the Church. I have always felt it was right to be baptised as well. After all Christ told us to go into all the world and baptise believers. So I will be baptised as well and I am quite sure you will want to be also, Olga, won’t you?” He turned to his wife. Olga readily agreed.

So in looking at the idea of developing a football team we had actually come up with three commitments to Christ. But that was not all. In the first week of attending our Church George and Olga Wildman made more impact upon what our Church was doing than any couple I can ever remember. Before I left their home that night George had given me an invitation to visit him at his work. “I have some very interesting things going on in the laboratories that will really amaze you. Why don’t you come over on Tuesday and have a look.”

George Wildman was the Chief Physicist and owner of some experimental laboratories. When I walked into this office I saw on the wall Honours, Degrees, Certificates of Appreciation, framed patents and even an illuminated address from the Australian Society of Lithographic Reproductions naming him the Father of their Industry. George had spent a lifetime in developing new techniques in photography, printing and reproduction.

Long before there was ever an environmental movement George had seen the dangers of mercury and silver used in photography, of the impact they were having in the ocean floors and upon fish. Yet these were the two heavy metals used within his industry. He had developed means of photographic reproduction without using these heavy metals thus making a contribution to the environment as well as to the lowering of costs of printing and reproduction. He took me out to his laboratory where there was a huge drum whirring at great speed on the end of a printing press.

George indicated “I’m just taking on board the image that is being sent via satellite from New York. Did you see the dish on the roof as you came in. A lot of people will wonder about that and think we’ve got radar set up here. But it really is only a satellite dish. I’m taking the image right now direct from New York of “Time” Magazine. You can see by the drum it’s in four colours but really we could do it in full colour if we wanted to.” I glanced at the high speed drum but couldn’t see anything as it whirred round. I found myself constantly saying to George “I see …....I understand”. Two phrases which were absolutely opposite the truth. As we walked along George kept talking very rapidly in astronomical terms and I found myself saying “I see…..I understand” when in fact I did not see nor did I understand.

“Yes the image is coming in here at the speed of light. I manage to recapture the image direct from the satellite onto that drum and from that drum onto this offset press. You realise of course the tremendous significance of this. It will revolutionise the printing industry. There will be no need for plates, no need for lino-typers, no need for setting type, no need to have compositors or people doing the make-up of pages of newspaper. We can take any image anywhere in the world, put it straight on this drum and print from it immediately. The whole thing can be done within a matter of a few minutes. Of course it will have a profound effect upon the industry. Most of the trades in the printing industry will be redundant. If only Australian newspaper magnates realised this and had the money we could have an international newspaper for the entire world. There is no reason why each nation shouldn’t be submitting several pages of its own news and one newspaper being formulated to cover the entire English speaking globe. It could be produced everyday in its own country of origin simply by having this equipment.”

He reached over to a shelf where there was some scrap pieces of paper. He picked up a series of little booklets the size of a playing card “And of course you don’t have to have them the size you buy from the newsagents. Take this little book, it’s only the size of a playing card, but that happens to be a full “Time” Magazine from last month. I reduced it down to this size just for the heck of it. There’s no reason why a person couldn’t have a whole years supply of “Time” Magazine in the pocket of his coat.” George’s enthusiasm for miniaturisation raised for me a whole lot of questions like “Why would anybody want to carry around a years supply of “Time” Magazines in his coat pocket?” “And you can do this with any other book of course. It is possible for a person right now to carry a whole library shelf in his pocket without even putting a bulge in his suit.”

George obviously enjoyed developing ideas. As he kept moving through the laboratory he picked up differing objects and explained them to me. I realised that here was someone who was living constantly on the edge of new thinking and new developments.

“Of course it is one thing to be able to produce a miniature “Time” Magazine. The problem we have is that it is a bit difficult to read.” George laughed to himself. “I’ve got to develop either a new kind of reading spectacle, or else a small frame that can be unfolded to sit above the magazine to magnify the words. It is a bit of a problem if you want to read the magazine on the train. That’s why we are sticking to the standard size.”

