Three Wise Men
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.
I have attended the funeral services of three of my dear friends who died this week. In the period of six days, four wonderful men died and I was privileged to attend the funeral services and service of thanksgiving for three of them. The fourth was at too great a distance interstate for me to reach. The three whose thanksgiving services I attended all played an important part in my life when I became Superintendent of Wesley Mission. There were some remarkable similarities between these three.
All three were born before 1910, which meant that they were all in their nineties when they died. All three were very committed Christians and active in their local church. All three were successful businessmen, starting with nothing and becoming wealthy in the process. All three were great philanthropists and gave enormous sums of money to help the underprivileged in the community. In fact, between them they gave many millions of dollars to people who are underprivileged in Australia. All three had happy long marriages with partners who stayed with them throughout their married life. All three had well known children of whom their father was proud. All three became mentors of mine in early life. They had a habit of looking out for up and coming young and women and giving them encouragement and guidance. I owe a great deal to each of the three. One final point: all three were unique in their attitude towards transport. One purchased a brand new Jaguar car every year. One purchased a Chevrolet Bel Air in 1964 and drove it every day for the next 30 years. The other travelled by public transport to work on the train except he would get out of the train six kilometres from his office and walk that distance every morning, and did the same every evening. He managed that for more than half a century.
The three wise men whom I remember with deep affection this week as I have attended their thanksgiving services are firstly Mr. Harold Green AM. Harold was born in Charters Towers in 1908. After living in western Queensland for some time, he joined a family in Sydney. He eventually became managing director of the firm and chairman of the company. The company distributed sugar throughout Australia. Harold Green developed, among many innovations, the art of packaging sugar in single serve sachets. These are the little packets of sugar you see in every restaurant, on every airline, in every hotel in the nation. His company packaged hundreds of millions sachets of sugar. His sons and grandsons have followed in the business. Most of his married life he lived in Strathfield. He and Kathleen had a half-century of happy married life together and they had four sons. Living in Strathfield, Harold became an identity, not only at Wesley Concord Church where he served as Trustee, Sunday School Superintendent, Teacher and Leader for more than half a century, but in many local community groups including the Strathfield Recreation Club which he was president for about 40 years. For over 40 years he was a member of the Newington College Council and for 20 years was on the council for MLC Burwood. For 30 years he was a member of Methodist Leigh Theological College Council and for 15 years a member of the Methodist Property Department. He was also a member of the Methodist Department of Home Mission and Evangelism. Within the local church he was a lay preacher, trustee, Sunday School Teacher, Circuit Steward and Elder, covering a magnificent term of service upward of 50 years. He was always committed to the work of helping the needy people in the Sydney community and he gave years of service to the Sydney City Mission, helping them with generous donations every year. At Wesley Mission, he was a member of the Wesley Mission Board for 48 years, and for more than 20 years a board member of our Harold W Cottee Pty Ltd company that steered the operation of our huge citrus orchard in Renmark, South Australia. Harold was honoured by the church and by the community and the “Green Room” at Wesley Centre is named in his honour. He also was honoured by the Queen by being made a member of the Order of Australia in 1987. Harold was a very warm and caring person and for the 24 years that I knew him, he was always a wonderful mentor, a good guide, and one with whom I discussed a number of important financial and property decisions. He was always generous with his own money and believed that we should be generous in the way we treated our staff and the people in need whom we helped. Whenever I had made an important property decision about the purchase of hospital or a new centre for caring for aged or disabled people, Harold would say to me privately, “I think you better be prepared to go up in the price another quarter of a million dollars. This is such a good buy and fits in with our core business that you shouldn’t lose the purchase for the sake of another quarter of a million dollars.” He was a benefactor to many and there are organizations all over Sydney who received his annual cheques. A committed Christian, he gave his life to helping the underprivileged and poor.
