The Lay Preacher
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.
In the early church, most of the preachers, evangelists and church planters were workmen. Like Jesus, many were carpenters, and others were fishermen, and farmers like the first disciples. They loved the Lord Jesus Christ and followed Him, proclaiming the Gospel. The greatest of these was the Apostle Paul who was firstly an apprentice tent maker and then a tent maker who worked at his trade throughout his life while he visited communities, established churches and built up people in their faith.
Over the centuries, ministry became an educated, qualified and ordained profession. Ministers were inevitably middle class and for much of the period of church history, were part of the gentry. As church leaders became more educated, the church seemed to lose it power. It lost touch with the common man and the poor and therefore lost much of its vitality and enthusiasm.
During the 17th and 18th centuries in Great Britain, the evangelical revival led by John and Charles Wesley saw the rise of a new form of minister —the lay preacher. They taught classes, bible studies, home groups, and preached the Gospel in open air and at the factories among miners and workers. They did not earn a living by preaching. This was because for 60 hours a week or more, they would earn their living working in the mines, at the coalface, in the factories, in the iron and steel fabrication shops, and working with hammer and chisel. These lay preachers knew the Bible, they trusted in their faith and they knew the difference that conversion made in their lives. They turned from drinking and gambling and wasted living because they loved the Lord Jesus Christ.
Frequently, the educated professional and ordained minister, instead of working alongside and appreciating these lay preachers and evangelists, looked down upon them for their uncouth ways, their unlearned manners and the fact they often were successful in their ministry, whereas those who were trained, educated and ordained were not. However, as church bureaucracies grew, it was trained educated and ordained who rose to positions of power within the church, and often conflict existed between those who worked at the coalface and preached the Gospel and those who organised the church.
Australia was evangelised largely by dedicated lay preachers. Throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, these lay preachers were usually farmers, agricultural workers, miners, steel fabricators, and others. Some were professionals such as lawyers, doctors and school principals who were also lay preachers. These lay preachers worked without payment. They opened small preaching chapels by the hundred throughout every little rural community in Australia and in the new fringe suburbs of the big cities. They ran open-air meetings in the city streets, formed organisations like Campaigners For Christ, the Gospel Fishermen, and Open-Air Campaigners. They went to war supporting the YMCA and the Everyman’s Huts to serve the needs of the servicemen. They filled in for ministers in times of sickness and holiday and in between the arrival of the new minister and the departure of the old. They preached in small mission halls and in inner suburbs and taught innumerable classes and home groups.
In Australia, the Methodist Church depended upon these honorary lay preachers more than any other denomination. They trained them and treated them better because John Wesley himself taught the church to honour such men. The Cornish miners who came to Australia to work in the mines of Moonta, Broken Hill and Newcastle and in the steel works of the lllawarra and Mt Isa, would be found every Sunday preaching in little Methodist chapels across the land, and often preaching every Saturday night in open air services outside pubs and at busy street corners. They were tradesmen, blue collar workers, workers with their hands, who loved the Lord Jesus, trusted the word of the Bible as true, and committed their lives into seeing people converted and saved. They taught Sunday Schools, often in garages and in the lounge rooms of their homes, and in the factories where they were employed, they followed the example of Kier Hardy, the founder of the Labor Party, in their concern for their unions and the welfare of working men.
Over the years, most major denominations had similar men and lay preachers. The Roman Catholics called them worker-priests. The Anglicans had industrial lay workers. The Brethren and Baptist often depended entirely on these lay preachers, and other denominations called them lay pastors. They were all alike. They were workmen who loved the Lord, who believed the truth of the Scriptures, who served wherever there was need, and who prayed for conversions among the people who heard the message. They worked and taught without pay, built churches with their own hands, and cared for widows and orphans in the most practical of ways. Often they took over the leadership of small and struggling congregations in inner suburbs or in the outer fringes of large cities or in rural communities. They were the people who got these churches on their feet and sustained them in their ministry.
