With a Bit of Personal Effort
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.
One of the young men I met in the church at the time was a fine eighteen year old young fellow by the name of Les Gason. Les had been in trouble at school. His reports were not good and he was introduced to me for the very first time as someone who had dropped out of school at the third form. The person introducing him to me made the point “Perhaps you can do something with Les he hasn’t got a very good record behind him!”.
I felt very embarrassed at this introduction to the young fellow. It is not a nice thing to be introduced to other people as a failure when you are only seventeen. The fact was that Les did have trouble at school. He didn’t cope with his maths, nor with his reading and writing and I wondered whether he may have had some problem with dyslexia or with his eyesight because his reading seemed to be terribly poor.
However, he was employed and he worked as a welder in a steel fabrication shop. There were plenty of older men in the community who worked alongside of him doing similar kinds of work and who were happy with their lot. But I personally didn’t want to see Les spending the rest of his time as a fabricator in a steel welding shop in a small country town. There were no long term prospects for advancement there, unless he did a great deal to improve himself.
I asked Les very early in my country ministry if he would join me in starting a new boys club I was anxious to run and Les immediately agreed. That was the beginning of what has been a life long friendship. Les’ enthusiasm and reliability running the boys club was something to be admired. I had worked with many youth leaders over the past thirty years but this young man was outstanding in his commitment and reliability. I had a strong sense of discipline with the young lads, with emphasis upon clean uniform, physical fitness, drill and marching, as well as earning badges by doing appropriate extra activities. Les had never had any background of this kind at all but he very quickly jumped into learning everything from first aid to rope knots, to scripture lessons and camping programmes.
Les was a slim teenager, with short cut hair, a wry smile out of the corner of his mouth and a cheeky grin. What spoilt Les was immediately he started to read something or speak to you. He was functionally illiterate as far as reading was concerned, and his speech was peppered with bad grammar. He was a clean spoken young man as far as foul words were used, it was just that he couldn’t pronounce many words and didn’t know how to accurately use good grammar.
Les was willing to help me do anything except get up in front of other people and speak or read.
Troubled with his inability to cope with reading he came to me one day and said “Mr. Moyes, you know I like working with you, but I really have trouble with these kids. Most of them can read better than I can and when I speak my words don’t come out proper. Will you help me?”
I remember saying to him “Les, you can go anywhere you want to in Ararat from where you are now with a little bit of personal effort. And with a little bit of personal effort you can go far beyond Ararat if you want to. This world could be your own backyard but you have to make a little bit of personal effort yourself.”
Les looked at me with a look that was warm and appreciative. “If you help me proper, I’ll never let youse down” he said with obvious meaning and I believed him.
Les persevered with trying to read and to practise reading aloud but it was of little avail. In spite of his effort he wasn’t getting very far at all. However, the one who was to help Les most of all arrived in our church. She had come into the small country town to work as a nurse in the Ararat and District General Hospital and when this pretty young new nurse arrived at church Les took an immediate interest. Les and Barbara quickly became friends and I took the opportunity to take Barbara to one side and asked her if she would help me with trying to help Les read and speak correctly. With Barbara’s obvious willingness to help I then gave Les some remarkable challenges.
He attended a class I ran for young helpers in church services and he very quickly learnt what leadership in public worship meant.
I then asked him to read some Scripture lessons in the evening service. Les was embarrassed. He wanted to read them but he felt that if he did people would laugh at him. He accepted the challenge and set about with Barbara’s help, learning the Scripture passages. I remember encouraging him to learn one verse of the Scripture each night and the following night to add an additional verse in the passage I had given him. He read and reread the verse chosen for each night over and over. He told me that he had read one Scripture verse more than one hundred times until he learnt to pronounce every word correctly.
Les with determination and grit was really showing a little bit of personal effort. Then Barbara came into the work and listened to Les reading. Barbara told me that after they had been out one night Les came back to the house where she was staying and they settled down in the lounge room not to kiss and cuddle as most young couples would, but for Les to stand up near the mantelpiece with his back to the fireplace reading out aloud with his chin held high, his Bible verses. Barbara listened carefully and provided constructive criticism. So it was that Les came to an evening service and read through the appropriate verses better than he had ever read anything in his life.
The success of reading that Scripture lesson enthused him and he immediately wanted to do more. We put Les down on the regular reading plan for Scriptures in morning service and the person who was functionally illiterate spent hours and hours every week learning by
heart the correct way to pronounce words and to read the Scripture for the next Sunday. I was absolutely thrilled at the dedication and the effort put into his reading by this young man.
It was about this time that we suggested to Les he might ask the boss to give him a week off in order to go to Melbourne to do a concentrated one week session with the Dale Carnegie Institute. Les really feared going to Melbourne and to be part of the Dale Carnegie course of learning to stand properly, speak properly and present himself in public. But with a little bit of effort he remembered could go anywhere so long as he made that personal effort. Some time after he booked into the course in Melbourne and completed the concentrated course.
