Sesquicentenary Celebrations - LaTrobe Terrace Church of Christ
Sesquicentenary Celebrations
LaTrobe Terrace Church of Christ
Sunday 21 October 2007.
Thank you for your invitation to speak to a group of people I greatly admire. I appreciate my heritage in Churches of Christ. I have followed every aspect of Churches of Christ closely for over 50 years. My last 30 years of ministry has been as a Uniting Church minister and for 27 years the Superintendent of Wesley Mission Sydney, one of the largest churches of the world with over 4000 paid staff, and during my time, I was responsible for raising and spending one billion dollars in Christian ministry.
I have had significant ministries in Churches of Christ. For many years in the 1980s and 1990’s I was engaged in lecturing at the Carlingford Theological College. I have continued to speak at significant gathering of Churches of Christ in all states of Australia, New Zealand, UK., and USA. I have been an appointed evangelist for Conference wide crusades in each State and in every Church of Christ in New Zealand.
I have attended seven world conventions over 52 years. I have written study materials for World Conventions and will be leading studies on Urban Mission at the New World Convention of Churches of Christ in Nashville USA. I have been a keynote speaker at World Conventions including being the Jessie Bader Evangelism Lecturer for World Convention. I was presented with the World Convention Sir Garfield and Lady Grace Todd Memorial Citation for internationally outstanding Service to Churches of Christ in Brighton England.
Two of our children have been engaged in full time ministry in Churches of Christ and for the past twenty years I have been lecturing at Emmanuel School of Religion, a Churches of Christ, Christian Church Graduate seminary in Tennessee, where I am currently an Adjunct Professor of Christian Ministry.
Beverley and I appreciate the history and nature of Churches of Christ. We pledged to help build the first church in Canberra and went to the opening by TR Morris. We also pledged to fund other national church developments in Darwin and Albany, W.A.. We supported National initiatives in establishing State and National Departments. We were at the Federal Conference when Harold Finger and Frank Beale proposed Papua New Guinea as a new field in 1956. We were at the Federal Conference when Ban Mat Bible College was proposed in Vanuatu.
We supported Federal Indigenous ministries and visited at our own cost the fields in Victoria, W.A., and Queensland to minister to our missionaries to indigenous people.
We supported our Overseas Missions both with sending funds and work teams, including organizing a Work Party to build our hospital in PNG. We also sent and totally supported the first nursing sister there.
One and a half million of my books printed in China in Chinese, have been sold in China. When I visited there to meet with hundreds of students who studied my books, I kept thinking that in China lies the body of Will Waterman at Hueili, South Szechuan a little bit of Australia still there after our hospitals and schools were closed. Today the revivals of Christian faith in China are a tribute to that missional thrust into China.
For many years I was a columnist in each edition of the “Australian Christian.” I still read every issue avidly. Our national magazine, now unfortunately available only online, keeps the churches linked together.
For many years, I wrote Sunday school lessons and adult studies for Federal Board of Christian Education, and then the Joint Board of Christian Education for Churches of Christ and the Uniting Church.
Throughout the nineteen fifties, sixties and seventies, I attended every Victoria-Tasmanian Conference, and every Federal Conference and served on many state and federal committees. The most influential people were not ministers, even those holding position as President or State Conference or Federal Conference Secretaries, but a handful of wealth lay businessmen. They had been successful in business and investment and were the power-brokers of the State and Federal Conferences. Churches of Christ have almost entirely lost this group of people from active membership.
Churches of Christ have a democratic heritage, preferring a loose-knit federation of interested people and churches, and resisting authoritarian, hierarchical or denominational structures. There has been a fear of bureaucrats who want to run things, and to be less accountable. Wisdom lies the multitude of Counsellors. They believed that ministry and mission were not two different things, but that mission is accomplished by the ministry of all the people.
Churches of Christ had a traditional plea: the evangelisation of the world through the unity of the church which could be retrieved by restoring the principles and practises of the New Testament Church as a basis for our unity.
I set out to review the validity of each aspect of that heritage over a period of twenty years. In 1965 I published ‘Rethinking Restoration” – the most thorough review I have seen made in Australia of the Restoration principle. My conclusion was regarded as too radical by many people, but no further scholarly study has ever been made.