Usually they refused to accept hypocrisy including from those who claimed to be educated. Ordination meant little to them and ministers who talked in knowing terms of the latest German theology or modern ways of looking at the Bible were viewed with suspicion.
The church owes an enormous debt to these lay preachers. I want to tell you of one of them who died this past week at 90 years of age; he was almost the last of a breed of good and great men. His name was Henrie Pietzsch, and he spent most of his life in the western suburbs of Melbourne.
Henrie was born in Ascot Vale in 1912, not far from the Melbourne Showgrounds and the racecourse on which the famous Melbourne Cup was run. He was one of a family of four boys and one girl. Ascot Vale was a working man’s suburb. On the flats, as they were known, near the river, there were little wooden cottages built on narrow blocks of land, each with access to the backyard by a narrow sideway. You could look out a side window of one house directly into the side window of the next house, only a few feet away. Up on the hill there were some solid brick houses, occupied by factory owners and mill managers. Around the area of Kensington, Newmarket, Flemington, Footscray and other suburbs, there were Melbourne’s main industries. There were the abattoirs, the boning works, the rope factories, the glass, steel and iron foundries and dozens of heavy metal industries.
These factories were to become the workplaces and the field of ministry for Henrie Pietzsch.
From the mid 50’s to the mid 60’s for eight years I ministered in this area at the Ascot Vale and Newmarket Churches of Christ. Round about were the slums of inner Melbourne and the Housing Commission flats that were built to replace the worst of the slums. It was while I was ministering there that I was visited on many occasions by Henrie Pietzsch, who came back to see the church, and who joined with me in ministering among Melbourne’s inner western suburbs. I was eighteen years of age when I started regularly preaching in this area and Henrie wanted to encourage a young man from the other side of Melbourne who committed himself to working among the slums and the people who worked in the local industries. That friendship was to remain intact for over 45 years.
Henrie’s mother died when he was nine years of age, and as happened in those days when money was tight and families were large, the children were separated and went to live with their aunts and uncles. So the family was scattered. Henrie, however, boarded with his father in Footscray, close to the tanning factories and iron and metal industries. His father worked in engineering at Barnet Glass Factory in Footscray.
Henrie was educated at the Ascot Vale Primary School, a school where I taught religious instruction. He attended also for a while the Essendon Primary School, and then went to the Footscray Technical School, where he learned trade subjects, particularly in the field of iron working. He completed his apprenticeship as a moulder and worked in factories as a moulder, an ironworker, a foreman and factory inspector.
His father was a lay preacher in the local Methodist Church in the Footscray Williamstown circuit. It was a circuit that I knew well because while I was ministering in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, that Methodist circuit was home to my Methodist minister uncle, who was superintendent of that circuit, Rev Harold Gordon, after whom I received my Christian name.
Henrie’s father George was a Methodist lay preacher. For five and a half days a week he worked in a factory with his hands, and then on Saturdays and Sundays, he preached the Gospel, taught Sunday school, was Sunday school Superintendent and a leader in the local church work. Henrie was to follow in his footsteps. But they were also in the footsteps of John Wesley, whose first church was in a foundry.
Henrie’s father George allowed him to attend the nearby Footscray Church of Christ because, like many fathers, he realised it was important for a young son to mix with plenty of other young people his own age. The minister of the Footscray Church of Christ at that time was Dan Stewart, who not only ministered there, but who also ministered at the church of Ascot Vale where I was later to serve. Dan Stewart was an outstanding minister and attracted many working class men around him for his blunt talk and keen enthusiasm for the Gospel.
It was while he was at the Footscray Church of Christ that Henrie met and later married Hazel Cousins. They were very much in love, married in the Footscray Church of Christ and remained committed to each other throughout their lives until her untimely death. Hazel was a hardworking, compassionate and caring woman and mother. They had five children, Margot, Marilyn, Lynton, Glynne and Colyn. They also had two loved daughters in law, Lyn and Elizabeth, and seven grandchildren. Henrie also paid tribute to two wonderful women who were housekeepers at different stages of his life, his sister Kath who kept the house at Ascot Vale, and his daughter Marilyn who kept the house at Hurstbridge.
