Jim Ford
When I was studying to be a Minister of the Gospel my student churches were two adjacent wooden churches in the inner slum areas of Melbourne. For seven years during the 1950’s and early 1960’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
The first time I ever met Jim Ford I was amazed. He was a tall gangling fellow with a struggling beard, pretending to be a beatnik. This tall university student and I met up accidentally I guess. But then he started a conversation and when he found out that I was a student minister, told me he was a student engineer and very proud of the fact that he was a humanist. He came from a good family but he did not believe in God. We got to talking about God and about belief. Jim, pulling his beard and proud of his teenage independence, looked a bit older than the 18 or 19 years of age he really was. He wanted to go on and give me all the reasons why he held his atheistic and humanistic viewpoint.
We decided to have a cup of coffee together down in the university cafeteria or the “caf” as they used to call it in those days. The coffee that the University Students Union served was a mixture of Yarra mud ground into a thick opaque paste. While we were drinking it, other students round about would be playing cards, or advocating Marxism, or the overthrow of Henry Bolte and the Liberal Government, or some other world shattering events. In years to come, plots were to be hatched in that cafeteria to end the Vietnam War, to kick America out of South East Asia and to make Australia a republic. But for Jim and I that ground Yarra mud in university “caf” cups became the accompaniment to talking about the Christian faith.
Jim had a good early childhood growing up in a farming community. His parents were the salt of the earth Christian farmers. He went to a private school, one of the best in Australia. While he was a boarder he was turned off Christianity by the chaplains employed by the school. They were a rather dour, miserable lot who did not take any delight in sport. Going to chapel regularly with those chaplains turned Jim off Christianity.
He was reluctant to come to church but because we built up a friendship solidified in those innumerable cups of Yarra mud, he eventually came to the little wooden church at Ascot Vale. I will never forget the first day he arrived at church. The service had begun. The first hymn had just ended and before the opening prayer, Jim walked down the aisle and sat in the front seat. He came with his straggly beard on his chin, open necked shirt, jeans and thongs.
Now in those days no one was wearing jeans except an occasional farmer, and thongs were certainly not seen in any church and the hippy beard gave people the image of Maynard G Krebs who was a well known character on television. Shock! Horror! The people saw this apparently uncouth fellow coming into the church and sitting down at the very front. I led in prayer and went on with the rest of the service.
Some of the ladies who lived in those inner areas of Melbourne regarded Sunday as the occasion to dress up. Living in a place like Newmarket or Ascot Vale did not provide many occasions to dress up. Going to church was the time when the fox fur was taken out of the cupboard and dusted off. Hats were worn by women everywhere and gloves. Yet here was a fellow in thongs and jeans and a straggly beard.
But Jim was willing to talk about faith and about his doubts and was willing to investigate them. Back to the university “caf” we went and there discussed the Christian faith. The way that discussion went took an interesting framework. He did not want to talk about Jesus Christ. He did not want to talk about Christianity. He wanted to put it in the context of intellectual humanism. So we agreed to write and discuss together papers about that, which Christians believe.
We decided to take one phrase of the Apostles’ Creed each week. I remember writing the first paper that we would discuss in the cafeteria. The title of the paper was “I believe in God the Father Almighty”. We never got past the word “I” that day. As soon as we got stuck into discussing what it means to say “I believe in God the Father Almighty” Jim asked what it means to say “I”. How do you understand yourself? How do you know yourself? Is it really possible to understand self? And anyway, who are you? Are you the product of your environment or are you the product of your genes? Are you a matter of random selection of the forces of heredity?
On and on the discussion and debate went. I think we spent a couple of months on the first word “I”. Then the word “believe” came in sequence. Having understood what we meant by “I” the personality, we now moved to the point of belief. What is belief? Is it something demonstrable? Is is rational? Can it be described in scientific terms? So on and on the discussion went.
