Mrs. Gossip
When I was studying to be a minister of the Gospel my student churches were two small adjacent wooden churches in the inner slum areas of North Melbourne. For seven years during the 1950’s and 60’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
Down in the Newmarket area there was a slum reclamation programme under way. Many of the old wooden narrow fronted houses, only 18 feet wide, were being demolished and big concrete buildings were being put up. It was the hope of everyone to be able to get into one of these new concrete flats. The old Debney’s paddock was now renamed Debney’s Meadow and from 1961 920 flats housing 4,000 people were built. Then a further two sixteen storey blocks were built housing another 425 people. Eventually there were 2,600 flats. The old slum areas were going and with them some of the characters of the area.
One of the characters of that area I was pleased to see go was Mrs. Gossip. That was her name and that was her nature. She was a big woman, hard as nails, who used to wear dresses of large coloured flower prints. She was very bossy. In my first two weeks as student minister in the Newmarket church Mrs. Gossip made her presence felt, not only upon myself but upon my sixteen year old sister, whom she managed to reduce into tears because of the harsh way she spoke to her, and my eighteen year old girlfriend who came out to hear me preach and was cowed by the bossiness of this hard woman.
She lived in one of those little narrow fronted houses. Her husband was an inadequate fellow, angular, aggressive, noisy, unable to speak with ordinary tone of voice as he shouted all the time. He was a railway worker. They had two gangly sons who were made in the same mould as their father. Kindness and sensitivity were unknown in that family. Mrs. Gossip reigned as queen of the flats. Yet a more unpleasant person I was never to meet.
What really troubled me when I first met her was that there were so many Bible College students with whom she had had conflict in the last few years, and none of those students had continued in the ministry. I checked the record and found that three out of the five previous students who had been in the College of the Bible as student ministers at that church had had conflicts with her and shortly after had left the College of The Bible and given up training for the ministry altogether.
I did some further research and found that of the seven previous student ministers, five of them had left training for the ministry. This was most unusual. Even though it was a very large college we had only a few people who left mid course, and it seemed that those that left had served this church to which I now had been called as the next student minister.
Mrs. Gossip made it clear right from the beginning that she was a big fish in a small pond and she liked to make the waves. In her presence the other women were cowed into submission. I visited their house a number of times for meals. She certainly was very generous in opening her home for the young students but she made it very clear where she saw students. In the pecking order of God’s Kingdom we were the meanest, the leanest, the lowliest and the last in God’s Kingdom. She had a role to play and in the area of Debney’s paddock she was significant whereas the student minister was useful only to accomplish her will.
There was no real joy about the home. The garden certainly was not a thing of beauty to enjoy forever. The house was full of cheap ornamental kitsch, similar to what a person would win as prizes in the sideshow alley at the Royal Show. Some people had three ducks flying up a wall. She would have three ducks up one wall, three down the other, and six in the passage. On the shelves the ornaments were all cheap, tawdry, glossy china.
What really troubled me however, was her attitude: she was responsible for the conduct of the ministry of the church and everything had to be according to her whim and will. Although I was only eighteen and the youngest of the previous seven students to come to this church, I was firm in my understanding of my role as a student minister. A clash and a confrontation was inevitable.
In every way I was no match for Mrs. Gossip except when it came to firmness and determination. I wrote in a note to myself, “She must either change or go. She is going to be accountable to God.”
The conflict came. It was rather a torrid affair. I stood my ground. She had to change or she had to go. Not only was she concerned about an eighteen year old student talking to her like that, but she had never been spoken to like that by anybody throughout her life.
The issue was not of my choosing. It occurred in an innocent enough setting at the first meeting I attended of the Christian Women’s Fellowship for 1957.
There were six ladies seated in the little wooden vestry behind the little wooden church amid the slums of Newmarket. There was old Mrs. Henley there. She was a regular attendee and had been a member for more than 50 years. She was pretty deaf and agreed with whatever everybody else agreed.
Mrs. Baker was there, the youngest of the women, a happy, bright, smiling lady with a sweet personality who struggled with a very difficult twelve year old daughter whose body was grossly deformed and whose face was terribly disfigured. She certainly had her hands full just coping with her daughter but she never allowed the travails of her personal life to make any difference to the sweetness of her nature.
Mrs. Bankstown was there, she was the wife of Mr. Bankstown the Sunday School Superintendent, a quiet, shy, reserved and very friendly lady and she was sitting next to Mrs. Bankstown, the previous wife of Mr. Bankstown the Sunday School Superintendent. Everything that the second Mrs. Bankstown was, the first Mrs. Bankstown was not. Her personality was vivacious, talkative, hyperactive, the local girl guide commissioner, entrepreneurial with plans to raise funds for every good work, a constant bush walker and hiker and seasoned traveller.
Mrs. Hughes was there, the most ordinary of ordinary women. Warm, friendly, a hard worker with no pretensions about herself, always full of good deeds and helpfulness to other people.
Seated facing these women on the other side of the big board table with the maroon coloured cloth which covered it was Mrs. Gossip.
She led. She ruled. She decided.