At the same time as he was putting the effort into the boys club and the youth work and the reading of Scriptures at church, he was developing his friendship with Barbara and apparently doing extraordinarily well at work. It wasn’t long before his new found confidence and ability led him to be appointed leading hand.
I left Ararat at this point in his personal development but Les did not give up. He placed effort into writing and had his girlfriend check his spelling, punctuation and grammar. The little bit of effort was applied every day after work and soon his reading and writing skills greatly improved. Les became engaged to Barbara and it was my joy, a year or two later, to be present at their wedding service and to marry them to each other. They gave me a magnificent New Testament beautifully inscribed which I have kept to this day and value as a token of their friendship.
I had said to Les that with a little bit of effort he could go anywhere in Ararat, but gave him the view that from Ararat with a little bit of effort he could end up making the world his own backyard.
Les was appointed salesman with the firm and started travelling throughout Victoria selling products in the agricultural industry field. He succeeded in meeting his sales targets and was then made salesman covering South Australia and New South Wales as well. With a little bit of personal effort he gained all of his targets in those two States and was then given additional territory in Queensland and Western Australia. His inability to communicate in his early teenage years had now become a strong point and his ability to communicate allowed him to write contracts right across the nation.
He eventually was appointed in charge of the factory, having a good knowledge of sales and marketing and at the same time, because he started in the steel shop as a welder and fabricator, had a good knowledge of production techniques.
Les and Barbara set up their own home, eventually became parents and produced a fine family of three children. At the same time Les was continuing to study and to improve his abilities to relate and to communicate. Soon he was appointed factory foreman and after about ten years he became factory manager and eventually a director of the firm, and then Managing Director.
Because my family continued to go back to Ararat year after year to have our annual holidays on Judd’s farm, I kept in contact with Les and Barbara. The friendship deepened over the years and I appreciated all the young man had done personally to improve his skills. One day in an airport lounge in Hawaii I was planning to sleep on the carpet in the corner of the transit lounge before my plane left for America where I was on a speaking tour, when I saw a familiar short cropped haircut from behind it was Les and here he was on the same flight heading towards America where he was expanding his opportunity in sales ability and seeking to break into the American market for his company. That was the first of many overseas trips to Europe, America, Africa and other countries. It is a strange feeling that I had in the airport lounge of Honolulu, I remembered my words “with a little bit of personal effort you could make the world into your own backyard”. Les was certainly turning the world into his backyard as he travelled, wrote business, gained ideas and brought back to Australia insights that helped in the manufacture of Australian secondary and agricultural products.
Today Les is a wealthy middle aged business man in Ararat, a member of the Wise Men, the group that support the work of the YMCA, living in a very fine home with Barbara and their family. He is a businessman of some repute in the town, and a community leader of whom the community is proud. He is today, Chairman on the Board, a national leader in Gideon’s and a faithful member of the Church.
But I always think of him as a rather embarrassed and shy young teenager who could hardly read or write, who had left school too early and who was faced with spending his years as a welder, but who was determined to make a little bit of personal effort that might take him anywhere in Ararat and turn the world into his own backyard.
There was, however, one part of Les’ development that will always stay in my memory. During 1964, I asked a group of men to meet with me and to undertake a course in what we called Lay Visitation Evangelism. These laymen in the church were to be trained in visiting other people and sharing their faith with them so that the other person might come to recognise Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and desire to become a member of our church. We had eight or nine men who accepted my invitation to undertake this training. Les was the most hesitant and reluctant person among the nine. Most of the other men were competent, well read and experienced Christians of many years standing. Les felt he didn’t belong with them, and at this stage was unable to read or write well, nor to speak with any sense of authority or smoothness. But Les was determined to put a little bit of effort into learning how to share his faith.
Each night for thirteen weeks I trained the men in elements of Christian doctrine and faith, in how to share friendship with other people, how to cultivate their interest in things of God, how to witness to their own personal faith, and then how to use the Bible verses in such a way that people for themselves could understand the essential elements of the Gospel and to come to a point where they could respond personally with faith in Jesus Christ.
Most of the men in the group had heard it all before. They were quite confident of how they would be able to speak to other people. Many of them would quote to me additional verses that could be used in the
presentation and ways in which they thought they could quite easily outline and develop my suggestions. Les had nothing additional to add, for he was still grappling with pronouncing the Bible verses and with the task of remembering the simplest of outlines.
After three months of intensive training we then started visiting people in the local community. The idea was we met together each Wednesday night, shared in prayer, and then took assignments among the families of the community arriving, by appointment, at one family who would be expecting each man. Over the next hour the man would share his insights and understanding of the Christian gospel and help lead a person to an understanding of what it means to be committed to Jesus Christ. After such commitments were given there would be prayers of commitment and our man would leave behind some Christian literature for reading by the family and for a subsequent follow up visit or two. The various visitors would then return back to the church where at 9.30 or so we would meet for prayer together before breaking to go in various directions to our homes.
