Graduation, Ordination, and Re-Ordination
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 1960’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
After three years of working in the two small churches in the slum areas I was invited to stay on for an additional period of ministry. In total we spent seven years working in those same two student churches although by now the student churches had grown in their size and membership until we could afford a part time ministry which I completed while I was finishing my university studies. Then for the first time in 40 years re established a full time ministry. Now the tables had been turned somewhat and instead of being a student minister, I in turn had a student assistant.
The great aim of all student ministers is to graduate and be ordained. It took a total of six years full time study for me to complete both my theological studies and university degree. To graduate from both was a time of great excitement. It had been a long haul with much sacrifice being experienced by my girlfriend who later became my fiancee and eventually my wife, and myself. Beverley had worked for three years in the latter stages of my study enabling me to spend my full time efforts on my studies at the same time as I was working the best of 60 hours a week in the growing slum church.
The number of boys I had on probation from the courts were continuing to increase, and the numbers of personal tragedies in the lives of people in that area mounted constantly.
Few professionals, whether they be social workers, medical doctors, teachers, or ministers of religion, seemed to stay in the slum areas. Most spent two years, or three years at the most, before moving on. It was not long before I found I was the longest serving professional in almost any field in the area. The longer we stayed the more people came to know of us and consequently came knocking on the door in their time of need. Regardless of the nature of their need, they often presented to the person they identified with first.
These were years of tremendous change in the community. At university the campus was ablaze with opposition to Mr. Menzies’ compulsory call up for service in Vietnam. There were very few of us who actually supported the government’s conscription policy of sending 20 year olds to Vietnam. We were prepared to defend our country in the event of war, but we felt that this undeclared war was both unjust and improper. We were not defending our country, we were propping up a regime which had been corrupt and contrary to the interests of the people of Vietnam. In those days the student mind was quite clear where they stood on the matter of conscription and involvement in Vietnam. “All the way with LBJ” may have been a sycophantic cry from Harold Holt but it was like red rag to a bull to us students. We sat down on the job – literally – on the tram tracks of Melbourne and held up the traffic in huge protests.
I believe those student protests of that time did change Australia’s international policy but it took a lot of effort. However, we students at university who thought that our opposition was making and shaking the governments of the land were really fooling ourselves. The decisions were being made by old men who really believed twenty year old students were quite expendable.
In between our social protest and social welfare work, the grind of studying philosophy, logic, biology, genetics, mediaeval philosophy and the like continued. Occasionally the exam results turned up honours and one dreadful year the biology paper failed and required a supplementary exam in the middle of the January holidays before a successful pass was achieved.
At the end of my theological course, the studies of Old and New Testament, New Testament and Classical Greek, Church History and Apologetics were completed. The end of our course had been achieved. All that remained now was for graduation and ordination. At the end of our course we all had a mixture of emotions. The fifteen or so students who were graduating with me were all looking forward to marriage. In most cases we had been engaged three, four or five years. We were not allowed to get married during our course, and as soon as the graduation was complete there was a stampede for home towns around Australia. The following two or three Saturdays saw the long anticipated marriages of almost all of those students.
The joy of marriage was only tinged with the sadness of leaving each other. When a group of 60 men plus a few women live together in a college for three, four, five or more years, a very close bond develops. The extended family is very real and to leave that family after all of those years was a traumatic experience. Fifty years after I first entered college I still feel the closest bond of friendship with those other young men who started studying with me. (Although, as everyone else was older than me, the fact is that most of those good friends are now dead.)
At the end of the course we had our annual sports banquet and the trophies were presented to the successful athletes. There was a concert for all of the supporters of the College and we bid our farewells with humour and mirth before a crowd of eight or nine hundred.
Then came the serious business of graduation and ordination. The graduation ceremony was quite simple. The College choir sang, there were speeches from the VIPs from the Churches and the College and then the graduates came forward one at a time, to the applause of the hundreds of people present, to receive our certificates.
But the highlight of the whole course lay at the moment of ordination. The ordination was prepared for by spiritual devotion over the previous week. We fasted for the couple of days prior to the ordination in order that we might be in the right frame of spiritual dedication. We had studied the Biblical passages on the laying of hands and devotion, and fulfilled all of the spiritual requirements.
