Bribed With Firewood
When I was a young minister freshly graduated and ordained, my first ministry in the 1960’s, after seven years of the slums of Newmarket, was in a small country church, in the small country town of Ararat, gateway to the Wimmera in Western Victoria. There I learnt the difficult art faced by all city bred ministers, of becoming a country parson.
We had intended to travel to America to do post graduate studies at the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. Our appointment was confirmed, our scholar ship was allocated, our ship passage was reserved and all our possessions were on board the SS Arcadia steaming to San Francisco.
We were not. Beverley and I with our young daughter Jenny were sitting in the US Consul’s Office in Melbourne trying to argue him into letting us travel without a visa. Our original visas were lost in the recent confusion over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
It would take a couple of months before the new visas would be approved, then another month before the SS Monterey would be in Sydney leaving for San Francisco. So we had a number of weeks to fill in. As we had no income I desperately needed work.
The Conference Executive of Churches of Christ in Victoria, knowing of our predicament, asked me to spend what time we had ministering in the small country church of the small country town of Ararat in Western Victoria.
They made it quite clear this was a difficult church. Several ministers had been terminated and a number of members had left.
Many of the members were at loggerheads with each other and the conflict split the church. One of the principals in the dispute was the wealthiest man in the church, Mr. Fred Garrison. Fred was a good hearted man, but was rejected by many of the members. He used his wealth to buy favour and standing with the minister and the other members. I realised that if I was seen by the other members to favour him in any way I would be rejected by them.
I would need to be very careful.
As we arrived on the first day at the decrepit and disgusting manse I noticed a truck had backed up the side of the house. A wood man was beginning to unload a load of firewood. I spoke to him “Who ordered this wood?” and he replied “Mr. Fred Garrison. It says here on the docket and it is paid for. He sent it round to you with his compliments.”
I suddenly realized I had to make a decision about what I should do with Mr. Garrison. I looked at the wood man. “I did not order this wood and I do not want it. Would you stack that wood back on your truck and take it away. When I want some wood I will order it and I will pay for it myself.”
The wood man looked at me in stunned disbelief. “You must be bloody mad! Fred Garrison has paid for it, and you would be a fool to knock a gift from Mr. Garrison back.”
I repeated that I wanted the wood loaded back onto his truck and taken away and that if I needed wood I would order it and pay for it myself.
I walked inside shaking from this unexpected confrontation. At the end of the long passage which ran straight through the wooden house, my wife was talking to a man at the front door. He had two large cardboard cartons and had come from the hardware shop. I asked him what was in the cartons. “Two electric radiators for ya by courtesy of Mr. Fred Garrison. He has paid for them and he wants you to keep them as a gift.”
I decided I had to make this stand once and for all. “Take them back to the hardware shop and thank Mr. Garrison for his gifts, but I do not want electric radiators. When I do I will order them and pay for them myself.”
The man from the hardware shop looked at me and said “You must be bloody mad! You cannot stay here in Ararat on the cold nights we have here without some ‘eat!”
I made it clear that I was not going to argue with him but the radiators needed to go back. Beverley also looked at me in disbelief. I had not as yet caught her up with the situation.
On the first Sunday after the church stood in disbelief looking at the yellow painted fence and the pillar box red church doors I had painted the day earlier to show our commitment to cleaning up the place and ending the rusty corrugated iron around the church, Mr. Garrison walked up to me and said “I think you are putting us all to shame with your concern and energy. But don’t worry, we’ll get behind you.” And with that he stuffed two 10 pound notes in my top pocket. Whether this was to pay for my labour or the paint I do not know.
But I was angry. I took the two 10 pound notes out and stuffed them into Mr. Garrison’s pocket. “Thank you for your offer but I don’t accept tips, wood or radiators. We pay our own way thank you!” To my surprise Mr. Garrison looked pleased that I had stood up to him. He liked people who did that.
I had been warned that Mr. Fred Garrison knew that money talked and that he used his money very effectively. Well the first lesson that he was going to learn was that I was not going to be bought by his money no matter how urgent our needs were.
The first Wednesday night became the turning point. It was Bible study night and I had carefully prepared a message outlining the introduction to the letter to the Romans. I had a good study on Romans 1 organised. We met in the little vestry which was a wooden lean to attached to the back of the church. If the battleship grey had been peeling on the church, then the paint that was on the vestry must have gone back to the previous century and had all peeled off. It was the most disgusting set of buildings I had ever seen in my life.
I waited for the people to arrive and to my surprise they came. Eight men one after the other, all with their hair still wet from showers after a hard days work on the farms or in the factories around town. To my surprise no ladies attended, just eight men. All of them carried Bibles, big, black impressive looking Bibles. I realized then that I would have to be careful.
I had been used to adult study groups where we had friendly people, couples, young people, young marrieds and young adults. But here I had eight dour looking miserable men each holding a big black leather Bible. I asked them to turned to Romans and I started to read the first sentence, but before I had it finished one of the men asked me in a very angular tough voice, “What translation is that? Are you reading from the Authorised Version?” The threat in his voice indicated that if I was reading from any other translation, as I was, then I would have an argument on my hands then and there.