“Oh, here is something that will interest you. Knowing you were coming I’ve made this especially for you. You can put it in your wallet and use it anytime you like.” He roared with laughter and gave me a clear piece of plastic about the size of two postage stamps. I looked at it. It was absolutely transparent, I couldn’t understand why he should give me a small oblong of clear plastic. “Hold it up to the light and tell me what you see”. I held it up to the light. Sure enough I saw rows of microscopic dots. I told George what I could see. “They’re not dots, they’re pages. There are 1,114 of them on that. Every dot is a page from the Bible. If you put that under a microscope and examine it closely you will be able to read every word perfectly including the punctuation marks. We can miniaturise all kinds of printing these days. That one bit of clear plastic there is the entire Bible, every word, every dot. You can put it in your wallet and tell people that you always carry the Bible with you. Of course it is a bit hard to read.” With that he roared with laughter again. It was quite obvious miniaturisation and photographic reproduction had been mastered, the problem was in our ability to read.

George moved to another part of his laboratory where he was working on a series of new projects with some of the men of his firm. “All this had to do with photography. I’m working with a couple of American Companies – Land Corporation and Polaroid – on developing new film. By the time we’ve finished you’ll be able to take a photograph and have it developed in your camera. You won’t need to go to a photography store to have it developed. You’ll be able to just pull it out the back of your camera, put it under your arm pit for a few moments in the warmth and, lo and behold, you will have a developed photograph right before your eyes. And see this here? This is something new that we are working on. What is the most expensive part of the camera? The lens? No the film. We can make camera lenses quite cheaply. As it is most people spend a lot of money buying a camera. They keep the same camera for years and put in film after film after film. The really expensive piece in photography is the film. I’ve got another idea. Why don’t we sell the film with a cheap camera wrapped round it. Then you can take your photographs, have the film developed and throw the camera away. One of these days you will be able to go into a store and ask for a film and have a camera around it and it will be a disposable camera, able to take any snap you want and at the end of the time you will just dispose of the camera. It always amazes me that people have not thought of this before.”

We went from research to research with George just giving ideas of things that people had never thought of before. It was the most incredible lunchtime I had ever spent. At the end of that time I had prayed with George about God guiding him into future discoveries that would benefit people all round the world. I hadn’t realised here in Australia we had a physicist and an inventor who had worldwide patents. The trouble was George didn’t have enough money to develop most of these patents, so he sold them to large American or Japanese firms and they made the profit.

A couple of weeks later I baptised George and Olga and their son Geoff and welcomed them into the membership of the Church. Coming out of Church one morning George stopped as we shook hands by the front door and said “Here is something to interest you. Only wished I’d given this to you before you preached this morning. It would have helped your sermon a great deal.” With that he pulled out two long hairs, or pieces of fishing line from his top pocket. He gave them to me “You know what this is?” I looked at them, twirled them in my fingers, and offered the comment “A piece of fishing line?”

“No, not a piece of fishing line. That is glass.” I commented “It is the funniest glass I’ve ever seen. This glass bends. It’s quite flexible. I always thought glass broke if you bent it.” George’s eyes lit up “Ah hah, that’s because you haven’t seen glass fibre before. These are hollow tubes, each about five microns. This one is full of liquid. I’ve been shooting electrons down this one endeavouring to create heat on one end. This one is hollow and as you see I’ve covered the outside with silver. The technical term is cladding, just like you clad a house with artificial brick, so I have cladded this piece of fibre optic with silver and I’ve been shooting light rays through it.” I looked at George and repeated my usual comment “I see…...I understand” when in fact I neither saw nor understood.

George waxed on about the technical properties of this fibre optic. It was all beyond me. I decided to ask him the question that accountants, managers and other brain-damaged people ask: “But what good is it? What is it for?” George didn’t stop for breath, he just plunged on. “Well I could take these two fibre optics when I have developed them a little more and push them up your nostril for example. Let’s say you’ve got tuberculosis in your lungs. I could pass these fibre optics down your nasal passage into your lungs, with a little bit of manipulation get to the site of the tuberculosis. I could turn the light on and if I had a small enough lens I could see inside your lungs which cells were damaged. I also could shoot some electrons through this other piece of fibre and could knock out the diseased cells and those that were ravaging your lungs. Furthermore you wouldn’t feel a thing. And you wouldn’t need to have anaesthetic and you could just be totally conscious during the whole procedure. If you had cancer in your lungs I’m quite sure we could kill off all the malignant cells. The only problem we have at this moment is how to clear away the waste. That is always the problem. Apart from a tickle in your nose you wouldn’t know you had treatment. It could revolutionise surgery.”