In 1975 I was committed to Unity between the fractured parts of the church and I wrote and lectured on how the Uniting Church in Australia needed the evangelical witness of Churches of Christ, and how Churches of Christ needed to move from observer status to that of a negotiating denomination if it was to fulfil our plea that a united church could strengthen our witness in evangelism. But at a Federal Conference, the Christian Union proposal to join in the Uniting Church in Australia was rejected and we could not proceed. Over the next few years I was invited to explain to the Uniting denominations, their own Basis of Union. I decided then I should be true to my commitment to Christian Unity and join the Uniting Church.
In 1979 at the Federal Conference on January 14th 1979, before 3000 people on the Sunday night closing rally in the Melbourne Town Hall I preached on the theme “Salvation in Christ”. I pointed out that evangelism was our primary purpose, to win the world for Christ. We had to become totally committed to the mission of the Church.
The opportunity to be involved in our life-time in a unity of Australian denominations would never come again. The plea of unity had been rejected by our churches.
Likewise, the principle of restoration of New Testament. Christianity was not achievable except in the most general sense, but evangelism was still our option. Our Lord’s High Priestly prayer was “I pray Father that they may be one, that the world may believe.” That the world may believe should be our theme for the future. I urged a wholehearted commitment to evangelism. Churches of Christ needed to be wholly committed to evangelism. The future of Churches of Christ lay in becoming fully committed to the mission of the Gospel.
The earliest colonial conferences in 1873 were to make for more effective evangelism, but unfortunately, in the last half century there has not been a great emphasis on evangelism.
The week after the 1979 Federal Conference, I was inducted into being the senior minister of Wesley Mission, Sydney, and a church that in 1884 had changed its name from “Church” to “Mission”, because that was to be its main emphasis. I believe in a missional church, and had argued for 35 years that the church is only the church when it is the church in mission.
Further, community has been in the forefront of my thinking when it comes to the ministry of the church. No Church of Christ had wider community impact than the Cheltenham Church of Christ during my 13 years of ministry. It was amazing that in the 1970’s a multi million dollar development in buildings, extensive staff and ministries to the disabled, the aged, the mentally ill and the largest community education programs every undertaken by a local church, were in that church where I had the privilege of being the senior minister.
The story of Wesley Mission’s growth in missional and community service is widely known. Over the past twenty-five years my observation of Churches of Christ, is that while the word “missional” was discovered in a British paperback, and is now applied everywhere, the practise of mission has been subverted to a managerial and business operation where the leadership of the church has not emphasised evangelism but management, and where chief executive officers now run the churches. Today’s bishops are neither theological Principals nor successful businessmen, but managers, none of whom, have any graduate qualifications in management.
If you want managers instead of evangelists, at least insist that they are trained in graduate management. Currently we have millions of dollars of assets under the control of unqualified people. The training of people to be ministers of the faith, is quite different to the training of managers.
If a minister wants to also manage, he or she should immediate start doing management courses at the Australian Graduate School of Management at the University of New South Wales, or the Mt Eliza School of Management at Monash University, each acknowledged as the best in their business, and places where I have trained since 1967.
If you want a church led by managers, start putting in some key performance indicators for each state and each state CEO. You should identify key result areas, publish them, and quantify progress.
However, the role of a CEO is not to manage. A CEO appoints managers. A CEO provides strategic directions and thinking, and is the chief communicator to the people and the world outside the church. In any large organization it is the CEO who should head strategic direction and who should be the chief communicator with both the members and the community.
The experience of the Uniting Church in Australia, has been that its Chief Executive Officers, its bureaucrats and managers have been the chief cause of the blunting of the church missional thrust and community involvement.
In the United States each year, I meet with some of the leaders of the Disciples of Christ, the Christian Churches, Churches of Christ, and with the a Capella Church of Christ. It is interesting to note that the Disciples after restructure have moved to the management model and have suffered profound loss of membership and churches.
The Independents moved to the evangelism and outreach model at a local level with authority limited to a centralised vision and have grown with vigour. This is where all the largest churches in the Stone Campbell tradition belong.