I realized it was now or never. Here was a complete challenge to my role and authority. I remembered the words on my letter of commission from the Conference Executive. They did not hold me responsible for what might happen but asked that I do all I could to straighten up this church.
I realized the church was not ready for Bible study. So I slammed my Bible shut and put it firmly down on the seat beside me and I looked defiantly at the eight men. “You did not invite me to come to this church, and I did not want to come. I have been sent here to work with you until we learn to live and work as a church properly. You did not want me and I did not want to come but I am here and I intend to minister here as God guides me.”
“You are not ready to study the Bible yet. We need to pray first, to pray for ourselves, to pray for forgiveness and to pray for new attitudes. Nothing is going to happen in this church until you men change and the only way you will change is if you start to pray together. Now, get down on your knees and let us pray.”
I was absolutely surprised with the strength and loudness of my voice. There was a ring of authority and strength in it that I never realized I had. To my surprise these farmers, factory workers and business men did exactly what I said. Without a further word they shut their Bibles and in a way not customary in Churches of Christ, got down on their knees in front of their seats, turning round to place their elbows on the seats.
I then had a moment of panic. What do I do now? Then I noted for the first time that they were sitting on opposite sides of a square and that the four men on one side seemed to belong to one group and the four men on the other side seemed to belong to another group and that the looks of antagonism which I had encountered when they first started to arrive seem to align themselves with their opposite number.
In one of those moments of divine inspiration I said, “Keep kneeling there. We are going to stay here till each of us has prayed aloud for the person, by name, who is kneeling immediately behind you. I want you each to pray now for that man who is kneeling behind your back.”
There was a long, awkward, embarrassed silence. A church seat creaked as one man shifted his weight from knee to knee. No one said a word. And then the man on my right who was big, tall, strong, a brick maker from the local brick works whom I was to nickname “Ivan the Terrible” began to pray for Fred who had been sitting opposite him.
I had heard that Ivan and Fred had been in conflict for years. Ivan started to pray. He prayed for the missionaries that were serving overseas, for those who were working on the Aboriginal Mission Stations throughout Australia, the Queen, for the Prime Minister and members of Parliament, the church’s task in theological colleges and chaplaincies in schools and gaols. He prayed for the mental hospital on the hill and for the prisoners in J Ward. I got the feeling that Ivan was praying for everything else in the world except the Ararat Church of Christ.
He kept praying for subject after subject but gradually he ran out of subjects and, after a huge sigh, said “And now, Father, I pray for myself and especially for Fred. You know that Fred and I do not always see eye to eye and that often he is wrong. But Father I want to confess to night that often I have been hasty and I have said things about Fred that have been untrue. I have talked about him behind his back and made things
worse because of what I have said. I am sorry Father that I have said that and I ask that you will forgive me, and I ask my brother Fred to forgive.”
He continued in a very shaky voice. Suddenly there was a noise from the other side of the room. It was Fred. He was getting up to his feet. I was peeking at him through half closed eyes. I wondered what he might do.
Instead of walking out he walked across to the church bench where Ivan was kneeling and knelt down beside him and put his hands across his shoulder. The two tough men within the church and town were being reconciled on their knees.
Fred was the next to pray and he started to pray for Ivan and asked forgiveness that he had done and said, particularly about Ivan’s wife. And then others joined in the prayer. One of the men, a bee keeper who was rather quiet and withdrawn and not as involved in the disputes as the others, broke down into tears and began to sob. Then another. Those hard, tough men were humbling themselves before God.
At the appropriate moment I brought all of the prayers together in a long and stirring prayer to God for forgiveness and for the making of new attitudes within us. I then asked the men to stand and to grasp each other by hand and to sing together the doxology of praise. Nine voices rose in that decrepit old lean to of a vestry at the back of the church that night in a song of praise and triumph. Something was born within their hearts and within the heart of the church that night, something that would change them and me and the community in a way beyond our dreams.
As we were parting Mr. Garrison lingered behind, not to give me anything except praise. He felt this was the moment in the church’s history for which he had been praying and we were the very people this church needed.
I felt greatly encouraged, but even more relieved!
If I could only see it, we would soon have crowds in our buildings, youth clubs that were bursting at the seams and a Sunday School that would reach an all time record. The old decrepit lean to at the back of the
church would be demolished and new halls would be built and hundreds of commitments would be made to Jesus Christ over the next six months. I could not see it then, but something was beginning to happen that would make us postpone our trip to America and continue to minister in a church that would come alive like no other. That night I discovered I had a tiger by the tail.
But I could not see any of that when the doxology was finished. We simply shook hands with each other and agreed to meet on Saturday to finish painting the front of the church. They each got into their cars and drove back to their comfortable houses. I walked over to the cold manse where Beverley was struggling with a burnt out stove and a hot water system that was not working. Things had to change and that prayer meeting was the start.
So I headed back to the country manse at 90 High Street, opposite the Railway Station, having learnt another lesson in the difficult art of becoming a country parson.
GORDON MOYES