I had been asked to attend this first meeting of the year as the brand new student minister to give devotions, and so I gave a Bible reading, some devotional thought and led them in prayer. I decided to sit through part of the business meeting and then, at the appropriate time, excuse myself and leave.
Mrs. Gossip introduced some items of business. The first was about their support for the Aboriginal girl in Carnarvon, Western Australia. Every year they had supported at least one Aboriginal girl by providing her with all the new clothes she would need for the year, with her school books and with her weekly board as she attended an Aboriginal mission. Then they discussed some arrangements for a supper for a meeting to be held, which was coming up.
Then Mrs. Bankstown the second mentioned she was short of a lady Sunday School teacher in her department of the Sunday School and she could do with the help of one of the ladies present.
Quick as a flash Mrs. Gossip offered Beverley, my eighteen year old girlfriend, to do the work. I thought she was joking. She was not. So I said, “No, Beverley cannot teach in the Sunday School here. She is a Sunday School teacher in her own church at the Box Hill Church of Christ and she also runs the Girls Club during the week and has about 60 girls in it. She is very busy running those two programmes.”
Mrs. Gossip was not one to be put off. She looked at me and in a very hard and threatening manner said, “If we want her to teach she will. We are paying you and you are to serve where we decide.”
Whenever Mrs. Gossip said “we decide” she really meant “I decide”.
I continued protesting, “Beverley is not employed by the Church. She is my girlfriend. She comes to hear me preach on a Sunday night but she is not under any obligation to this church at all. You cannot expect her to give up her own church, her Sunday School class and her Girls Club and let down that church simply because I am your student minister and because you pay me six pounds a week.”
Mrs. Gossip now had herself in an awkward position. She had declared her position that Beverley was to be the Sunday School teacher in the primary department. That should have been the end of the matter but here she had an eighteen year old student minister in his first year at Bible College contradicting her decision. There was now a clash of wills and Mrs. Gossip could not afford to lose.
She leant forward over the maroon tablecloth of the big board table and sat even higher in her chair and she looked at me with the most intense, powerful concentration and said “Students are sent to us by the College for us to train. One of the first things a student must learn is that they obey the decisions of the church.”
Whenever Mrs. Gossip said “the decisions of the church” she really meant “my decisions”.
I looked at her in silence for a moment. I decided that this was the moment. In a very careful, unemotional but strong voice I said “Mrs. Gossip. You are one member of this church and you are entitled to your opinion only. When this church speaks officially through a members meeting, or through their elected officers, I will listen. In the meantime you may run this meeting but you have no right to determine matters beyond your authority.”
“I have no intention of taking the slightest notice of what you may say. I will minister to you and your family and I will conduct my ministry in the way I know best. I will listen to the voice of God and the voice of the membership of this church but on this and any other matter which you may care to raise I have no intention whatever of hearing you.”
It appeared as if she had been physically struck.
She sat back winded. She looked like a stunned mullet. No one had ever spoken to her like that before. In a strange sort of way, I felt I had established the basis of authority for my student ministry.
The day came soon afterwards when she left that little church. She did it with an enormous splash. Everybody was loudly told that she was taking her support, her finances, her leadership and everything else, to another church. Far from being concerned, I think everybody breathed a sigh of relief.
Unfortunately, I began to notice the same sort of thing happened in the other church and the same old dominance quickly rose to the fore like the cream used to rise up into the necks of the bottles of milk. She never changed. Over the years that I continued to know her she was always the same wherever she went. Unfortunately she was never really welcomed and so moved from place to place. When I thought of her I thought of her dominating spirit and harsh cruel words that could reduce teenage girls to tears, and I remembered the word of Scripture which said that judgment begins in the house of God. That judgment had to begin with people like Mrs. Gossip. The day would come she would be called to account.
Now that I look back after forty years I have a sense of sorrow for her. She probably just needed acceptance by people. She probably saw her own inadequacies in upbringing and education, in status and standing in the community, in her husband and in her family. The way she thought she would achieve status was by authoritarian bombast. So she used that method to dominate people and made sure they followed her whim and will. I was not going to stand that and so she either had to change or she had to leave.
That was the first and the last time that I ever tried to move a person out of a church. Ever since, with increasing patience, I have sought to change them but in those first days of student ministry it was a matter of survival. The odds were against me – three out of five previous students left the College, five out of the last seven left the ministry. I was not going to make it six out of eight. So I stood up to her.
I guess she is still alive. I have not seen her for many years and I rather hate to think what it would be like to meet her these days, a frail elderly lady probably needing love and help from someone.
There is a truth in this: Judgment does start in the house of God. We who have the gospel of grace are expected to grow in the fruits of the spirit and if we do not grow more like Jesus in our holiness and in our character then God holds us accountable. I think Mrs. Gossip might have found that to be true.
I will not forget that time I met head on the bombastic steamroller who was determined to come straight over me when I went to the little church at Newmarket and how I felt later, when I walked out into the heavy air, troubled in spirit because of that terrible meeting and smelt the wind blowing from the abattoirs and started my motor bike and headed back to the College of the Bible to continue training for the ministry thinking about my meeting of some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
