27 Glorious Years
Rev Dr Gordon Moyes has been employed at Wesley Mission for 27 years – but he has really been working for a different organization.
The extent to which he has been successful in working for a different organization may be gauged by the sheer size of the Mission. When he arrived in 1979, the Mission had 23 centres of care (which even then made it one of the largest Christian complexes in the world).
He is retiring at the end of this year with well over 400 centres of care and a thriving set of congregations. It is one of the Australia’s most multicultural parishes. One of its congregations is the largest single congregation within the Uniting Church.
He has been the longest serving Superintendent/CEO in the history of Wesley Mission. During his time, he has handled on behalf of the Mission the raising (and spending) of over a billion dollars. The Mission is the first parish of any Australian church to acquire such a record.
The Mission has just completed another very successful financial year, with the largest surplus in the Mission’s history. The Mission has no debts. It is proceeding well into the current financial year.
He has therefore been the key person responsible for the Mission’s dramatic growth over the past quarter of a century. This has been the largest amount of growth in the Mission’s history (which began back in 1884).
Indeed, the Mission – with an annual budget of about $150 million – could easily fit into a league table of major secular Australian corporations. With well over 3,000 members of staff, the Mission is larger than 95 per cent of all the registered companies in Australia.
But in three major respects Dr Moyes is different from the average CEO in the secular business world. First, he is paid a Uniting Church ministerial stipend. Given the size of the Mission as a “business”, he is one of the lowest paid CEOs in Australia.
Second, he is one of the longest serving CEOs in Australia. CEOs tend to have a short shelf life – probably on average around two or three years. Then they often get moved on by their boards or shareholders. Gordon has served virtually a decade for every year that the average CEO stays around. He is moving on (and into Parliament) according to his own wish. The prevailing view within the Mission (among the “shareholders”, so to speak) is that they do not want him to leave.
Third, many exiting CEOs (whether or not they actually added to a company’s profits) leave with a very generous golden handshake. Gordon will leave on December 31 with many handshakes – but no gold.
One of the world’s great churches is St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London. Its architect was Sir Christopher Wren. He was buried within the church in 1723, when he died at the great age of 91.
An inscription inside his beloved cathedral, dedicated to the architect, reads (in English translation): “Reader, if you seek a memorial, look around you”.
Much the same could be said as a testament to Gordon’s working for a “different” Mission. This is not merely a comment on the new building at 220 Pitt Street, but also the expansion of the Mission’s evangelical work, and the 20-fold increase in the centres of care, with operations in new areas of service that could hardly have been imagined in the 1970s.
Gordon is leaving but the impact of his work will long remain.