The second man whose service I attended this week was Mr Howell Swanton. Howell was born in 1910. He was born in Elsternwick, Victoria where he completed his schooling. At school, he was an absolutely outstanding scholar. He was baptised in the Elsternwick Baptist Church and from that moment on became a committed Christian. With his friends Leonard Buck and John Robinson, he founded the Campaigners For Christ, an open-air evangelistic program that preached on street corners. This eventually grew to have a wide Australian ministry including the Everyman Huts, which went with the Australian armed forces whenever they went to war.
He was a brilliant violinist and played in open-air meetings. Later when he was sent at the age of 27 to become manager in South Australia of a life assurance company, he became member of the Conservatorium Orchestra. The love of music continued with his six children, two of them being today professional musicians. When World War Two came, he three times tried to join but was rejected because of a lifelong affliction of having migraine headaches. However, he served the country well, becoming the Superintendent with the War Damage Committee. He was the person who assessed the damage in Darwin following the Japanese air raid, and was responsible for the redevelopment of Darwin subsequent to World War Two. He continued during the war years as Assistant Secretary of the War Damage Commission at the Sydney head office and became Chief Superintendent in 1944. It was at this time he met his wife June, and they were married in 1950. At the close of was he became a director of the Sydney City Mission, a role he held for 45 years. He was Chairman for 14 years from 1964 onwards. Over the years he set up his own loss assessing business, H W Swanton and Company. He became a legend for assessing the damage caused by fire. He became a Fellow of the Institute of Fire Loss Assessors and was responsible for assessing the loss of the Colonial Sugar Refinery in Townsville in 1963 that had been the biggest loss by fire at that stage in Australian history.
Following the 1974 Christmas Cyclone Tracey disaster in Darwin, he was appointed the Chief Loss Assessor for all properties damaged by Cyclone Tracey.
In 1951 he became a member of the Rotary Club of Sydney, served as a director and chairman of various community service committees and celebrated 50 years of continuous service to the Rotary Club of Sydney. When I joined the Rotary Club of Sydney in 1977, Howell was one of the first persons to make himself known to me, to help me through a number of offices through that Rotary Club, and who was a mentor to me when I became President of the Rotary Club of Sydney. For many years he travelled around the Pacific and many overseas countries whenever there was a major calamity caused by cyclones, assessing the loss for insurance companies.
He always was a generous man and set up a trust from which he could support numerous charities like Wesley Mission. On his 65th birthday, he drew up a list of 65 major church, missionary and community charities, sending them all very large cheques to celebrate his 65th birthday. On his 75th birthday he sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to 75 major charities and church organisations in Sydney to celebrate his 75th birthday. He was a life member of many charities and many important organizations, something he never sought but was granted to him with affection from all of those charities. He was an absolutely committed Christian who believed in making money in order to help underprivileged people. Like Harold Green, a packed church, this time the Gordon Baptist Church, paid tribute to his faith and service to the community. He was always a warm mentor to me. He was a man of great encouragement who regularly sent cheques to be used in the service to underprivileged people in Sydney.
My third wise man was buried this week in Melbourne, and I was privileged to be at his service held in a packed church which he had attended for over 80 years. Noel Miller was another Australian benefactor. He worked for more than 70 years in the financial industry, retiring at 95. Until that time, he kept an office in one of the major financial companies of Australia. He retired as a Director of Australian United Investment after 30 years of leading that organization. He was a director of many other companies in Melbourne and knew many famous Australian businessmen from the time they commenced work, including Sydney Myer and George Coles the founder of Coles stores, and knew well most of the chairmen and executive directors of Australia’s greatest companies. Noel Miller started off as an accountant, graduating from university with his accountancy degree in less than 18 months. He became interested in share broking when asked by the founder of J B Were and Sons to become their chief research person, and to develop a systematic share portfolio activity for the Australian stock market. Over the years he developed that so successfully that he was headhunted by Sir Ian Potter and became senior partner in Potter and Co. Noel Miller had a photographic memory for company data and history and a remarkable talent for spotting industry tends. During the war he became a senior financial man running the RAAF in its war service, and was highly respected for what he did. When he officially retired from business at 65, he opened his own company and since that time has developed a business that today has more than $240 million under investment.
