Wesley Chapel
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was 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 13 years, I was a suburban minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And then, for more than 27 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.
One of my first experiences with Wesley Mission was preaching at the 94th anniversary of Wesley Mission in 1977. I was invited by the then Superintendent Rev Sir Alan Walker to fly to Sydney from my ministry in Melbourne to preach at the 94th anniversary of the Central Methodist Mission. It was just after the Methodist Church joined with the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches to form the Uniting Church in Australia.
I was a Churches of Christ minister and was in the middles of a nationally known church development at the Cheltenham Church of Christ. We had become rather famous for my book on “How to Grow an Australian Church”, and my lectures on church growth that had been attended by more than 15,000 church leaders. I was 38 at the time and really anxious to think through how churches could become relevant and effective in their ministries in the city. Alan Walker invited me to the 94th anniversary, remembering the occasion when Rev W G Taylor took the old Sydney Methodist Church, which had been established in 1812, and in 1884 gave it new name Central Methodist Mission with new slogan “A Living Christ for a Dying World.” In the early 1900’s, the Central Methodist Mission had centred it’s worshipping activities in the Lyceum Hall, later called the Lyceum Theatre and the various Superintendent’s following W G Taylor built up the largest congregation of any denomination in Australia.
The afternoon and evening congregations in the Lyceum Hall developed a core of people who attended no other church. This core of people needed a smaller church where they could worship. It was this desire that had led one of the Superintendent’s, Rev Rupert Williams, to construct Wesley Chapel to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Central Methodist Mission in 1934. Now I was coming along to preach at the 46th anniversary of this particular chapel, to meet with the leaders of the Central Methodist Mission and talk to them about my principles of church growth, to address a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon and to speak at the evening service in the Lyceum Theatre.
It was going to be a very busy Sunday. And it started off in Wesley Chapel. For 46 years Wesley Chapel served the members of Wesley Mission’s morning church congregation and was the home of staff communion services for the Central Methodist Mission and the Methodist Church who had their offices built above it.
I was thrilled to be invited to come and speak at this famous Wesley Chapel on Castlereagh Street. I had frequently visited, and on one occasion preached, at Wesley Church Melbourne—a massive large cathedral type church seating 1,500 made out of solid basalt rock, it’s high spire dominated Melbourne’s northern skyline, and was the Methodist Cathedral. I imagined Wesley Chapel in Castlereagh Street, Sydney to be something similar.
Was I in for a shock! It was small, built inside a series of other buildings, dusty with little natural light, and possessed an overwhelming smell of damp. What I didn’t recognised was this little Wesley Chapel had endeared itself over the past 46 year to the hearts of Methodists in Sydney.
When I become Superintendent of Wesley Mission in the late 1970’s I saw positive ways in which I could use this little Chapel off Castlereagh Street. Instead of having one congregation I established five congregations in the Chapel, one for each lunchtime of the week, and five on Sunday’s. As well, we used this Chapel for weddings, funerals, prayer meetings, lectures, bible studies and devotional times for groups and individuals. During the 1980’s, out of it grew two new parishes in the Uniting Church and eleven new congregations which totalled over 3,000 persons. During the 1980’s it became one of the busiest properties owned by the Uniting Church and integral to the total work of Wesley Central Mission, which conducted services of a different kind in the Lyceum Theatre and in the Wesley Chapel simultaneously. At one occasion we could have more than 1,500 people in worship. However, using little Chapel in the most positive ways possible didn’t overcome all of its deficiencies. Yet it became the centre of vital ministries under the leadership of four Superintendents.
Wesley Chapel was constructed under the leadership of Rev Rupert Williams, who was then Superintendent during the dreadful days of the Depression. He brought church members and crowds of the city’s poor to meet in Wesley Chapel and then go to the Fellowship Hall where people would receive bread and soup. In the depression years this was purely a subsistence ministry. But it was the means by which many families kept body and soul together. In 1938 the work was taken over by the Rev Dr Frank Rayward. Rayward had a passionate love, as did Rupert Williams, for Methodist young people and Methodist youth crowded into Wesley Chapel for their Saturday night functions once a month. It was here also that many young men assembled prior to marching out to war. At wars end when peace was declared in the Pacific, Dr Frank Rayward gathered crowds of people in ten consecutive services on the Sunday that peace was declared. Wesley Chapel almost became Frank Rayward’s major Platform because it was here that he became famous for his charming and theatrical wedding services over 20 years. Hundreds of people look back to being joined in matrimony through the remarkable wedding services conducted by Dr. Frank Rayward.