“Take Greg for example, ever since he did his cartilage in, in your football team, he’s been hobbling around. The surgeon tells him that after he has operated and corrected the cartilage damage he will be on crutches for at least two months and will be unable to run or play football for another six months. I believe we could fix that within an hour under the new surgery that will occur through developments like this. Instead of having an operation I think we can just pass optic fibres in through the veins down into the knee, find out where the cartilage is torn and then just fuse with electrical charges the two damaged ends of the cartilage together inside the knee without any surgery. It would be absolutely painless and recovery time would be almost instant because there would be no damaged muscle or ligaments. More damage is done by the surgeon’s knife than anything else. So we could get rid of the knife and do the surgery from the inside.”

George the physicist and inventor was now moving into the realm of surgery and opening up possibilities beyond our comprehension. I twiddled the piece of optical fibre in my fingers wondering how on earth something so small could ever be used for such amazing consequences. George continued “Of course, the real feature lies in technology, especially in the communication of information. See this fibre, the hollow one? Already I can pass 80 telephone messages down this fibre simultaneously. A bundle of these fibres as thick as your wrist, underground from Melbourne to Sydney, would transfer with absolute clarity and at the speed of light every telephone conversation presently being conducted. Not only that, we could send up every radio program being broadcast and every television program, even television programs in full colour, still on the same little bundle of optical fibres.” He smiled at me with a look of triumph as if he was just giving me something beyond my comprehension. I replied “I see…..I understand”.

He continued: “When you said this morning that we pray to God and that God hears our every prayer I got the image of a million people praying simultaneously to God. You know, you could send those prayers on a bundle of fibre optics as thick as your wrist and God would hear every one.” He burst out laughing. “Talk about telephone to Glory. We can do that already.” George was laughing at his own joke and I was struggling to keep up with the advances of technology. “But there was something you said about prayer that was very interesting this morning” he continued. “You said that in prayer we not only talk to God but we need to listen as God talks to us. Do you realise that in optical fibres we can send hundreds of messages in both directions simultaneously, so you can both send and hear without getting mixed up? Prayer isn’t that remarkable when you realise that we can do the same thing just with optical fibres!”

As George left Church that morning twiddling the two pieces of optical fibre in his fingers, I suddenly realised here in the mid nineteen sixties we were standing on the cutting edge of incredible new technology which was going to influence all the transmission of messages and a member of my Church was in the forefront of its development.

But there is one other thing about George that always stands in my mind. During the week that George was baptised we made an announcement to the Church members that we were going to conduct a stewardship campaign. When I had arrived at the Church just a few weeks earlier, I received a great shock upon examining the financial accounts. The Church was in deep debt. Indeed the debt was larger than our total income for the three past years. Even paying the interest was consuming most of our income let alone paying a minister and providing for the normal running of the Church. The Church had built a huge new gymnasium, which was the pride of the area but it had to borrow the money to do it and its income was not covering the repayments. We were in dreadful financial strife and the loss of their senior minister and the appointment of a new young minister didn’t give the Church a great deal of confidence.

The level of giving had dropped dramatically and we were in a financial mess. Our total income was less than 100 pounds a week. My salary was 26 pounds per week and almost all of the rest had to be used for loan repayments and interest. There was no money to do anything. Financially we were in a crisis. I announced that we would need to have a stewardship campaign and I wanted men to volunteer to meet with me for training. After committing ourselves financially to the Church week by week in a weekly pledge we would then go to the homes of our members and ask them also to commit themselves. I indicated that I would be inviting men of the Church to meet with me on the coming Wednesday night for a brief training program and for making our personal commitments before visiting the members of the Church.