Then a selection of ministers, church leaders, and representative Elders of the Federal Conference of Churches of Christ in Australia, representing several States where the denomination had students in the College, came forward to where the ordinands knelt before them on the platform. In an atmosphere of devotion we answered the questions about our faithfulness to Jesus Christ, our belief in the Trinity, the inspired word of the Scriptures, and our obedience to serve in the proclamation of the Word of God. Then, as we knelt, the representative Church Minister, Leaders and Elders of the Federal Conference of Churches of Christ, gathered around us laying hands on our head, and in prayer and dedication, we were ordained into the ministry of the Word and Sacrament.
After all of those years I was now really a minister.
Of special meaning to me was the choice of one of the men of the Conference of Churches of Christ, a former President, who joined with those who laid hands on my head.
It was the same Dr. W.A. Kemp who had presided over my earliest growth in my mother’s womb as our local family doctor, who had been there at the time of my birth, who had delivered and hung me up by the heels, spanking me on the buttocks to produce the first cry of life. It was he who, as surgeon, had removed my appendix and my tonsils and cared for me in all troublesome childhood illnesses. It was he who, as the President of our School Council, as Mayor of our City, as Magistrate in the Childrens Court, as Elder within the local church, and as family doctor, had guided me in my earliest days of boyhood need and questioning. He, with whom I had discussed entering the ministry, was also Chairman of the Board of the Federal College of The Bible of Churches of Christ in Australia.
It was only natural that he who had held me up in the air by the heels and spanked me on the buttocks at my birth, who had placed his arm around my shoulders at the time of my father’s death in companionship and encouragement, and who had shaken my hand when I left the church to enter the College for training, should lay hands upon my head in blessing at the moment of ordination.
I went out into the world of the Parish of Ascot Vale and Newmarket now as a newly ordained minister.
There was an interesting twist to all of this.
Twenty one years later Wesley Central Mission Sydney invited me to come to be its Superintendent in succession to Rev. Dr. Sir Alan Walker. I had accepted that invitation in November 1977 and began ministry at the end of January 1979. A few weeks before my installation at Superintendent of Wesley Central Mission and welcome as a minister of The Uniting Church in Australia, a question was raised with the President of The Uniting Church in Australia, Rev. Dr. Davis McCaughey, about whether my ordination as a minister of Churches of Christ was accepted as valid by The Uniting Church. The Uniting Church had previously declared that any minister ordained by a denomination represented within the Australian Council of Churches was acceptable within The Uniting Church as a valid ordination. But the Presidential ruling, which surprised all of us, was that the ordination twenty one years previously was not valid or acceptable to The Uniting Church. A fresh ordination was ordered.
There were many surprised leaders within The Uniting Church who received this news. But I must say I found the whole experience of my re ordination a time of remarkable spiritual blessing. I found it strange that a church that did not believe in re baptism should practise re ordination. But because it was the ruling of the President of the Church I accepted it as a discipline and in humility.
This time 1,300 people packed the Lyceum Theatre in Pitt Street to witness my second ordination. Scores of members of the Sydney Presbytery gathered round, and letters were received from large numbers of people assuring me of their prayers and best wishes as I commenced a new ministry. This time I knelt in prayer and submission after answering the very same questions and re submitted myself to the ministry of God.
No green student minister in the slums this time, but a minister of some twenty one years standing. But I can assure you the same thrill of ordination was present as the leading church dignitaries of The Uniting Church in Australia gathered around my kneeling person and laid hands on my head.
In my speech afterwards I indicated that I believed the President was wrong, and that my first ordination was a valid ordination, but that I could never despise the prayers and best wishes of such a huge gathering of people, and if it were in the mind of The Uniting Church to re ordain me as an annual affair I would certainly be willing to comply. Subsequently the Presidential Ruling requiring my re ordination was revoked – but after the event!
That graduation, ordination and ordination remain as three of the highlights in my spiritual pilgrimage.
I little realized, however, what would lie ahead in those last weeks before graduation at the College when, after the evening service, I stepped out into the heavy air blowing from the abattoirs and start my motor bike to head back to the College of The Bible to continue to train for the ministry thinking about my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
