At Cheltenham
When the circumstances behind Gordon’s call to Cheltenham leaked out, not everyone was happy to welcome the new minister. Although innocent, some of the members blamed him for the shabby way in which their former pastor had been treated. It took time and patience before Gordon’s exuberance, his inexhaustible flow of ideas and his amazing propensity for hard work won over most of the congregation.
The Moyes had scarcely unpacked their few personal belongings and arranged the manse furniture to their liking, before Gordon began planning for the future expansion of the church.
“We’ll double the membership in no time, Bev. This church already has great programmes for the Sunday School and older people, but not much to attract youth or non-believers to the church. We must evangelize. Brighten up. Let the community know we’re here.”
Beverley acted as sounding board. Airing his ideas, answering her questions and listening to her suggestions, gave Gordon time to plan the details and perfect his schemes before submitting them to the church board.
Although his twenty-seventh birthday was only weeks past, experience had already taught him a few things. He realised that church members often resented a new minister’s attitude of changing things around to suit his own talents and tastes, so before he instituted any of his ideas Gordon wisely began by strengthening what was already established.
He also made clear that it was not because of any shortcomings on his predecessor’s part that he and Beverley had been offered the post. On every possible occasion he publicly applauded the ideas that the former minister had implemented. When he could no longer contain the new ideas seething in his own mind, he gradually suggested them to the church’s officers.
At the first board meeting Gordon found that the church’s biggest problem was finances. This was normal. He had never heard of a church that could not use more money. Worse still, Cheltenham church was badly in debt. Key members had quietly loaned money to keep the church afloat and the interest payments were a constant noose about the congregational neck.
Gordon made some instant enemies when he insisted that the true position be revealed to the entire church.
“There should be no secrets,” he said. “I love this church as much as you do and the only way to get it back on a financial footing is to openly discuss the situation and have a pooling of ideas.”
Some of the resultant meetings were stormy, some unproductive and all were lengthy, but tackling the problem head-on was the only way to solve it and eventually success crowned their united efforts on the financial front.
Two and three generations of several families had grown up in the 110 year-old Cheltenham Church and they did not take kindly to any type of change. New ministers, new members and new ideas were all regarded with suspicion.
“I think some of the church’s departments have been conducted in the same way ever since it began,” Gordon groaned. “We’ll have to install new leaders before we can get anything moving.”
“It will be hard,” Beverley rejoined doubtfully. “Apparently some of the members have held top positions for decades.”
“All the more reason for change.”
As months passed and new and younger members joined the church, some of the older ones obviously felt threatened. They had held supervisory positions for years, doing the same old things in the same old ways. On principle they resisted any suggestion of change.
Tactfully but firmly Gordon set about convincing them that positions in the church were not hereditary, they had to be earned. For the best interest of all, the old leaders must move with the times and welcome new ideas or else make room for someone who did.
To his surprise and unutterable relief, the majority of the established leaders accepted the changes with good grace, or stepped down and let younger, more energetic persons take their places. When that happened a load rolled off his shoulders and he had time to think of his own future.
Now that he had shelved his plans for advanced study in America, he must see about furthering his education in Australia. No one knew better than he all the obstacles and arguments that arose when he presented some of his ambitious plans to the church board. Members asked questions that he could not satisfactorily answer. He needed more than typical theological knowledge.
With this in mind Gordon undertook courses in people management, human relationships, leadership and psychology, fitting them as best he could into his busy programme. Business management and financial management courses also loomed large on his study agenda and he planned to deal with them as time permitted. He needed to know so much. It was this need that led to the implementing of one of his bright ideas.
As young parents, the Moyes had gone through difficult times. They had no nearby grandparents or other relatives to whom they could turn for help and advice when the children were sick, or teething, or just plain naughty. They had to work out their own solutions to such problems as how to discipline a toddler; how to develop a tiny tot’s social skills; how to explain death to a little one; how to prepare a young child for the coming of the new baby.
As he went around visiting people in his new parish Gordon discovered that there were many young parents facing similar problems so he decided to run a course for young parents. He’d find the best paediatricians and other child experts in Melbourne and persuade them to lecture on these subjects. At the same time he’d arrange for some of the women in his church to provide a creche while the lecture was in progress, so that the parents could listen and ask questions without being distracted by their own or someone else’s children.
To advertise the course Gordon prepared a glossy brochure with photos of the six experts he had chosen and a brief description of their specialties, and how they could help worried parents. On the front cover he had a photo of Beverley and himself with Jenny and Peter and the legend: “Even the minister has young children…”
The church members helped to letterbox a few thousand of these brochures, and Gordon wrote stories for the local newspaper about the famous men who were coming to lecture on child care. The response was overwhelming.
The price of the course covered several books on Child Rearing, including an excellent one that the Baptist Church had recently published on `Introducing Your Child to God.’ Gordon swotted this subject and taught the last of the series of six lectures; marvelling as he did, that parents paid fees to come and learn how to rear their children in a Christian fashion.
By the end of the series the people had become accustomed to meeting in the Church of Christ hall. They had used the church facilities, become acquainted with the minister and the ladies who ran the creche, so it was the easiest thing in the world to invite them to bring their children to Sunday School while they attended a brief and bright church service designed for young parents.
The course met with overwhelming success and many delighted parents said: “You’ve helped us with the young ones, but it’s the teen-agers that cause the problems.”
