LifeLine
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was a village. I then became Pastor to the Slums of Inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a Country Parson and a Teacher at a One Teacher Bush School out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for thirteen years, I was a Suburban Minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And now, for more than 20 years I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
Every superintendent at Wesley Mission has had a huge load of counselling of troubled and distressed people. Often because the Superintendent has a high public profile people come to him from all over the city in order to talk confidentially about their personal issues. When Alan Walker was Superintendent he was overwhelmed by the amount of personal counselling that came to him and an idea came in 1961 to use the telephone to allow a 24hr per day counselling programme manned by volunteers to provide someone who could always be there when a desperate person needed help. The idea of a Christian Counselling service received enthusiastic support from members of the church who undertook a training programme in counselling. The re-construction of a Flinders street Darlinghurst property began in 1961 and became the first LifeLine centre. The title of the service was given to it by the sub-editor of the Sydney Morning Herald who called this new telephone counselling service “LifeLine”. Volunteers trained for 6 months in order to equip themselves to counsel people in all kinds of personal difficulties. Alan Walker opened the Lifeline Centre on Saturday 16th of March 1963. Immediately the telephones began ringing. Each telephone counsellor worked a four-hour shift once a fortnight and summarised the details of every conversation. The following morning a small committee examined the reports and determined if any follow up support was needed. In the first year there were 11,600 calls.
The second call was answered by Ivan Reichelt, an elder from the 7pm congregation who was one of LifeLine’s longest serving counsellors having served for 26 years. He took the second call in and a man with a query in his voice asked “Do you know how many holes are in a crumpet?” The man was not a practical joker. He was a mentally sick man who desperately needed help and he was trying to describe his own feelings about himself. Alan Walker continued to be involved heavily in the training of counsellors from 1963 to 1978. Over 15 years he trained hundreds of counsellors.
The genius of LifeLine was that it had about it an anonymity – people could ring without revealing who they were. It also had confidentiality because they knew that whatever they said to the counsellor would be kept strictly confidential. There was also the ubiquity of a telephone. People could turn to that phone wherever they were. Soon the 11,000 calls had reached 25,000 when I became the chairman of the Lifeline board and in 1979 took charge of the workings of LifeLine Sydney.
By this time we had a large number of LifeLine centres around Australia and oversees. Today that number has grown to 270 cities in the world where there are LifeLine telephone-counselling services. When I took over the leadership of LifeLine there were two very serious problems. The first was that the type of counsellor, which had been trained in recent years, which had come into LifeLine, reflected a Christianity that did not truly represent the evangelical commitment of Wesley Mission members. The result was that some of those counsellors were leading Lifeline away from its Christian basis. It was becoming a secular humanist advice line. The second problem was that LifeLine Sydney was running with poor management, which need urgent attention.
The second problem was handled quickly. I terminated the existing management and appointed committed Christian management without personal problems and baggage that was complicating the previous management. And to help overcome the secular humanist thrust moved the LifeLine centre from Darlinghurst where it operated as an independent unit into Wesley Centre in Pitt Street where it was under our eye 24 hours per day.
With new staff, new enthusiasm and the direct oversight of Wesley Mission Lifeline Sydney soon began to break all records for the numbers of people effectively helped. Soon we had topped 60, 000 calls per annum.
By 1981 I was taking time to examine the nature of those who were calling LifeLine and the kind of problems that people were facing. Out of that we developed a whole series of new ministries. The greatest reason for people calling LifeLine in those days was what we described as social isolation – people who felt utterly alone, who had no one with whom they could relate or talk. Quite a number of these people were repeat callers who found a friend who was willing to give support and encouragement to them. We quickly learned to encourage those people to come to Wesley Missions Singles’ Society or to become involved in some of the other activities of the Mission where they could meet with others. This had an interesting impact upon the life of the congregation because we very soon developed a large number of people attending services, groups and activities who could be described as being socially inept – good people but just unable to relate well with other people. This was going to be very demanding upon the elders within the life of the church to provide support and encouragement who needed one on one support. A second group of callers were those who were so depressed with life that they could see no reason for continuing. These people were potential suicides. Some of those people in fact committed suicide after ringing to give a final call and their number was unable to be traced in those days. It is always distressing to a counsellor to find a person who suicides. I remember receiving a letter at home from a man who simply told me where he had left his will and possessions and asking me to explain why it was he was killing himself to the defacto; where his body would be found and requesting me to go and speak to his partner who had been living with him and explain the facts to her. By the time I had received that letter the following day he was already dead. I notified the police about the location of the body. Then I went and told his partner who was worried because he had not been home all night. She was so supported during the time of the funeral and there after that when I looked up on the first week of the next training course that commenced I saw her sitting in the front row. She became one of our regular and very reliable counsellors.
There were many other reasons why people rang LifeLine in those days. Some days there were family issues with people unable to cope with children and we often were able to refer these to our Dalmar Child and Family Care and provide volunteers who would come to their home and help them with the business of bringing up children. Others were suffering from mental illnesses such as Schizophrenia and severe depression or anorexia and we were able to tell those people that help was available in spite of the fact that they had no financial resources. We made it possible for those people to become patients within Wesley Hospital, a mental health hospital run by the Mission.
But I found another group of people who had consistent problems with their money. These were people who were running into debt, who were unable to control the new credit cards that were so freely being given out by banks and those people that were loosing money because of increasing gambling on poker machines. I realised if LifeLine was to effectively continue its work it would need to develop a subsidiary series of specialised services.