The a Capella Church of Christ, has strong growth, missionary and missionary vision and have grown phenomenally, to be numerically the largest of all three groups.
Because I have credentials with the United Methodist Church, I speak each year in their churches, and in one main centre, have given regular lectures on urban mission. The United Methodist Church have, more than any other denomination, moved to a management model, strong on state Conference rights and programming. Under the management model, the United Methodist church has lost 1,000 members a week, every week, for the past thirty years.
The primary task of leaders in churches of Christ today is to give the believers a strategic vision of winning the world for Christ.
It was this strategic vision, communicated by trusted leaders who accounted well for its expenditure, that encouraged my young wife and myself, when my salary was under $20 a week to pledge every week to help build the Canberra, Albany, and Darwin churches, to support the World Convention, the Christian Fellowship Association, Home Missions and a dozen other programs.
Money is never the problem in a believing church. Strategic goals, communication and accountability are. Because people do not restrict their money being given just to denominational work any longer, this means our market for finding financial support is now broadened enormously (there are more of them than us) and because companies are becoming socially responsible, there are corporations that will help churches if they have strategic vision, communicated by trusted leaders who account well for its expenditure, and that meet real needs.
Today the greatest movement in the world is into the cities of every inhabited continent. One hundred years ago in 1900, only 8% of the people of the world lived in large cities. Most people lived in villages in rural areas. In spite of the growth of industries, 92% of people were still engaged in agriculture. But two world wars, transportation, and a growing population able to be sustained in a city, saw, within one hundred years, more than half the people on earth living in cities. Over three billion people now live in large cities. Urbanization has been the greatest story of the twentieth century. We have a missionary gospel to spread into the cities of the world. Yet many church denominational leaders still behave as if nothing has changed.
They still organise the life of the church based upon state lines and a village parish system. The denominations have not learned how to use the media to penetrate the city and possess no strategy to penetrate the security of high-rise apartment blocks. They give token support to developing multicultural congregations and have no policy for influencing the social, political and economic systems of our modern community. Yet the city is the most important factor impinging upon the future of the church. In the next ten years we will add another billion people to the planet and most will live in our cities. Christianity will be successful only if it learns to capture the cities of the world.
1. The Necessity of Capturing the City
Nations are changed by people who capture the streets of the city. The ideology of globalisation is today being fought in the streets of large cities. The people of Manilla overthrew the Marcos regime from the streets. The people of Selma, Jackson and Washington marched behind Martin Luther King Jr.. The people of India filled the streets of Calcutta behind Mahatma Gandhi. The people of Paris overran the Bastille. The people of Beijing crowded Tienamen Square. So on throughout history. You can change history by changing the minds of people in the streets.
Only after His death and resurrection did the people of Jerusalem realize that Jesus was the Messiah of God, an ideal King, a victorious conqueror, a humble hero, and a suffering servant. He had come, not to bring political victory, but a reign of peace and righteousness with justice for the poor and humble. How they wished they had greeted Him with more commitment! I have always been captured by a line in the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The Palm Sunday crowd is singing “Hosanna” and waving to Jesus and as Jesus passed by they called out “Christ, you know I loved you. Did you see I waved?”
Many in the crowded city that day waved. But Jesus wanted devotion not greetings, commitment of the heart not waving of the hand. Even those who wept for Him later that Holy Week, were told not to weep for Him but for themselves. Jesus did not want tears of sorrow, but the toil of discipleship of those who would follow Him. The crowd needs to be confronted with the accurate picture of who Jesus is, if their waving is to be turned to commitment. The missionary gospel has tough demands.
That is why the church where I ministered for twenty-seven years, Wesley Mission Sydney, enters our city at every available point through the secret accesses of radio as people listened in their bath or bed, their car or campervan. Every day. Every week. Through television we entered every city and town in our nation, into lounge rooms and kitchens, bedrooms and classrooms. Every week. Through our magazines we entered the waiting rooms of doctors, dentists and lawyers. In our books we entered the libraries and homes to sit upon shelves and beside beds. Through our videos we stayed by the video machines in the schools and homes. We preached in eight languages every week to reach the major ethnic groups. Through 56 church worship services we conducted each week in our central church we challenged the people of our city by lifting high Jesus Christ and saying: “Who is this?”
