My Old College
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.
The College in which I trained was the College of The Bible of Churches of Christ in Australia and was situated in Glen Iris, Melbourne. The College was built on a beautiful site only seven miles from the heart of the city. The College was divided in two by the Gardiner Creek that ran through the property. On the far side of the creek were acres, a sports field, an oval and our farm which consisted of a small herd of cows and a dairy shed, a large number of free range fowls and a chook shed, a hay paddock, some vegetable gardens, a tennis court and a small dam in the creek into which students inevitably were thrown.
The other side of the creek consisted of a three storey brick building consisting of lecture rooms and administration offices, a two storey women’s residence complete with dining room for 60 people and kitchens, the Chown Memorial Chapel which seated about 100 people, an extensive library and group of study rooms, the married students’ quarters, an “L” shaped principal’s wing with a whole row of student dormitories housing two single students to each room, various houses for faculty members and some extensive gardens.
From all States of Australia students came from Churches of Christ to train at Glen Iris although there were later State Colleges built in Woolwich and Carlingford, New South Wales, and in Kenmore, Queensland. In February 1957 the doors of the College swung open to 47 men and a few women who came in pressed suits with kit bag in hand to commence the first day of their college course for that year.
Over 80 years of its existence, about a thousand young men and women have come to train for the ministry in local churches or for missionary service among aboriginal missions throughout Australia, or in overseas missions in India, China, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Papua New Guinea.
Each year there would be a grand parade of old boys and girls who came back for an evening meal with the contemporary students. We soon realized that those who had sat in these same desks decades before us were a close knit fraternity, as we would discover in our turn as we would live together for three, four or five years, studying, working and sporting together.
We quickly settled in to a new routine.
There were no lectures on Monday but everyone had to be engaged in secular employment. Those with teaching qualifications taught as relieving teachers in schools, those who were professional engineers, architects or lecturers, lectured in their own chosen profession, and those who were plumbers, motor mechanics and tradesmen did one day in their chosen field. It was the philosophy of the College that hand in hand with theological studies one had to also work alongside the man in the street to make sure that while our heads may be in the New Testament our feet were certainly planted in the secular world.
I was the baby of the College, having just had my 18th birthday and without any formal trade or profession behind me. I was not exempt from secular work and over the years packed sugar for the large grocery chain, Moran and Cato, well known for their support in the Methodist church, gardened for people, attended court as a Probation Officer and ran a youth club.
From early Tuesday morning till Friday afternoon we had eight lectures each day commencing at 8.15 a.m. and going through to 4.45 p.m. We then had time for compulsory sport and after the evening meal, it was heads down at the study desk from 7 p.m. till 11 p.m. At 11.30 p.m. I also had a College task to complete, peeling potatoes for 50 people for the next day’s meal.
We wore suits and ties to all lectures and took part in cricket, football, tennis, athletics, table tennis and various other sporting competitions.
Some students studied secular subjects for university examinations such as English and French, economics and history, and the rest of us studied mainly Biblical subjects like Old Testament and New Testament Studies, Apologetics, Church History, Homiletics, and New Testament Greek.
I also studied and completed my university work in Classical Greek.
Like all communities of students there were plenty pranks and water featured in many of them. On more than one occasion a student rumble would be set upon by other students separating all and sundry by the force of water from the fire hose. Innocents would be call out of a door on the ground floor while from the third floor window water bombs would be hailed upon them.
As breakfast began each morning we stood at our places while a student recited a verse from Scripture and led in prayer and grace. One morning, just at the student went to be seated, the chair was pulled out from beneath him and he sat on the floor with a large crash. The student President then read the appointed verse for the day: “Thou knowest my down sitting and my uprising.” Everybody headed for the showers between 6.30 a.m. and 7.00 a.m. and on cold Melbourne winter mornings we would often gather around the piano before breakfast while one enthusiast would pound out the Mexican Hat Dance and many of us would rock the floors with our versions of the Mexican Hat Dance and Russian Cossack dancing.
Students in those days all shared a common lack of money. Unlike the students in the Methodist and Presbyterian and other Theological Colleges, the Churches of Christ never paid their students to attend. We received no allowances whatever from the denomination. On the other hand we had to pay for attending, for our lecturing fees plus our board money. We were all required to come to College with 200 pounds in the bank to cover our first year expenses. My student churches at Ascot Vale and Newmarket paid me 6 pound a week. Of that I returned 12/ as a tithe of my income as my offering; I paid board money of 2 pounds 10 shillings each week, about 100 pounds in fees, and with the remainder purchased petrol for my motor bike, clothes, books and other necessities. It was very rough on my girlfriend Beverley, being in love with a poor college student. By the time I had finished my college course I had no money whatever.
What we lacked in money we made up for in good friendships. At the end of our first week all of the new students had to present a Freshers’ Concert. It was a tradition of the older students to boo every act loudly and throw missiles at the performers.
At the Old Boys’ banquets we had famous ministers come in from around the land who told us how difficult things were in their days and how lucky we were to have it so easy in our day. There was a college concert towards the end of the year when college students presented musical items, dramas, and choral works.
But the objective of every year was the graduation of the students at the end of three, four or five years’ study and their ordination for ministry. Crowds of 600 or 700 were normal at the Graduation and Ordination Services.
The College Chapel always meant a great deal to me and the huge stained glass windows captured my imagination from the first day. These magnificent stained glass windows pictured St. Luke and St. Paul and they became the focus of many a meditation and also of anguished questionings concerning my future career. I photographed Paul and Luke many times in those stained glass windows and created an audio visual on their lives and ministries. I preached on them as effective servants of the Lord and wrote on their lives and their theology.
