The Work of an Evangelist
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.
On the night of my ordination back in 1959, I knelt in prayer as hands were laid upon my head and representatives of the Federal Conference of Churches of Christ in Australia laid their hands upon me in the act of ordination. I always remembered the ordination charge given to me: “Do the work of an evangelist”. That phrase has continued with me throughout every year of my ministry. I have never forgotten that I was called to “do the work of an Evangelist”. No matter what other activities I have been involved in always there has been this ordination charge ringing in the back of my mind “do the work of an Evangelist”.
During my first eight years as a Pastor to the slums of inner Melbourne, I was involved in a great deal of social work. We were helping people with food, clothing, finding accommodation, helping drunks and derelicts and particularly working as Patrol Officer and Probation Officer with young offenders. I spent as much time going in and out of the courts and the jails as I did any other place. But always there was ringing that ordination charge “Do the work of an Evangelist”.
In the slum ministry I sought to do this by preaching a Gospel message every Sunday night regardless of the size of the congregation. The first time I ever preached was a Gospel service and fourteen people were present, eleven of them my friends and relatives who came visiting the little inner suburban Church to give me encouragement. Every Sunday night of my life since then I have preached a Gospel message and invited people to commit their lives to Jesus Christ.
Billy Graham came to Melbourne during that period and the thought of preaching evangelism in the style of Billy Graham influenced many of us.
But I also felt that the better way was to train and equip members of the Church to be evangelists themselves. So for four Sunday afternoons I brought together a group of rather unwilling Church members and taught them how to witness to their faith and how to lead others to Jesus Christ. Then for four Sunday afternoons in a row we encouraged them out of the Church building to go and visit friends and relatives and share the Gospel with them. It was a miserable failure. After four weeks not one life had been committed to Christ through the evangelistic witness of our members and so the program was quietly dropped.
During my years as a country Parson in Ararat in western Victoria most of my time was spent visiting the farmers, helping crutch the sheep, shifting mobs of sheep around from paddock to paddock and bagging wheat during peak periods. This was all designed to help build up relationships with those who were Christians and to open opportunities for evangelistic discussions with those who were not yet Christians. Every Sunday night it was the same. I would preach a Gospel message from the centre of the platform asking people to commit their lives to Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. A few did and there was great rejoicing at their baptism.
But always at the back of my mind was the ordination charge “Do the work of an evangelist”. So I organised Teen Week a remarkable evangelistic week of activities when we sought to reach young people in the community. Over eight thousand people attended our activities in one week and two hundred and sixty one made commitments to Jesus Christ. It was the most thrilling evangelistic outreach in which I have ever been engaged in. It was the closest I had ever come to seeing a revival in a community.
As young people became Christians I realised it was important to teach them how to witness to the faith and help them bring other people to the faith. So I organised a twelve-week training course where we trained people to witness to their faith and share the Gospel with others and then sent them out to witness and bring others to Christ. That was much more successful and those young Christians shared their vibrant testimony with others. Some thirty-eight other adults became Christians through the personal testimony of those lay people sharing their Gospel message.
Then came the thirteen years as a suburban minister of the Cheltenham Church of Christ in Victoria. They were busy years with all the demands of a very large parish that was growing from strength to strength. In the first couple of years we overcame the inertia which was in the Church, changed some of the leadership from the very tired and elderly people who were in positions of power, removed the debts that were strangling the Church and affecting all aspects of growth, saw our offerings rise incredibly as additional people came into the membership of the Church, extended property, added staff and developed three retirement villages for elderly people. In the midst of running the Church sporting teams, playing football, training with the young fellows, and putting into practice almost every kind of social welfare programs you could imagine, I still had ringing in the back of my mind the old ordination charge “Do the work of an Evangelist”.
I managed to quieten this call for several years because I received a large number of invitations to be a visiting Evangelist for a state wide Church Evangelism Crusade.
For many years I went to Western Australia each year where all the Churches of Christ in Perth and the nearest country areas came together for a Statewide Evangelism Crusade. Each night for fifteen nights I preached in the huge theatre attached to the main Perth City Church. Scores of people made commitments to Christ in each of those evening rallies. During the day time I spoke on radio, gave lunchtime lectures at the Universities and Teachers Colleges, spoke to women’s and men’s morning teas, breakfasts and dinners and at youth barbecues. It was an exhausting round to be capped off every night by an evangelistic rally. Then for two and a half months I toured New Zealand on behalf of the Churches of Christ in New Zealand conducting evangelistic crusades up and down that nation, never pausing for breath and having every single day a Crusade Day starting with a new city every Monday after finishing late Sunday night at a prior place.
After two and a half months away from home I met my wife for a delightful one-week holiday where to my surprise I found that I had been booked in to a wonderful hotel on Mt. Cook but left to pay the bill myself. There were similar crusades in Tasmania where we visited every Church in that State, conducting crusades each running for a week and then numbers in New South Wales and Queensland.