Noel had a long and happy marriage to Olive and they had two sons, both very successful men. After Olive died, Noel was a widower for six years before marrying Josephine, a lovely widow from his church. Noel was blessed by being loved by two outstanding women. However, he never actually retired from work. Upon reaching retirement age, he simply changed desks and started off a long career in stock broking. He became a major shareholder in some of Australia’s largest companies. All this time he was actively engaged in the Ewing Memorial Presbyterian Church in Melbourne. He was in membership for 80 years, 50 of which he served as an elder, 14 on the Board of Management, 10 as Church Secretary, 30 years as member of the Financial Committee and 24 years as a Trustee.
For many years he served both Presbyterian and then Uniting Churches on their finance committees and on a score of other charitable committees designed to raise funds for the Melbourne University, the Royal Melbourne Hospital and many other charitable organizations. He said I sat together for the best part of ten years as directors of the Christian Television Association of Victoria. He was impressed that I was a young man with a vision of using television for the Gospel, and that I went around speaking in churches mid-week to raise funds to develop that television ministry. Consequently, when I established Turn ‘Round Australia 23 years ago in Sydney, he was the first person to make a large donation to help us get that work underway. When I established Turn ‘Round Australia, a national television program on the Nine Network that has now been running for 23 years, he was one of the first people to send me a donation. In late 1979, I was in San Francisco when I received a message from a staff member that Noel Miller had sent $5,000 for the new television ministry. I waited several hours and then rang him to thank him. He had not long arrived in his office and was absolutely delighted that I should take the trouble to ring him from the US. Then he suddenly said, “But it must be about 3am where you are now!” I told him that I had waited until 3am so as to catch him when he arrived at his office. He was absolutely staggered that I should ring him at 3am. He said, “Five thousand dollars is not enough. Come and see me when you get back from the US and I will give you another ninety thousand dollars.”
Over the years he became a major donor to Wesley Mission and the Noel Miller Musical School at the Wesley Institute for Ministry and the Arts is named in his honour. At a time when most people retire, Noel Miller established the Noel Miller Foundation, and by trading on the stock market built it into one of the largest foundations in Australia. From that he provided finance to 75 charities and church operations. His generosity knew no bounds.
I have put aside most of Coles gifts in recent years into Noel Miller Foundation, which is a perpetual trust. We use only the interest from that trust to help us in our ongoing work of caring for the underprivileged. In the last few years he had given more than $650,000. This will support Christian television in perpetuity.
In 1989 Noel Miller was also recognised by the Queen and Government by being made a member of the Order of Australia. At his Thanksgiving Service, I was greatly surprised when his son Richard quoted his father: “The two men who have had the greatest influence on my spiritual life have been the Rev Dr. Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral in California and Rev Dr. Gordon Moyes of Wesley Mission in Sydney.” That surprised me because my dear friend had been such a great mentor to me.
Something unusual happened after the Thanksgiving Service. As my taxi headed back to airport, I directed the driver to turn off a few streets from Noel’s home so I could see the work of the Malvern Aged Citizens Welfare Centre—a work that Noel had established and led for 13 years. There is the Olive Miller Nursing Home, named to honour his wife, and which he had largely funded. Nearby is the Noel Miller Centre, which is to be shortly opened—a magnificent new centre of care, again largely funded by Noel himself.
What Noel did not know, and what I did not know until this week, is that it is built on land that once housed the Churches of Christ Federal College of the Bible where I lived and trained. My old home was demolished when a new college was built on another location and the land today is the home of the new Noel Miller Centre, built in memory of my dear friend.
These were three remarkable wise men—all successful, all generous and really men who had a total life through their faith in Christ and commitment to the Church, their family and the community. Harold Green had a statement on his desk from Rev John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, which illustrates the philosophy behind each man, “Gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can” these three wise men obeyed that instruction, and as a result hundreds of thousands Australians have been blessed.
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.