Twenty five years later the slides had given way to a million dollars that I raised to make a film series following in Paul’s and Luke’s footsteps which now screens on several continents in a variety of languages and in thousands of churches. My original writing on their lives and theology developed into a book “Discovering Paul” which was runner up in the 1987 Book of the Year Award. Twenty five years later the inspiration of those magnificent windows still lasts.
It was in the Chown Memorial Chapel that student preachers had to practise preaching before other members of their year and faculty who then indulged in a time honoured period of criticism of all that was said and done. I remember not so much the times of criticism, but those dark nights when, in the pitch black interior of the Chapel, I would practise speaking with full gestures and without notes in the dark, without also the critical gaze of either my fellow students or the faculty.
My bedroom was the corner room in the new Principal’s wing where my room mate for three years was the late Daryl Thoday. Poor, dear Daryl, the most patient and long suffering student in the College. Our friendship never wavered over the years. His task was to sweep the floor every morning after breakfast, of our one roomed apartment. My task once a month was to wash the windows. Our room consisted only of a built in wardrobe, two single beds, two study tables, a one large bookshelf each. We were under strict instructions not to hammer any nails into the walls. I soon accumulated three and four times more books than the bookshelves would hold and so I developed a bookcase which consisted of long planks of wood balancing on bricks, leaning up against the wall to the ceiling and then out over the double windows. They were crammed with books, and true to the prohibition, there was not one nail holding it all together. The day of my undoing came, however, when in a hurry I pulled out a book from the bottom shelf, dislodged a brick, and everything came tumbling down!
I was the youngest student ever to be accepted into the College and I was the baby of the College in 1957, 1958 and again in 1959. I graduated in the shortest possible time, being ordained the very week I turned 21 years of age, the youngest in its 80 years history.
The policy of the College of making us spend at least one day a week in secular employment, and then of paying our way for our tuition and board, and of making us serve a part time student church as well as study I believe was a good one.
Working in secular employment kept people in touch with their trade or profession and certainly with the mind of the man outside in the street. Working in the student churches gave us a very practical insight to the other side of the studies that we were doing. It took me six years to complete my university degree and college Theological College Diploma and in that time, while studying at both university and Bible College I prepared and preached 300 sermons, made hundreds of pastoral visits, and spent six years in a student ministry. My friend in the Presbyterian Theological College, who had started the same year as I, was about to graduate six years later, asked for my help. He was required to preach a trial sermon for a church to which he was being called. In the previous six years he had only preached on one occasion, had no internship, and no experience in Christian ministry whatever.
On the other hand by the time we graduated and were ordained we knew what ministry was all about, and the churches knew us well before they voted on us as candidates for ministry.
Churches of Christ shared with the Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, Anglican, Baptist and Roman Catholic denominations in being part of the Melbourne College of Divinity attached to the Melbourne University. It accredited the Colleges, approved the level of lecturing, and then set the exams which all of us students, regardless of our denominations, had to complete. Our examiners were lecturers from other Colleges who corrected our exam papers. So our theological training in all of the basic subjects was the same regardless of which denominational college we attended.
However, Churches of Christ expected this secular employment to keep us in touch with the man in the street and our church internships to keep us involved in local congregations.
It is now more than 50 years since I commenced at the College and I am more convinced than ever of the wisdom of this approach. I recently went back to the old College to a gathering of old boys. Hundreds came from among the more than one thousand who have been trained in the past 80 years. They have more students and lecturing staff than at any time in their history, but after 80 years our old College was demolished to make way for a freeway through the College grounds. It is no longer viable to have a farm with cows and chooks so close to the heart of Melbourne. A new multi-million dollar College took its place.
So an era ended. I was the youngest ever to be admitted or ever to graduate in the 80 years of its history. But I still feel that same sense of awe as I gathered with the old boys and met with Dr. Ray Kilmyre, who entered the College of The Bible in 1916 where he had come from South Australia farms. His secular employment was bagging wheat. He graduated as a minister and also as a medical doctor, married his wife who graduated with him in a double wedding with two other College students in a Christian chapel service and in the British Consul’s office at the missionary base in Hweili Chou in Central China. There with a team of ten Australia missionaries they staffed a great Chinese ministry until the Communist takeover. I still stand in awe of Grace Waterman, a student who entered College in 1920 from New Zealand. She worked in secular employment scrubbing floors and cooking breakfast for a nearby family. Upon graduation she too went into missionary service in China where she married her husband and buried him a few years later in the mission compound. She stayed there ministering for decades as her two young daughters grew up. They in turn married missionaries and served in Papua New Guinea. It was Mrs. Grace Waterman, in her retirement years, who used to be assistant cook in the College when I commenced in 1957.
When I stand among the old boys, I see some notable people who have led powerful ministries in university and churches across the land, but I guess the one who appeals to me most, is a frail lady who entered College in 1925 and has worked in India for the past 61 years: Edna Vorswer, who revolutionised a whole State through her work at Baramati. Millions of trees have been planted in a huge reforestation programme, water reticulation dams have been built holding millions of gallons of water turning India’s dry and parched desert areas into vegetable gardens. After 61 years of selfless service the time has come for her to lay down her spade, the plans for new dams, schools and colleges, and put to one side her engineering helmet which she used while working on drilling rigs and blasting units to return to the College where she had trained more than six decades previously.
It was an emotional day last week as we stood and prayed together for the last time prior to the demolition of the College. As I left I saw the College logo with its motto, “Omnia Ad Dei Gloriam” “All To The Glory of God”.
The men and women who started as I did have been true to that motto over all the years.
But I never realized how significant that College would be as every Sunday night I would conclude my church service, walk out into the heavy air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, start my motor bike, and head back towards the College of The Bible to train as a young minister, thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