Modern people in many of our cities accept Christianity, but they do not become members of the church. We have to convert believers into belongers! But some people who belong to the church are not really committed. We have to convert these belongers to believers! Jesus Christ does not ask for your admiration. He wants your commitment! Jesus does not ask for acknowledgment. He wants your commitment. Do not say: “Christ, you know I loved you. Did you see I waved?” Say instead: “Jesus Christ, my Master, I’ll take up my Cross and follow wherever you lead me.” And join the crowd that follow Him.
A wave changes nothing. Jesus wants to make disciples who will be committed to turning the world upside down. He wants our city confronted, changed, turned around, converted! That means you! Turn to Him now! Stop waving. Start following!
2. Learn to Communicate with the City
Churches have to learn to speak the language of their own city. They have to listen to what the streets are saying, and learn to communicate with people our message in the language they understand. Too often the church talks to itself in its own language, and the people outside in the city do not understand.
Paul communicated the Gospel intelligently when he entered the great cities of the Mediterranean world in the first century. He spoke to the citizens of each city in their own culture. At the time of Paul’s visit, Athens was in the twilight of the Greek civilization. She would never recover her glory.
Athens has been continuously inhabited for 3000 years, but it was in the centuries before the Roman Empire that Athens reached her height. In the 5th century BC, the days of the marvellous buildings of Pericles, Athens became the mistress of the world and the mother of Democracy. Great writers like Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, joined with historians like Heroditus and Thucydides, and thinkers like Plato and Socrates. Their Classical Greek is acknowledged as the world’s most perfect expression of human speech in all history.
Great art, sculpture and architecture flourished. The Parthenon, commenced in 447BC, even to this day, remains one of the world’s most pleasing buildings. All about were other temples, theatres, the agora or marketplaces, and the magnificent colonnades of the Stoa of Attulus. It is probable that Paul walked through these columns debating with the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers as was typical of the teaching method of the time.
He certainly climbed nearby Mar’s Hill, and spoke to the Aeropagus Council. In great cities of the world we copy the architecture of Athens, and many of our public buildings reflect those of Athens; we lecture on Greek philosophy, and Classical Greek, unspoken for 2000 years by any community, is still taught in some of our colleges and universities.
3. Speak to the City in its own terms
If you examine the sermon of Paul to the Jews of Antioch in Pisidia, you would find that Paul starts with the history of the Jews in Egypt, covers their development as a nation, their expectation of the Messiah, and points to the death and resurrection of Jesus, and our need to repent and believe. Yet when Paul entered Athens his approach was totally different from that at Antioch in Pisidia. He appreciated their culture and spoke their language. He marched to the beat of their drum. v16-17.
He first spoke to Jews and Greeks who worshipped God. Paul commenced with those who would give him a favourable hearing. v18a He joined the philosophers in their debates and with people who just passed by. In the time of Paul there were two schools of philosophy: the Epicureans and Stoics. They debated him. The Stoics’ aim was to attain personal supremacy over all areas of life and to control human passions. The Epicureans’ aim was pleasure, the happiness the mind finds in freedom from physical excesses. The Stoics and Epicureans, walked through the Stoa of Attulus, arguing with each other, for the benefit of crowds of people who followed them to hear some word of insight. Paul was not afraid to talk about his beliefs in the context of other philosophies and faiths. v18b-21 He indicated up front his own religious beliefs. He preached “about Jesus and the resurrection.” As the philosophers debated Paul, v19 “some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?”
The word for babbler is spermologos. It means a picker-up of scraps, a gutter-sparrow that picks up little bits of rubbish or seeds. They said Paul picked up bits of wisdom, scraps of thoughts from here and there. The philosophers despised him because he did not argue in the conventional form.v22-23 Paul acknowledged their religious attitudes. He was not flattering them, but was stating a fact about Athenian life, dominated as it was by so many beautiful temples to many gods. v22”I see that in every way you Athenians are very religious.” He indicated the statues dedicated to gods. v23 “As I walked through your city and looked at the places where you worship, I found an altar on which is written “To an Unknown God.” That which you worship, then, even though you do not know it, is what I now proclaim to you.”
