What a Coat of Paint Can Do
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 60’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
The church secretary at the little wooden Ascot Vale church had seen student ministers come and go for more than forty years. They often came with high enthusiasm with what they wanted to change and went in despair having met an unchangeable group of church members. Basil the church secretary was one of those who loved the church tremendously and was concerned at the attempts over the years by various students to change that which the older members held dear. Basil had married the daughter of the previous church secretary and she had been in the church since the day of her birth more than 50 years earlier. There was a strong resistance to change and they knew well that all they had to do was oppose the student minister for ten months or so and his year appointment would run out and they need not worry any more as another student would be coming.
I had brought up the proposal of changing the church administrative structures with my Functional Church Board concept, but it had been knocked on the head by the sudden attack of appendicitis and Basil’s resolute opposition.
It seemed that nothing would get this church to change and so my girlfriend Beverley and I decided on a different tack. Instead of changing the church, we would learn to love them as they were. We decided to love them as people and love the building that they loved just as it was. What we could do was to make what was there better without fundamentally changing it.
So we spent a few Saturdays weeding the front gardens of the church and up the side drive. We spent another day working on the tennis court, weeding around the edges and repairing the net. We spent another day cutting the grass and weeding around the toilets and painting the ladies loo.
These signs of effort did not go unnoticed and it was the cause of a fair amount of discussion about how the young student and his girlfriend were showing real effort in making their church look nice.
One problem had long confronted the Church Officers. The inside of the high church was very dark and the paint was peeling from the high front wall behind the platform. The Officers had discussed this matter over the years as it looked like it had been peeling since the 1930’s. But the wall was so high that the cost of repainting was prohibitive. They had discussed various firms and had had some quotes, but by the time firms brought in all of their scaffolding and cleaned off all the peeling paint and then repainted it, the cost would be beyond that which the church could provide. They were locked into a situation where they wanted something done but were unable to agree how to do it.
In one of those crazy decisions that young people make so easily, Beverley and I decided that we would paint it ourselves without telling anybody in the church. The cost? We would pay for the paint. The firm? It would be Beverley and Gordon Proprietary Limited. The scaffolding? Well, the professional firm needed safety scaffolding built over the entire front of the wall, but the firm of Gordon and Beverley decided we could do it with 40 foot extension ladders with some steel brackets and some planks between two ladders.We hired what we wanted and physically carried it round to the church. The tins of paint were purchased along with new rollers and brushes. During the next week, day after day, we cleaned down the high peeling, dirty wall, scraping back the paint, preparing the surface for a good coat. Late into the night we would work climbing up the high ladders and balancing precariously on the planks while we scraped and patched and primed and undercoated. We then had sufficient time to give a full coat of a light blue paint over the entire wall. The job was finished. We lowered down the planks, took off the steel braces, and lowered the huge extension ladders and returned them to the paint hire place. Every bone in our bodies was aching but the church front wall was completely painted a pastel blue. And what if the people did not like that colour? We decided that if anyone did not like that colour they were free to paint it any other colour they liked themselves!
When we arrived at church early the following Sunday morning all the early arrivals were standing around looking at the freshly painted wall complimenting the Officers on their choice. Various Officers standing around nodded their heads and agreed it looked much better and tried to remember when approval was given for this and how much it was going to cost. One Deacon thought it must have been decided at a meeting that he was not able to attend, but he went ahead and took the credit anyway. Another Deacon thought that the decision must have been made during a moment when he temporarily snoozed in a meeting, but he took the credit anyway.
The wall behind the platform looked so clean and neat and good that everybody was impressed. The only trouble was it showed up some of the cracked stained glass and a few missing pieces where mischievous boys had broken the stained glass windows. Looking at the cracks in the glass against the beautifully painted front wall, one man offered to repair them revealing for the first time that in his youth he had worked as a glazier and that, at his home, he still had quite an assortment of pieces of suitable coloured glass. He did and the windows looked complete for the first time in decades. Some of the women got to work and with suds and warm water carefully washed all the stained glass windows, and the whole place took on a new sense of lightness. That made the lights look dull and dusty and a young electrician brought his ladders and lowered the old lights to the ground and replaced them with new. The new light made the church furniture look dull, and a group of women decided to polish all of the pews and the choir stalls.
When the furniture was polished the communion rail, the pulpit and the communion table also looked as if they needed a good polish.
Then one Sunday morning a magnificent rosewood French polished communion table stood where the old one used to be. Surrounding it was a completely new communion rail, magnificently French polished. It had taken weeks of work and no one knew who made it. It just appeared anonymously.
I knew of only one man in the church who had the skills to work like that, and one afternoon after work had finished and before the evening meal had been served, I called in on our old friend Basil, and found him in the garage French polishing some more pieces of glorious rosewood. He was the secret donor. He was making some intricate wooden lace work which would appear in front of new polished woodwork to run right across the front of the platform. He also made some matching polished wood doors to replace the old dark stained ones.
Basil said to me simply, “The church was looking so good I decided that I should make a gift to God in appreciation for the life of my wife Dorothy. When we had our last child, the baby was born safely but Dorothy nearly died. For nearly two weeks it was touch and go with her life and we earnestly prayed to God. God spared her life and I have always wanted to do something in appreciation. This new communion furniture is just my way of saying thanks to God for giving me back the life of my dear wife.”
The furniture was moved in during the week, quietly and without anybody knowing. No one else in the congregation for years afterwards ever found out who the secret donor was.
Other people quickly joined in making their contribution. A new clock was fixed to the walls. The old hymn books were taken out of circulation and ladies worked on a street stall to raise the money to purchase new hymn books. A new light appeared over the organ, and the whole church began to take on a sense of transformation and purpose.
More changes had occurred than we ever realized, and they came about not because we forced change, but that we learnt to love the people as they were, and learnt to love what they loved and improved what we had. The tie that was binding us as young students to the older people in the church was growing richer week by week. They asked us to stay for another year, and then another two years, and then another three years, and then another three years and as the years went by we were married, we settled in to our first manse and three years later our first child was born. And all the time that church was transformed into a loving and caring group of people and gave to us some of the richest experiences of our life.
Change can come about by revolution, but I had discovered that change could also come about quietly by evolution, through the powerful influence of love.
That was a big lesson to learn and I pondered it often as I walked out of the little wooden church into the heavy night air with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, started my motor bike and headed back towards the College of The Bible to train as a young minister, thinking about my meeting with some of God’s children in the slums of Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