We had YouthLine a programme that was organised and run by youth for youth. Eventually YouthLine handed over most of its activities to the Kids Help Line where it continues strongly to this day.
CreditLine I established to help bring specialist counsellors with training in financial management, such as accountants, tax experts and bank managers who became counsellors. People who often rang with very deep problems and then came with bundles of unpaid bills and accounts to work out their situation one-on-one with one of our face to face financial counsellors. The task of credit counselling is today an enormous one and the work has spread now to cover the entire nation. Every credit counsellor throughout Australia has access to a special hotline into our CreditLine when they have problems and need advice. CreditLine is today the largest financial counselling service in the nation.
In 1981, there was concern with the large number of immigrants into the community who were suiciding. I decided to establish Ethnic LifeLine, a service where we trained people from a score of nationalities and provided counselling in more than twenty languages plus a free interpreter service. This service took off like wildfire, not so much from people who were wanting to commit suicide from different ethnic backgrounds but from people who wanted someone to translate the instructions on a new washing machine that they had purchased or to understand the ingredients in a packet from a supermarket. This free Ethnic LifeLine counselling and interpretation service eventually was taken over by the State Government and run as a free government service providing interpretation to new arrivals who did not speak English.
In the middle 1980’s a chance conversation with the then premier Barry Unsworth alerted me to a growing problem. Barry Unsworth indicated that his advisors had told him that gambling was going to become a major issue in society over the next ten years. He encouraged me to set up specialist counsellors just to deal with compulsive gamblers. These people needed strong psychological training as well as general counselling skills. I employed Mitchell Brown as the first full time gambling counsellor in the nation. Today he has built up an enviable record as being the father of gambling counsellors throughout the nation. We have been responsible for training most of the gambling counsellors in the nation. We likewise provide a nationwide telephone service for counsellors in remote and rural areas. In recent days this work has expanded into various ethnic communities and we provide Korean and Chinese gambling counsellors to deal specifically with the problems from those communities. With the opening of the casinos not only has the number of compulsive gamblers increased, but also the State Government levy upon casino turnover has meant that the government through the Casino Community Benefit Trust of which I have been a trustee since its incorporation, has been able to fund up gambling counselling across the state.
The old problem of suicide stayed with us. By 1990 I began to despair at the continuously increasing number of people who killed themselves each year. Because of the effectiveness of a campaign the Wesley Mission had run in 1979 to introduce seatbelts, .05 random breath testing and several other methods, the road toll in Sydney was being reduced year by year. The time came when suicide was the major cause of death outranking that of even road death among healthy Australians. Today 2800 people every year commit suicide and about 14 times that number contemplate or attempt it. That led us to set up a national strategy called Wesley LifeForce Suicide Prevention Service.
Today in conjunction with local community groups we have conducted hundreds of seminars training tens of thousands of ordinary Australians to identify the signs of suicide and to take practical steps to help a person who may be a future victim. We recently conducted seminars in 64 country towns throughout Victoria and are at the moment completing hundreds of seminars covering every community in NSW.
The final area of work, which became a specialist support service to people in need, was the establishment of Wesley Legal Service. This is a service which has brought together a group of qualified barristers and solicitors who work for Wesley Mission and who take up the cause of people who have lost their homes, jobs and personal self worth because of their own stupidity through gambling. The numbers of people who lose their home and who face court because of gambling debts is enormous. Frequently their families are very severely disadvantaged because of the sickness of compulsive gambling. Just this week one of our solicitors reported to me that she had been preparing with a QC a fraud case where the client stole $900 000 from her employer and lost it all on poker machines. She is only a young woman who has a passion for tennis and loves walking her pet dog. But this coming Friday she will go to jail for a long period of time. She is also working with a prisoner at Emu Plains who stole $76, 000 from her employer and put all of her money into poker machines. She is now doing two years prison and we are conducting an appeal on her behalf. This week our solicitors appear on behalf of a young father who has three children under the age of five who received an over payment of $60, 000 from Work Cover and did not return it. He spent the money on the poker machines and as it is, was to be sentenced to a prison term. Our legal team eventually were able to have him released on a 2 year bond and he went home tearfully to spend Easter with his wife and three young children.
We have been to court for a significant number of very elderly women all of whom have been aided by unscrupulous bank and club managers to mortgage their homes in order to get more cash to gamble in poker machines. Those managers were successfully taken to court, the gambling debts cancelled, the homes returned to the very foolish elderly women and the managers concerned both from the clubs and the banks were dismissed.
For 23 years now every Tuesday Night I have been involved in training over 2000 people for our telephone counselling services. My name is in the telephone book with my telephone number prominently displayed because I believe that I should be available for people to ring in times of crisis. Consequently on many nights of the week I have calls at 2 or 3 am from people wanting to tearfully tell their tales of woe or of contemplated suicide or of a ruined life. I am glad that I am able to refer these people on to our counsellors who are available 24hrs per day and who have specialised training to help them at their point of deepest need.
Sir Alan Walker realised that the telephone was a powerful tool when it was linked to trained committed counsellors. And Wesley Mission has provided free counselling services to more than 3 million people who have come to us for counselling through the telephone in the first instance but then in increasing numbers in face-to-face supportive work. We do this because it is part of our calling to provide a mantle of care over the streets of Sydney.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one of the world’s great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world’s great churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.
