Death of the Reverend Dr Sir Alan Walker
Reverend the Hon. Dr GORDON MOYES [5.49 p.m.]: I bring to the attention of the House the fact that the Reverend Dr Sir Alan Walker, former Superintendent of Wesley Mission of Sydney and former Director of World Evangelism for the World Methodist Council, died in a Sydney nursing home on 29 January. He was 91 years of age. Dr Walker led the Methodist Church’s “Mission to the Nation” crusades across Australia in the 1950s, he founded Lifeline in 1963; and he was named as one of Australia’s 100 living national treasures. Allan Gill commented in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Walker was the last of a brand of larger-than-life Sydney clergy, of international as well as local and national renown, unafraid of political correctness, whose confidence in their cause is considered admirable by some and “arrogant” by others.
He had various nicknames: “Mister Methodist”, by co-religionists; “the Methodist Pope”, by journalists; and “that nice Alan Warble” by Dorrie Evans in the 1970s TV soap Number 96. Bill Hayden, while Governor-General, called him the “conscience of the nation”. That title was chosen as the title for historian Don Wright’s biography of Walker, which had been launched in 1997 in Wesley Mission.
Sir Alan saw that Australia’s largest city, Sydney, had a crying need for a counselling service and a means to address this problem in a caring and practical way. With this realisation and vision he established the telephone counselling service Lifeline in March 1963. Forty years later Lifeline is an international organisation with a mantle of care over some of the world’s largest cities. As a result, millions of men and women around the world have received support and hope in times of loneliness, isolation and need. Lifeline counsellors take 400,000 calls a year—20,000 in Sydney alone. In addition to his leadership of Wesley Mission for 20 years, from 1958 to 1978, and being a prominent media cleric, Dr Walker was best known for his large evangelical missions to the nation, his uncompromising voice for peace and justice, and deep commitment to the Methodist tradition. Professor Don Wright, who authored an excellent biography of Alan Walker, said:
Nothing in Alan Walker’s ministry stands above his Mission to South Africa in September-October 1963. Called there to help the Methodist Church find a new and positive direction through the deepening gloom of apartheid, Alan Walker performed at a level higher than he ever attained elsewhere. God brought together a need, a man and a moment in a way that happens only rarely. Black “coloured” Christians were given a new hope.
Sir Alan Walker strongly emphasised this:
Let it never be forgotten that it is Christ we offer.
Sir Alan further said:
The church must never degenerate to being akin to a government or social service agency. We witness first, last and always, to Christ.
In 1971, a time of flower power and Jesus freaks, Alan Walker and a young minister, the Reverend Fred Nile, a current member of this House, led a group of alternative lifestyle Christians entering the world “living in hippiedom”. They launched the Newness NSW campaign, in which the young and not-so-young thought beautiful thoughts, sang beautiful songs, and pointed their fingers towards the sky one way. Fred Nile ran a commune for the young Jesus radicals in Francis Street, Sydney, and taught them the Christian faith. In 1997 at the launch of Dr Don Wright’s book Alan Walker: Conscience of a Nation, former Governor-General the Hon. Bill Hayden said:
Alan Walker had made the Christian message relevant and meaningful to the human condition. It took great courage to be an outspoken pacifist in the Second World War … to defend the young against conscription in the 1960s … [and] moral courage of the highest order to condemn the White Australia policy in 1938.
Dr Walker’s ministry extends from the time he was a probationary minister in the Hornsby circuit in the early 1930s to 28 February 1995, when he stepped down as Principal of the Pacific College for Evangelism. Alan Walker was honoured with the OBE and later with a knighthood in 1981. He accepted the title as he hoped it would open doors for him in various parts of the world, although he was a staunch republican. It certainly did, and in the next decade he and his wife, Lady Win, spoke at church rallies in more than 140 countries. Sir Alan Walker is survived by his wife, Lady Winifred Walker; his daughter, Lynette Sue; and sons, the Reverend Bruce Walker, David Walker and the Reverend Dr Chris Walker. The House honours the memory of a prominent Methodist and activist, Sir Alan Walker. 6 May 2003.