Henrie as a young man loved sport and was very active in tennis, football, in churches of Christ sporting competitions, in swimming, fishing and rabbiting, and was an excellent boxer and wrestler, and even was goalie for a soccer team when Australia came under the influence of heavy European migration. Things were tough in those days and an open air preacher had to learn to defend himself and while he was boarding in Moore Street Footscray, he went to Ted Graham’s Gymnasium in Collins Street, Melbourne. Ted Graham was at the time light heavyweight boxing champion of Australia and Henrie Pirtzsch learned the fine art of boxing from an expert. My parents and grandparents came from the area known as Moonie Ponds, and like Henrie, I have all my life followed the Essendon Football Club.
After his apprenticeship, Henrie worked for fifty years in more than 20 industries, mainly in the field of moulding and metal fabrication. He completed his apprenticeship starting at 14 years of age, and worked for Mason and Cox for ten years. Thereafter came a whole stream of iron and steel manufacturers, mainly in the West Footscray, Yarraville, Braybrook, Sunshine and West Heidelberg areas. For most of these years he was either a moulder or core maker, but in latter years was always a foreman of the factory or factory inspector. He had followed in the trade of his father George, who was trained as a moulder in an iron factory and as early as 1880 worked in the Holmes Iron Foundry in Kensington making cast iron beds.
But that was merely the way he made money for his real work, which was preaching the Gospel. Henrie took a number of jobs in order to earn money to support his part time preaching appointments, and this including working at a taxi truck business, developing his own business in extruded metals, owning his own menswear business in Diamond Creek, working as a security guard in the Footscray Nail Factory, in Roots Motor Assembly Works at Port Melbourne, and Kinnears Rope Works at Footscray. These shot-term jobs provided him with the income to support him in more than 60 years of ministry.
As a lay preacher, he not only preached for many Churches of Christ, but also acted as Bible School Superintendent. At different times, he was the minister of the Footscray Church of Christ, the Tottenham Church, the Maidstone Church, the St Kilda Church, the Hurstbridge Church, and ministered in circuit ministries at Sunshine, Footscray, Maidstone, Williamstown, Newport and Yarraville and at St Auburns.
He helped many churches develop and grow. His work in this field began at Kyneton, where he filled in between students. And then under the leadership of Dan Stewart, he and others developed churches and ministered in Williamstown, Sunshine, Tottenham, Yarraville, Newport, and in the home church at Footscray. For two and a half years he served as minister at the St Kilda Church of Christ, went for eighteen months to Maidstone Church of Christ, which he and his wife helped establish, and spent ten years as a minister at Hurstbridge. During his time there, he was not only pastor to the Hurstbridge Church of Christ, but Sunday school Superintendent, Youth Leader, Bible class teacher, Church secretary and editor of the weekly church newsletter. I remember him particularly for the ministry he and his wife gave at the Maidstone Church of Christ. He and Hazel taught Sunday school in the Thompson Street public hall and was for 25 years Sunday school Superintendent of that Sunday School. They were both busy in fundraising, collecting a shilling a week from some 20 people to buy the land for the Maidstone Church of Christ and Sunday school in Sussex Street. Then the Church of Christ at Mount Albert offered them the redundant wooden church building, which was shifted from Mount Albert and established on land purchased from the Housing Commission in Richelieu Street, Maidstone. Like all lay preachers, he was active in painting and cleaning, building extensions and working with his hands to establish to a place where people can worship God.
Throughout all of this era, he was also involved in frequent open air ministries. These ministries would usually gather together a group of like-workmen, and in his case some fifteen members of the Footscray Church of Christ banded together and preached every Friday night in the heart of Footscray at a time when Friday night shopping was in vogue. Like other great lay preachers, he was also concerned to spread the Gospel in the factories where he worked, and with the help of four other employees, he conducted lunch hour open-air meetings, preaching the Gospel to factory workers. In one factory, because of agitation by a communist group, his lunchtime preaching was stopped by the company for fear of violence between the Christians and the communists.