I knew enough not to just rely upon peoples’ willingness to come, especially if it was to be a stewardship campaign. I would have a lonely night if I just expected people to turn up, so I wrote letters and telephoned all the key Elders and Deacons in the Church indicating to them that I expected them to be there. Reluctantly most of them agreed but there was a real mood of reluctance to be part of this fund raising program. We met together in the Sunday School Hall where I had some charts set up showing our financial position, the needs of the Church, sample budgets and how we would go about visiting all the members of the Church. The key factor was that we needed to be personally committed ourselves before we asked anyone else. Slowly the men came into the room and sat down. It was a cheerless meeting.

And then the side door opened and in stepped George Wildman. I had not invited him. He was neither an Elder nor a Deacon and moreover he was just a brand new member. George stood out. This was a training program and men had come from work in the market gardens and in the businesses where they were employed but George walked in, in an evening suit complete with black bow tie and polished shoes.

He walked over to me “Sorry to come all dressed up like this but I have an important night at my Lodge tonight and I wanted to come and make my pledge and let you know I’d be willing to visit people before I went to the Lodge. If you are a member of the Church you should accept the responsibility of the Church and I want to be in your stewardship program.”

The market gardeners, the man from the supermarket, the local shop owners and others sat up as George sat in the front dressed in his evening suit ready to go. He had instilled a new sense of vitality into the meeting.

I started explaining the budget although everybody knew the situation. I indicated the gap between our income and our expenditure, explaining that we each needed to take a personal serious commitment to raising our money and to committing ourselves financially to God. When I came to the crunch point of the whole meeting by asking “Now I want you each to take one of these cards and write down what your own pledge gift will be and place it in an envelop and return it.” I went on to explain to the men once more that we couldn’t ask them to visit the other members of the Church until they themselves had made their financial commitment. There was an awkward silence as people took cards and chewed the ends of pens and pencils.

Then George stood up and addressed the company. “Well you know I am a new member and I don’t know much about stewardship but I remember when I went to the Presbyterian Church many years ago being taught that we should tithe our income. We should give back to God one tenth of all that we receive from Him. Now I remember in that Church how the people used to quake and quiver at such a commitment. There were Elders in the Church who used to talk about whether we should tithe their gross or their net income and whether it should be before tax or after tax. But I want to tell you I believe that the Lord will bless us if we give one tenth of whatever we get. Forget the tax, forget the gross and net, just give Him one tenth of whatever you get. As for me I am rather embarrassed. I get money from my salary and a share of the profits of the laboratories, but I also get returns from patents from around the world. Currently I am earning about 250 pounds per week. It is a ridiculous amount and I don’t deserve it but that’s what comes in and I believe I should tithe that. I see that your young minister is paid 26 pounds per week. Well my tithe will be his total salary. You can put me down for 26 pounds.” George sat down. It was done without any sense of boasting or pride. It was a simple matter of fact statement about his finances and about the level of his giving.

He was with that commitment by far the largest giver in the entire Church and he had been a member for two weeks. It was as though a bomb had exploded in our midst. Whatever anybody else had considered giving was thrown into confusion. George had set the tone by speaking about tithing and about the need to stop quibbling about the level of income – simply give to God and He would bless us. That statement by George scared some nervous nellies among our men like nothing else could have. Other men suddenly took heart, calculated their weekly salaries and wrote down one tenth for the Church. At the end of the night we each took a handful of cards of people we would visit that week to talk about giving. Each man went through the cards many, many times searching out people they would find easy to visit and speak to about financial commitment. George simply took the first half dozen and indicated he would have them back by Friday. That kind of resoluteness provided a new level of leadership within our Church.

I had never known a stewardship campaign like it. It was done properly and over quickly. All the cards were returned, our income increased by 250%. The Church now had money to pay off the debts and get on with the business of being the Church.

Looking back 40 years I marvel at George Wildman. He was a genius and at the same time a generous man, warm hearted and friendly. I never heard a word pass his lips of condemnation or criticism of anyone else. A couple of years later it was my privilege, when I was president of the Rotary Club in the area, to induct George into membership and he brought into Rotary that same sense of genius and generosity.

He was one of my first new members and he helped lift the Church to a new level of commitment to Christ and seriousness about finances. He was a man whose personal contributions to the Australian Photographic and Printing industry, and to the growth of technology has been profound. But George’s commitment was also profound in the Cheltenham Church of Christ.

That night in my study I spent some time in my study 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, 7:48 pm | A Suburban Minister, Australian Short Stories