Looking back on those years as a visiting evangelist I realised that I was away far too much when my children were young. I was always tired and weary from speaking usually about thirty times each week with large public crusades each night and all day filled with half a dozen other speaking engagements or appointments with elderly citizens groups, nursing homes, many secondary schools, radio stations, editors of local papers, men’s breakfasts, lunches and dinners and family barbecues. The life of a visiting evangelist is weary from constant moving, living out of a suitcase, sleeping poorly in some persons home, skipping meals or else having the meal at a function where more often than not it was sandwiches and sausage rolls. All the time the visiting evangelist is encouraging the local minister, listening to his problems, giving advice and counsel to individuals whose marriages were falling apart or whose children were off the rails and then leaving behind young Christians who had committed their lives to Christ during your visits but never really confident that the local Church would care for them and see them nurtured and grafted into the congregation. It was at this time I learnt the meaning behind the Apostle Paul’s statement when he listed all the things he was doing in various Churches throughout Turkey and Greece and concluded “And all of the time I have the burden of the Churches upon my heart”. The work of a visiting evangelist is not easy and if properly done is the most exhausting ministry imaginable.
And then because of the wonders of aircraft flight I would literally finish an extensive six week non stop campaign, get on a plane and two or three hours later be back at home where the mail would be piled high, where there would be recorded dozens of messages to contact people urgently and where every problem of the past six or eight weeks in the local parish demanded instant attention.
But always behind my mind rang the ordination charge “Do the work of an evangelist”.
When I was not a visiting evangelist I always felt my ministry was that of a pastoral evangelist, particularly to men. In most Churches women outnumber men. Today at Wesley Mission we would be one of the few very large Churches in the land where there are more men than women and where the average age of our membership is only thirty-one.
I had a concern to reach men in the Cheltenham area and therefore visited people in their homes of a nighttime particularly wanting to talk to the husband and father. More often than not I found whenever I asked a man a question about his own personal spiritual life and his relationship with God that before he could utter a word of reply his wife would jump in with some kind of defensive statement. I realised over a period of months that every man I had spoken to directly had his wife answer for him. I realised that many men were not at home in their own homes. In their own home the wife inevitably dominated the conversation and if I wanted to speak to men I had to get them while they were in their garage or outside their own homes. Most wives did not know how to make a place where a man can really call his own in a house. So I started what became a habit for many, many years of making an appointment to visit one man every Tuesday lunchtime at his work and to have lunch with him wherever he ate his lunch. I only had two rules – one was that I would eat wherever he ate, and the other was that no-one would ever buy me lunch. I was not visiting for a free lunch but I was there to talk to the man about the significance of his work, of his role as a father and a husband, of any problems he had in his own life, of how he saw his relationship with God at the moment and if he would let me outline to him the facts of the Gospel, the necessity of baptism and taking his place within the membership of our Church. Visiting those men every lunchtime became a sacred duty and a wonderful opportunity of sharing the Gospel.
Almost every lunchtime or at least once every second week I had the joy of seeing a man make a commitment to Christ and frequently this was then followed by other members of his family whom we baptised together.
Sometimes I had lunch at the bar of a pub, out of a paper bag sitting on a footpath with my back to the factory wall, in a Board room with the finest silver and crystal, in a works canteen or in a restaurant, but wherever that man had his lunch I would sit with him and share the Gospel, doing the work of an evangelist. One by one I saw men and more often than not other members of the family coming to faith and into the membership of the Church.
The greatest change in this approach to the work of an evangelist came about when I was sitting in a little South Yarra Italian Restaurant having lunch with Jack Fulcrum. Jack had been divorced and was presently running an advertising agency. He had his eye upon another young woman and was talking about getting married. As we sat together having lunch in the restaurant, he with his glass of red wine and I with my glass of lemon squash, I shared the Gospel with him. Step by step I took Jack through the outline of what it means to become a believer in Christ and to become a member of our Church.
I outlined to him some eight verses of the Gospel and slowly walked him through, with him understanding and agreeing to each proposition until in the end I led him in a prayer of commitment of his life when he for the first time bowed his head and prayed out aloud in front of someone else. His response at the end of that prayer was wonderful. “I’m a Christian. It’s wonderful. I am feeling different already. You know I secretly always wanted to be a believer and know the truth of Christ. I am amazed it is so simple. I just didn’t know where to look when I looked at the Bible in the past. Oh, thank God, I know I am saved and I feel quite different. I want to thank you for just showing me how I could become a Christian. If you hadn’t spent this hour with me over lunch I would never have found out how. Oh, I feel wonderful.”
On the spur of the moment I said to Jack Fulcrum something that ultimately was the most inspired question I had ever asked a man. “Jack, if you feel so different and you have realised what it means to become a Christian in just this little time sitting down together looking at these Bible verses, why don’t you come with me while I explain this to other people as I have to you and learn so that you yourself can then go and share with others?” Jack Fulcrum readily agreed and thereafter began a pattern of training and working as an evangelist that would change every Tuesday night of my life.