In 1958 Rev Dr. Alan Walker became Superintendent and he used the little Chapel much less than his predecessors. He preferred to preach in the Lyceum Theatre and to dust off the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon and turn it into a crusading platform where he would fight devils in all kinds of disguises in the strongest prophetic ministry ever known in this country. He would bring to the community, it’s commercial and political life, the searching light of the Gospel and at the same intertwine the Word of God that brought salvation to souls. Dr Walker was a bigger man than Wesley Capel and so its use declined. When I arrived at the end of the 1970’s it was only used for a Sunday morning small congregation and a Chapel in the City congregation of Thursday.
It seemed like its days were coming to an end. They were actually coming to an end very quickly and I was the person who was going to end its life by replacing it with a magnificent new Wesley Church three times the size!
The truth was most Methodist did not want the Wesley Chapel back in 1934. From 1884 there had been a constant battle with those Methodist who felt uncomfortable with John Wesley’s legacy for the poor and of a fighting prophetic witness in the pulpit.
In 1910 the Methodist Conference had a long and searching debate over the Central Methodist Mission’s ministry in a theatre. Many were shocked that we would worship in a theatre. Many people couldn’t accept that Methodists should worship in a picture house that attracted more than 1,000 people at every service including down-and-out and drunks. It was juts not respectable enough!
During World War One, the soldiers crowded into the theatre. Over 3,000 people, at a service readily heard the Superintendent, Rev Dr Samuel Hoban—an army padre—preached strongly on issues of God, King and empire.
Yet those men who went to the Methodist Annual Conferences didn’t want the church to worship in a picture house. In 1915 the Methodist Conference voted to acquire a suitable site, to worthily represent Methodism in the state capital and form a denominational rallying centre as the occasion may acquire. They wished the Methodist could have a cathedral like Melbourne’s Wesley Church.
That debate was to go on for years.
In 1921 the Methodist paper called “The Methodist” led a sustained attack which lasted over the next 14 years crying out in banner headlines, “When will Sydney Methodists have their Cathedral?” That Melbourne had such a magnificent Methodist Cathedral stuck in the throats of many Sydney Methodists.
But at the end of the 1920’s with the Depression coming along, the Central Methodist Mission had a lot of people, with high demand for food and no money. So the Central Methodist Mission created a beautiful little chapel on the first floor of the Vickery Mission Settlement as a centre for prayer and meditation. That didn’t work because it was too small and out of the way on the first floor.
With the 50th anniversary of the Central Methodist Mission’s commencement coming close, Rev Rupert Williams led the Mission into looking at the conference hall that was situated on Castlereagh Street on the ground floor. He devised a way whereby they could build within this hall a church with fine wood panelling, a pipe organ, stained glass windows lit with artificial light and pews made out of Queensland silky oak. It was quite an experiment and cost the Mission 9,000 pounds. Now the Methodist had a city church looked like a proper church, albeit a very small one. Later on, still inside this church built inside a large hall, a balcony was added to cope with the larger crowds.
The old argument did not die. In 1938 the Methodist conference debated forcing the Mission to remodel the Lyceum Theatre into a 1,200-seat cathedral type church. It was argued, “Some kind of stigma rests upon our church as its centre is located in a taking picture show.” The only change in this argument from the one that was made 25 years earlier was the instead of worshipping in a picture house, it now was a talking picture show.
There came an opportunity to really build a cathedral in the heart of the city after the Lyceum theatre had been demolished and gutted by fire in 1964. Again the cry to build a cathedral was raised, but Alan Walker had established the most effective form of city church ministry to be found anywhere in the world and he was determined that a theatre should be built. More than 100 other Central Missions around the world had been patterned on our work here in Sydney. Alan Walker led to the rebuilding of a new Lyceum Theatre, not a Methodist Cathedral like Melbourne had.