Jesus Christ was a carpenter—the term used in the New Testament was Teknon – which has come into our language as a technical craftsman. Both the early church and the evangelical revivals and the early church in Australia, depended upon these working lay preachers, who took the role of trained ordained minsters of the Gospel, who established churches and proclaimed the Gospel.
These workmen turned preachers did not always enjoy the support of the church bureaucracy. Sometimes the church bureaucracy saw such men as did the religious leaders of the days of Peter and John, who recognised them as uneducated and unlearned men who had been with Jesus. Those bureaucrats frequently opposed the ideas and development of such lay preachers. I remember as a young minister when Henrie’s work being rejected and coming under suspicion of church officials, that I went and visited him in his home to express my concern at what I thought was the unfair and unjust treatment given to him. He responded to me with great warmth because of my care for the work for a lay preacher. Later in life, we renewed our friendship, and for more than 20 years he regularly listened on his small transistor radio to my Sunday night radio programs, and keenly watched my Sunday morning television programs. When I went to him on that occasion to express my concern for his treatment at the hands of the religion bureaucrats, I discovered that his faith was tough, that they had picked on a man who had grown up in the factories of Melbourne and was not likely to be easily silenced. But at the same time, he was a man who was concerned not to win the argument because he knew that God was his ultimate judge and so long as God knew what was in his heart that was enough. Henrie Pietzsch like other lay preachers, was a man who knew how to work hard, who had a deep commitment to Christ, who loved the Scriptures, who was willing to proclaim the Gospel message.
In one way Henrie Pirtzsch is the last of a great group of church workers. The Apostle Paul like Henrie was a tradesman. He manufactured tents. He was an itinerant evangelist and church planter who moved round, building up congregations of believers. When he said goodbye to the elders of Ephesus where he had ministered for several years, the Apostle Paul said, “I know that when I leave you, fierce wolves will come among you and they will not spare the flock. The time will come when some men from your own group will tell lies in order to lead the believers away after them. Watch them, and remember that with many tears, day and night, I taught every one of you for three years. And now I commend you to the care of God and to the message of His grace that is able to build you up and give you the blessings that God has for all of His people. I have not wanted any money from you. As you yourselves know, I have worked with these hands of mine to provide everything that my companions and I have needed. I have shown you in all things that by working hard in this way, we must help the weak, remembering the words that the Lord Jesus Himself said, ‘There is more happiness in giving than in receiving.’” (Acts 20)
Henrie Pietzsch was a man who gave far more than he ever received. He built up people in faith, helped plant churches, and left behind a wonderful heritage. He told me in a letter some ten years ago that, “I am still in touch with Sunday school scholars and teachers of fifty years ago, and what a thrill this is that everything in these past years has been worthwhile because of the wonderful grace of God.” Henrie Pietzsch knew the happiness that comes from giving. Now he enters into the joy of his Lord and into the presence of Hazel others of like faith. I honour his memory.
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.
To the people assembled for the funeral celebration of the life and worth on Henrie Pietzsch
I send you my greetings and deeply regret I am unable to be with you at this funeral service. I knew Henrie well, and was deeply moved when some years ago he asked me if I would speak at his funeral. Unfortunately, my work in Sydney has grown into a national ministry and today I am in central Queensland opening a large new village at North Lakes, and am unable to be with you in Melbourne. I deeply regret that distance and time separate us.
This Sunday night on my radio program through 2GB 873, I will pay my own tribute to Henrie.
He used to listen to my Sunday night program on his transistor radio and would frequently write to encourage me. I will tell this coming Sunday night this story, and put it in the context of other men, who like him, worked with their hands to earn money in order to support their ministry in the Gospel. I would like you to listen now to this tribute that will be broadcast from Sydney this coming weekend.