We met the following Tuesday night and we had prayer together in the Church’s Board Room before going out to visit a married couple. I told Jack that all I wanted him to do was sit and listen all night at the way I would share the Gospel verses, learning from me as I led the discussion, then at an appropriate time I would ask him to explain the difference Christ had made in his life and I wanted that to be brief and to the point. At the first house we visited the husband was a metal fabricator. He employed a number of men and made car trailers, horse floats and the like. He was a big strong man and his wife was open and friendly. I led the discussion in the same way as I had shared with Jack in the restaurant in South Yarra and at the end of the time asked the father if he would commit his life to Christ and membership in our Church. I felt overjoyed when he indicated that he would and turning to his wife said “And I am sure you’d like to become a committed Christian and member of the Church, also wouldn’t you?” She agreed and so it was in that first visit two people confessed Christ as Saviour and came into membership of the Church.
The following Tuesday night when we went visiting another two made commitments for Christ. Then came a very important decision. I asked Val Adcock a wonderful Christian lady who was terribly crippled and unable to get out of the house if she would set up appointments for us each Tuesday night. Henceforth I would give her a list of people with whom I had some contact either because their children were associated with our Children’s or Youth Programs in the Church or else whom I had met through some avenue of activity in the local community and she set up an appointment asking the same question each time “Would you please receive Mr. Moyes and one of our younger men who would like to visit you this coming Tuesday night at 7.30pm to speak to you about your faith in Christ and membership in the Church.”
Val started making appointments and Jack and I would go and visit them. After four weeks of training I then asked Jack if he would lead the conversation using the scripture passages and I would keep silent except for a word of testimony. On his first night Jack led two to faith in Christ and an agreement to be baptised and become members of our Church. He was overjoyed. After four more weeks he had led about seven people to faith in Christ and membership in the Church and this all occurred before he was baptised. At the end of eight weeks of training, I then asked Jack to take Trevor Adcock and train him in the same way as I had trained him and I would take another person. In asking for two more people to come visiting with us I discovered an interesting fact, that a number of people said they would pray for us but they couldn’t go visiting and talking.
So I asked them to take upon themselves the same discipline of those of us who were going out visiting, that is, they would give up their Tuesday nights, we would all meet together in the Board Room of the Church for prayer and then while half of us kept praying in the Board Room the other half of us would go out and visit, coming back to report to them at the end of our visit. That really put some impetus into their prayers and some focal point because they kept praying for the people whom we were visiting. While we were in the house sharing the Gospel with others, we kept remembering that back at the Church these other faithful people were actually on their knees praying for us by name. That gave us courage in our witness. The first night we returned to our prayer partners and revealed that two or three more people had committed their lives to Christ. There was great enthusiasm.
The people who were praying felt they were really part of the action. After another eight weeks there were four of us now trained in sharing the Gospel and all four of us had led others to Christ. We then chose another partner and added more to the prayer team. Then another round of eight weeks visitation began. At the end of that eight weeks, the eight of us all took another eight partners and another team was added to the prayer partners. Soon we had sixteen people visiting each Tuesday night and Val Adcock had the task of organising eight homes where we might visit each week. The prayer partners were alive with their enthusiasm and every Sunday night we witnessed more baptisms as adults came to faith. The Church membership grew rapidly.
Over the next years each Tuesday night was spent visiting and each Sunday night was spent taking the public commitment of those who had made their commitments to Christ with us on the Tuesday night. They would go through a short period of training in Christian faith and the meaning of Church membership before being baptised. Over the years it was my privilege to baptise hundreds of adults who came to personal faith in Christ through our Tuesday night visitation evangelism. That work did more than anything else to see the Cheltenham Church of Christ grow to become one of the largest suburban Churches of any denomination in the nation.
After a few years we had fifteen people on the paid staff of that Church and had added several million dollars worth of buildings as well as additional services and facilities for the hundreds of people who now attended each week. Thousands of people are now involved in the life of this congregation and the heartbeat of it was the fact that we were doing the work of an evangelist.
That work was still going strongly when I left in the nineteen seventies to become the Superintendent of Wesley Mission Sydney. There have been changes over the years. Every Sunday night I continue to preach the Gospel and to see people commit themselves to Christ. But today I also proclaim the Gospel every week across the nation on television, through radio programs, through magazines and visiting more than four hundred rural areas of Australia over the past decade. Throughout the years, and with the help of my colleagues, about a thousand non-Christians are evangelized each year sand become Christ=9ianjs.
In the back of my mind has always run the ordination charge “Do the work of an evangelist”. Those who have heard the call of God will know precisely what I mean when I say that one heeds that ordination charge. It has been a most satisfying part of our ministry. For the past quarter of a century, every week in services, in the Wesley Theatre, in special programs in other churches, on radio and television every week without ever a miss, I have done the work of an evangelist, and with the help of my colleagues, about a thousand non-Christians respond to the Gospel and contact us about becoming a Christian. Every week. Each contact is fully followed up by our staff and elders.
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