This was the Lyceum Theatre I inherited when I was appointed in 1977 and with it, at the back, reached through the laneway made into Wesley Arcade, was Wesley Chapel.
By the end of 1979 I knew what I had to do, I proposed the redevelopment of the entire city property owned by Uniting Church including the Uniting Church offices, Wesley Chapel and the Lyceum Theatre. I had a vision that we would demolish everything on the site, that we would built a new 1,000 seat theatre for the performing arts with a huge cinemascope screen, but purpose built with the idea of using it for television production in church worship and in weekly services of Christian evangelism. Alongside this new Wesley Theatre would be a new Wesley Church, seating over 500 with a floor area three times the size of the old Wesley Chapel. It would be the latest in church design and worthy of the best of city worship.
Its design would be significant because it would be the first new church of any denomination to be built in the city CBD in the past 50 years since Wesley Chapel itself opened. We would take out the huge stain glass windows, have them cleaned and re-leaded and added back into the new church. We would take the pipe organ and replace it with a larger pipe organ and we would carry into the new Wesley Church some of the marvellous woodwork from the old chapel. The pews would be taken out and sold except for a number that would go to a new Chapel I was building in Wesley Hospital at Ashfield where we would there shortly dedicated new stained glass windows, created by the daughter of one of our psychiatrists.
In 1992 we dedicated the new Wesley Church. Today it is used for church services every day of the week except Saturday. On Sundays it is used several congregations including morning and afternoon congregations and by people of different racial groups. It is used during the week not only for lunchtime services but for healing services and for staff communion services, for the induction of new ministers, for weddings and funerals. One unusual service is the university church which consists only of university students and which meets every Friday night. Wesley Church continues with an outstanding ministry of proclamation to the city and building up people in their faith. It’s the busiest church in the City of Sydney.
When I first came to the 94th anniversary of Wesley Chapel in Castlereagh Street to the old Methodist pulpit, I said, “The city church has a specialist ministry. In an earlier generation its role was clear: A strong pulpit voice of faith and warm pastoral care. Today it has the complex task of being a prophetic witness, a place of social service, of community relationships, of placing care into the heart of the community, worship into the world of work, support for every need in a world where selfishness dominates. What a great time for Wesley Chapel to be alive! Great need presents us with great opportunity! Individuals in the city still have their personal needs. Inner city residents, care takers living on the roof of every tall building, young flat dwellers, ethnic subcultures, derelicts in the lanes and streets, homeless youths in squats, aged single people in hostels and lodges, travellers and tourists, and an increasing number of people falling victim to alcohol abuse, gambling, drugs and moral permissiveness—all still need the city church. These people have already written the charter for the city church’s ministry. While they are here our task is clear.
We must have in the Wesley Church tomorrow:
Evangelistic concern to bring the lost to salvation;
Compassion that the lonely might feel at home;
A family atmosphere that all may feel loved;
Flexible worship hours so that we are open when people are able to attend;
Programs of social action;
Educational groups and spiritual nurture;
Practical support for helping people with meals, accommodation, clothing, counselling, and care;
Leisure activities to enable city people to fill their lungs and to exercise their bodies;
Great preaching to catch the media’s attention and to complete with the Godless headlines of the secular world; and Ministry of such skills that the Word of the Lord will be heard above the noise of electric typewriters, cash registers, computers and the omnipresent piped music”. (1977)
That particular sermon captured the imagination of those present. It wasn’t long after that they would be coming down to Melbourne in groups to visit me and talk to me about becoming Superintendent of a church in the city. The little Wesley Chapel with its rather dowdy and musty appearance which had grown to be so loved by so many people has evolved today into a large Wesley Church with modern lighting and architecture, with the first baptistery to be built in a Uniting Church in Australia, with interpretation booths where many language translations can take place simultaneously and telephone lines coming in where counsellors can deal with the questions of people who respond to our radio preaching—Wesley Church is really tomorrow’s church.
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.