Several such altars have been discovered although the inscription is usually in the plural “To the Unknown Gods”. Epimenides, who lived in Athens in the sixth century, urged the building of such an altar so as to include any god not honoured with a Temple to avoid any calamity from a wrathful god.
Paul said the god they did not know, was known to Him as the father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul started with what they knew. v24-27 Paul preached from a point of agreement. The city fathers nodded in agreement. Every city alderman likes to be told that he has a fine respectable city. All of the Athenians would accept that God was the Lord of heaven and earth as the Stoics argued and that such a God did not live in the beautiful temples surrounding them, as the Epicureans argued. Paul went on, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.”
This pleased the Stoics. Paul said God created the world. That refuted the Epicureans who declared that the universe came by chance. Paul also agreed with Plato that God is a spirit. But then Paul went on with the devastating words “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.”v28-30 He moves from local interests to the everlasting God. The Creator and ever-present provider for them all, demands from us righteous living and has fixed a day of judgement for us all, calling upon us to turn from our wicked ways. Paul is now at the crunch of the gospel but to show them how close God is to them he does not quote Old Testament poets. Greek city councillors are not going to listen to Hebrew poets.
When he spoke to Jews he quoted Hebrew poets, but when he spoke to Greek city aldermen he quoted Greek poets. v28“For in him we live and move and have our being.” As some of your own poets have said, “We are his offspring.”’ He quotes two poets including Aratus who came from the same area of the Empire as did Paul.v29-31”Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” Resurrection! That shocked them.
That is the heart of the gospel: God made us, loves us, redeems us, and will judge us by Jesus Christ, the same Jesus slain upon the Cross, but now raised from the dead. The Greeks had argued about resurrection. Aeschylus said when a man dies, his blood seeps into the ground, and there is no resurrection of the body. They believed in the immortality of the soul, but not the resurrection of the body. Christianity is based upon resurrection, not immortality. God gives a new life and a new body, incorruptible and eternal in the heavens. v32-34
He found a typical response. Some scoffed, some wanted to hear more, and some believed in Jesus Christ. It is ironic, that of all the famous philosophers and debaters in the Royal Stoa that day, only three names are known in history and they were the three believers in Jesus Christ: Among them is Paul, “Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.” Dionysius became the first bishop of Athens. Damaris became a Christian. Their names are remembered while the names of the philosophers are forgotten. For all their wisdom the Greeks had not found God.
Paul’s teaching survived while the philosophers were picking up crumbs of human wisdom. We all will be judged by Christ. We all can be saved through faith. How wise of Paul, to adapt his message to the city in which he was speaking; to direct his address to the mind-set and philosophy of his hearers; to scratch them where they were itching.
That is why he was successful. Paul taught us to be relevant to our own city’s culture and to speak to it the Gospel.
4. The City Culture can confuse Christians
We are all influenced by our culture. That cultural influence impacts even our Christian faith unknown to most of us. Some cultural influences today are setting the tone for our community values and political policies. We are dominated more by economic policies than anything else. For the last two decades the defining principle in our culture has been that we improve our quality of life by improving our standard of living.
Our focus has been on material benefit, and expecting from Governments policies that would deliver us a better standard of life. Governments hold as a top priority improvement of economic standards. Yet people say their top priorities are not prosperity but quality of family life, security of employment, and personal care when in ill-health. Culture tells us there is an economic solution to our problems. Experience tells us the supposed solution is actually the problem. Some cultural influences in the Church today are more insidious.
I listen carefully to Church leaders. Some refer to cultural mores being essential Christianity rather than to Biblical mores. Recently I heard two leaders speaking not of Christianity but spirituality. That is a cultural expression that has become political correct. They were promoting spirituality not Christianity, Jesus not the church. These church leaders are speaking as if we can divide spirituality from Christianity and Jesus from the church. They obviously have not thought through their statements. Jesus did not come to improve the quality of our spirituality.