Right. With the Board’s permission Gordon set about arranging a second course, following the same pattern as the first. He located experts to deal with subjects such as teen-age rebellion, teen-age discipline, getting teen-agers to study, helping them develop a dress sense, how to understand teen-agers’ music. This time it was older parents who attended the course.
That course led to parents asking for help in explaining what was then delicately referred to as “the facts of life” to their teen- agers, so he developed a sex-education program called SLAM (Sex, Love and Marriage).
As before Gordon rounded up experts who dealt with the biological nature of sexual development, the serious side of sexual intercourse, problems of venereal disease (AIDS had not yet reared its ugly head), all illustrated with diagrams and films.
The Cheltenham Church of Christ gym hall seated 500 people and on opening night there was a queue right across the street. Parents did not send their children, they came with them. On certain nights there were closed lectures for females only, when girls came with their mothers; and for males only, when fathers came with their sons. Nowadays it sounds quaint, but if attendance was any measuring-rod, those lectures were highly successful.
The results of all these courses amazed even the most skeptical church officers and members. They saw hundreds of people queueing up to pay their money and flock to the lectures. More amazing still many of these people began to attend Sunday service and become involved in some of the church’s mid-week activities.
Encouraged by these results they planned more courses. Gordon never ran out of ideas for new topics. “How to be Happy Though Married” was a popular one that possibly saved the divorce courts a great deal of work. As well as secular subjects he branched out to specifically Christian topics.
For several years the hierarchy of the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational Churches had been studying a proposed basis for uniting. So Gordon organized a course on Church Union. By 1968 the Cheltenham Church of Christ was conducting 17 different six-week courses each year.
“Attendance will drop during winter,” one of the church elders predicted. “It gets pretty cold here.”
“Then we’ll have our most interesting topics begin in July,” retorted Gordon. “That should keep the attendances up.
“It’s no use having any courses in January because most people are away on holidays; but this will be an ideal time to introduce a different kind of course, this time for Church leaders.”So in the early seventies his idea of an Australia-wide Summer School for Successful Ministry was born.
Not too long after the Summer School for Successful Ministry, Gordon began a school of another kind. At his instigation the Cheltenham Church of Christ organized the “Cheltenham School for Continuing Education.”
While he was working in Melbourne in the early 1960’s Gordon had joined in supporting Stan Gilmour, Executive Director to the Employers Federation in Victoria, in establishing the Early Planning for Retirement Association. The EPRA grew to have tens of thousands of members who met in local churches or community halls, and undertook hundreds of interesting activities in preparation for retirement.
“Let’s have something similar to the EPRA,” Gordon suggested to his committee, “we can work along the same lines but let’s not confine it to senior citizens. We’ll let anyone join.”
“It will mean a lot more work,” one of the men grumbled good- naturedly, “and what does the Church stand to get out of it?”
“A lot of goodwill and the satisfaction of helping people,” Gordon said blandly.
“How much is it going to cost us?” The church treasurer posed the question.
“Nothing in hard cash,” Gordon assured. “This will be run along the lines of our evening courses, only it will not be so specialized. We’ll make a small charge for our classes—people won’t attend if we don’t, they become suspicious if a church offers anything FREE. They know it’s sure to have religious strings attached to it.”
The treasurer nodded and Gordon continued: “What’s more, people don’t appreciate anything that comes free. The more they pay for something, the more they value it.”
Murmurs of assent greeted his observation and then one of the younger board members asked: “Who is going to teach these courses? You can’t do them all.”
Always a little wary of their young minister’s bright ideas, the committee now concentrated on ironing out the details.
The first subjects offered were mostly of the lecture type. Only three subjects were `hands-on’: Crochet, Oil Painting and First Aid. Perhaps Exercise, should be included—surely there would have to be student participation in `Exercise.’
Most of the classes covered church-related topics such as `Bible, Death and Dying, Marriage Enrichment, Planned Retirement, Vocational Guidance for Youth, and a Theological Course which was advertised to continue for three years.
The cost of the classes ranged from $5 per subject to $40 for the two week-ends needed to study PET—Parent Effectiveness Training. Some classes ran for two terms of five sessions each, others continued for the whole year.
The school for Continuing Education filled a community need and it succeeded beyond Gordon’s highest expectations. The first year 1,200 people paid to attend classes, and for the next four years the number of participants doubled annually. By 1980 when it changed its name to Southern Bayside Learning, the school had some 40,000 enrolled in classes.
The idea of “Neighbourhood Schools” to lure the unchurched did not originate with Gordon, though he was one of the first to implement it in Australia. Never short of plans himself, he also had a knack of building on, or adapting other’s ideas to make them essentially his own.
All these activities took a great deal of Gordon’s time and though the church members supported and helped him in every possible way, he felt that he needed a full-time assistant.
In 1972, while on a study tour in America, Gordon met Reverend Jeff Benson, an expert in Community Education who conducted courses at Enid, Oklahoma.
Immediately he knew that this was the man he needed. It took nearly three years to negotiate the transfer but in 1975 Jeff Benson joined the Cheltenham Church to minister solely in the adult education programme.
By then they conducted 28 courses with 70 paid lecturers, but the year after Jeff arrived the number of classes jumped to 60, with thousands of people attending. Under his leadership it continued to grow until the Cheltenham School of Continuing Education had thirty- nine thousand people enrolled and classes held in every hall that could be hired in the southern Bayside area.