I was more than excited and on tip toe in anticipation as I came back after my first visit of sharing the gospel with a family to await the other men as they returned from their visits in the church hall.
The first one back was Les. He told me very simply what had happened during his visit. Then gradually the other men returned one after the other. We waited an additional hour and some had still not returned. They were still talking with their families. As we shared the results of our visit one man and then another told the story of what had happened, of how they had got side traced into discussing evolution, or side tracked into talking about the recent Billy Graham Crusade, or some event that was occurring in the life of our church until they realised that their time was gone and they had to get back to the report session. Their night had been spent in friendly conversation but to no avail. Man after man reported long and involved conversations on this and every other subject imaginable but no one had been led to Christ. I was utterly crushed.
Except for Les. Les had indicated that on his first appointment he should visit the sergeant of the police. I had shuddered when Les said that he would like to visit him. The sergeant of police in Ararat was quite a tough nut, a man with wide and very worldly experience. How we even had him on our contact list I do not know but he certainly wasn’t the person for us to visit at this stage, and certainly not Les. I had wanted one of our more competent and able business men who could talk with ease and freedom about any issue, who had education and background, to visit the sergeant of police. But Les had picked him and indicated he really wanted to visit him and rather than disappoint the young lad and show I didn’t have confidence in him, I decided to let Les visit even if it meant he might come dispirited with the potential aggressiveness of the sergeant ringing in his ears.
With rather despairing heart I said “And tell me, Les, how did you get on with the policeman?” Les said “Oh, it was wonderful. I told him that I had come to talk to him about his faith in Jesus Christ, about getting baptised and coming into the membership of the Ararat Church of Christ.
I said, “And what did the sergeant of police say to you when you started off just like that Les?” “Well he looked at me and said ‘I wasn’t expecting you to come, Les. I’ve seen you round Ararat and I know what you are like and what you do. I really wasn’t expecting you. I was expecting your father or one of the other men from the Church and I was going to have a good night of arguing with them and disputing everything they had to say. But somehow, Les, I don’t feel like doing that with you.’”
Les said, “Well I couldn’t argue with him about anything, but I could tell him about Jesus Christ who had made my life different and how I wanted him to find the difference that Jesus can make in his life as I have found in mine. So I told him simply what Jesus Christ meant to me, of how my life has changed, and how I was not putting in a little bit of personal effort to make myself a better Christian, a better church man, and a better leader of our youth group. I showed him in the Scriptures how all of us are sinners and need God’s grace and help. I asked him if he understood the verses as I went through them one at a time. He
understood them quite well so then I said to him, ‘Is there any reason why you should not give your life to Christ at this time?’. The policeman looked at me for a long time and said, ‘You’re the first man who has ever spoken clear, simple sense to me about the Christian faith. I want you to know Les that I thought I could argue against anybody about the Christian faith, but you have just shown me in a very simple way that I am an ordinary man who is a sinner and who needs to be saved through faith in Jesus Christ. No Les, I don’t need to know anything else. I believe that Jesus is God’s Son and my Saviour and I would like to be baptised in obedience to Him and become a member of His Church.’”
Les didn’t seem to appreciate the significance of what he was saying, but everybody standing around him looked at each other in disbelieve the sergeant of police! The toughest nut in the community to reach with the faith. And yet Les, in his simple and unpretentious way had sincerely opened the Scriptures and they had spoken to the heart of that man.
We had our prayers of thanksgiving and each went to their home. The next day three of the other men who had not returned to the church in time to meet with us called in to let me know that they had interesting evenings of discussion on this and that and every other subject imaginable without getting around to the point of commitment to Jesus Christ.
Week after week those men went visiting and for weeks the same result occurred every night: Les came home with another man committed to Jesus Christ and the rest of the fellows were still out there talking.
At the end of a month or two I indicated to the fellows that they ought to sit down there and just listen to what Les was doing.
The fact was that the people who talked most achieved least and Les with his simplicity and sincerity simply shared his faith with other people and let the Scriptures do the speaking. It was that approach that brought the return of committed lives.
Les had taught me a lesson. Be simple. Stick to the Scriptures. Be sincere in your concern for the person you are visiting. And when you have allowed the Scriptures to speak remain silent. Les, by his very openness and transparent simplicity allowed the Scriptures to meet the deepest needs of people. The boy who had dropped out of school to become a welder, was in fact a very effective personal evangelist.
With a little bit of personal effort a man could go anywhere in Ararat, and Les has proved that and today, as father, deacon and businessman, he has high standing in his local community. With a little bit of personal effort he could turn the world into his own backyard, and Les has also proved that. As for his business life, he has been most successful and is a millionaire many times over.
But Les proved to me another important lesson, it only takes little bit of personal effort to win another person for Jesus Christ when one uses the Scripture and the power of personal testimony. It is when a person gives too much of ourselves and too little of Jesus that we block the Spirit of God of doing His life changing work.
And so I made my way home 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