I used to wear a camel hair jumper with cords and desert boots. I would be sitting on the back of a chair in the cafeteria with my feet on the seat of the chair, and Jim would be sitting in the same uncomfortable perch on his chair with his jeans and thongs, and we would be discussing all of these issues. But after a while we came to really understand what it meant to believe.
Then we moved on to “I believe in God”. What do we mean by God? Each of us would take turns week by week writing a paper. We would go to the university library, research, look up encyclopaedias, get down the books of philosophy and go through what Plato had to say, what Emmanuel Kant had to say. How did Thomas Aquinas answer this question? What was Dun Scotus saying about the nature of God? What did Augustine say? What did Reinhold Niebuhr have to say? Theologians, philosophers, they all came in as we learnt to discuss the nature of God.
I guess a year went by and we were still only on the opening sentences. But gradually we worked through the Apostles’ Creed.
Two years later he had completed his Bachelor of Engineering Degree. He had still not become a Christian but I had learnt a great deal. Jim went on to study his Master of Engineering degree. He graduated ,and came to church regularly, sitting at the back with a foolscap pad with his feet up on the seat in front of him with his toes sticking out of his thongs. On this big foolscap pad he would write down criticisms of my sermon, talking about them with me during the week that followed.
However, fate took a hand. What my intellectual argument could not do an eighteen year old girl from our church did. She came into Jim’s life like a whirlwind. They were in love, dating, and going together. Jim became immensely interested in the church. He became involved in all of our activities ‑ joined the Young Adult Group, became a leader, began to provide lifts home for people, making sure that the last person that he dropped off in his car was the girl June. But all the time he kept investigating the Christian faith.
We enjoyed our friendship together. The Master of Engineering Degree was now conferred upon him. Jim was now studying for his Doctor of Philosophy. He was a designer of dams and huge water works and specialized in the nature of soil.
When we reached the end of the Apostles’ Creed with “the life everlasting” Jim believed. He committed his life to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. I baptized him. Two years went by and he finished his Ph.D. Now Dr. Jim Ford had reached a time in his life when he needed to get everything else into perspective.
He grew in his faith, and when he committed himself as a Christian it was a real rock solid conversion. He became engaged to one of our finest girls, a student teacher, June.
June was the daughter of one of the Church Officers and was a very attractive lass, who was studying to be a secondary teacher. We all went to their wedding reception. Afterwards they were rushing to catch a plane to leave on their honeymoon. The wedding reception house was just near the Essendon aerodrome so they left it to the last moment before they jumped in their car to go off to catch their plane to fly to Tasmania for a honeymoon. That is when Jim suddenly remembered that he had taken the airline tickets out of his wedding suit pocket because they were bulky and had left them in the vestry at the church.
They were devastated at the discovery because the plane was due to leave in only a few minutes time. I told them both to drive to the airport, tell the people what had happened, explain that they were on their honeymoon and to beg to be allowed to get on the plane and to say that I was coming up immediately after with the tickets. I felt sure that the airline would let them on the DC3, even if they did not have a ticket, in the light of their very obvious “just married” appearance.
They drove to the airport and I drove as fast as I dared in my Volkswagen back to the church, found the tickets and then sped at breakneck speed back through the side streets of Ascot Vale and Moonee Ponds until I pulled into the airport just as they were walking across the tarmac to board the plane.
Today they are still in church leadership. Those years of discussion added a great deal into the life of Jim Ford. But do you know he never understood what he was doing for me. He made me provide a basis of intellectual understanding for my faith. I had discovered an old truth that ‘if you preach faith until you have it, you will discover that you have it’. I had been preaching it for years and now Jim Ford had put an intellectual basis beneath what I believed.
How I enjoyed those discussions with him. He is still my friend but thank heavens we can talk these days without having to drink that dreadful ground Yarra mud in the University of Melbourne cafeteria.
But I never thought of that very much as I walked out on those days of discussion together into the heavy air which used to blow from the Newmarket abattoirs and start my motor bike and head back to the College of the Bible to continue training for the ministry, thinking about my meeting with one of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