This is new age philosophy. God was not incarnate among us to improve our spirituality, but to save us from our sins. He incorporates us into His body, the Church. You cannot have Him without His body the Church, and spirituality, without Christianity, is an empty shell. I have heard one deriding those who stress the uniqueness of our faith saying we should accept the beliefs of all people as being equally valid. This is pluralism. But pluralism is the enemy of Christianity. It denies the words of Jesus John 14:6 “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” It denies the truth of the Apostles who said, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” It denies the significance of the Cross and His shed blood for the sins of the world. It denies the authority of Scripture. All religions are not equal. We do not all worship the same God and we are all not heading for the same destination.
You cannot be a Christian and a pluralist at the same time. But this is a culturally accepted concept. These viewpoints are opposed to traditional Christian faith. I heard another say the church needs to be inclusive of all people and their behaviour. One person said we have to accept, within church leadership, people regardless of their culture, behaviour, whether they were gay or straight, immoral or people with HIV-Aids.
Everyone agrees that such people are welcome in the church. But they want to welcome into church leadership such people without any changes in their behaviour. The whole Biblical concept of being born again, of being saved from sin and of living a life of holiness, was ignored. I have heard our culture is one of whatever anyone thinks or feels is valid for that person regardless of the Body of Christ as a community of faith. Their philosophy of individualism denies the discipline of the community and promotes as true whatever an individual may think or feel. One church leader said we must accept the life-stories of people as basic for the way our church is ordered. What was important was their experience should be heard and become the basis of our church order. But the church’s order and faith is under the authority, not of people’s feelings and experience, but of Scripture.
There is a need today for Christians to stress Christianity as our key commitment not spirituality. We need to stress the uniqueness of our faith rather than the pluralism of others’ beliefs. We need to stress our openness to all other people without the acceptance of their standards of behaviour. We need to stress the sense of the church as a community rather than the priority of individualism. We need to stress the authority of Scripture rather than the authority of a life-story.
5. Proclaim the Faith over our Culture
We come from distinctive cultural backgrounds and we must learn the difference between what stems from our cultural heritage and what is essential to our faith. What is essential will abide, and what is cultural may change. You may have grown up at a time when it was said you could not be saved unless you abstained from using make-up, avoided picture theatres, ball-room dancing and billiards! Other people add their own cultural ideas.
But there is a difference between faith and culture. We need to learn that lesson. We Christianise our culture. We take our behaviour patterns and baptise them, saying, “That is Christian.” But there is a difference between what is essential to the faith and what is simply cultural. When Paul entered the great cities of the Mediterranean world in the first century, he spoke to the citizens of each city understanding their culture.
The early church faced the issue constantly as the Jewish culture tried to contaminate the essence of Christianity. They insisted Jewish cultural traditions had to be observed by Christians. This included having all baby boys circumcised, not eating shellfish and pork, and having all food kosher killed. When Christianity spread into the areas we today call Turkey, Greece and Rome it faced a new set of cultural demands. This included the acceptance of slavery, Emperor worship and oaths of loyalty to the state. Paul had a clarity of vision when it came to seeing what was essentially Christian and what was merely a reflection of the culture of the times.
We need Paul’s clarity of vision today. How wise of Paul, to adapt his message to the city in which he was speaking; to direct his address to the mind-set and philosophy of his hearers; to scratch them where they were itching. How much wiser is he than some contemporary church leaders! He refused to dilute the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the cultural traditions and standards of his day. He did not give away the essence of the Christian faith in the hope that compromise and change would increase their spirituality.
Instead Paul stressed Jesus and the resurrection – the missionary gospel. We must hold to the cohesion of Christian culture rather than dilute the faith with the passing trends of modern culture. We understand our culture and to speak to it. Like the Athenians, some will scoff at us; some will want to hear us some more; and some will believe. That’s the response in the volatile city. But we have communicated the missionary Gospel to the city.
We commend the Church in Latrobe Terrace Geelong that has faithfully sought to capture the city of Geelong for the past 150 years.
REV THE HON DR GORDON MOYES AC MLC
