Courses (part I)
All of my life I have been doing courses. Even during High School I attended classes in athletics, boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, rugby and swimming, in singing, piano and on Saturday mornings in learning the Italian language. I attended evening classes in learning the life and teachings of St Paul and for a couple of years attended classes in the principles of teaching to fit me for Sunday School teaching, and in youth Club leadership for the youth club in which I was involved.
Then over the next seven years I attended Theological College and the Melbourne University doing a wide range of courses. At night I attended extra courses in Classical Greek, both in reading and writing skills, and in translations of major books.
The theological lecturers taught me theology, Old and New Testament studies, the life of Jesus, homiletics, Koine Greek, and Hebrew, hermeneutics, apologetics, Australian society and contemporary social issues, church history, reformation history, the restoration movement, ethics, pastoral counselling, public speaking, church ministry and sacraments and so on. At University I studied English literature, classical Greek, philosophy, medieval philosophy, Ancient History, Australian history, American history, European history, logic, chemistry, biology, genetics, botany and so on.
But more was needed. I was taught not only the academic aspects of religion, but how to grow in Christian grace and spiritual strength, both essential to be equipped for ministry. When I graduated and was ordained it was stated I had completed all of the subjects required, but as the diploma states, I had also shown consistent development in good spiritual character, and on the basis of both I was granted the diploma and the degree. Then on the basis of spiritual fitness for ministry, I was ordained.
That was not the end. For I felt the need for further studies and I completed studies at Melbourne University, Ormond College United Faculty of Theology, in Christology, Reformation history, the process of Union within the Uniting Church, then studies from Oxford University in New Testament Greek exegesis, Church History, and in Australia, studies in counselling, chaplaincy, Christian education, business management, several years of archaeology, psychology, psychotherapy, graduate theology at the Melbourne College of Divinity and the United Faculty of Theology, all of them designed to advance the Kingdom of God.
Thankfully, most of these courses ran only for one year or one semester. Later I would do short term courses in occupational health and safety, company directors’ responsibilities, strategic planning, personnel management, computer skills, defensive driving and whatever else was required. Some were live-in courses such at Monash University Mt Eliza Management School and some required only daily attendance such as at the Australian Graduate School of Management at University of NSW. Along the way I completed the requirement for becoming an associate, then a member and finally a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management, a Fellow of The Australian Institute of Company Directors, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London, and a member of the Australian College of Education.
Every year for about fifteen years I had to do a brief course in defamation law from some lawyers because I was involved in radio broadcasting and television presentation nationally every week. Ministers also need to be spiritually equipped. I took every opportunity to learn by attending brief courses in spirituality and theology at the United Theological College, and courses in personal witnessing to Christ, in the methods and practises of evangelism, in writing for the public the Christian message, in church music, contemporary worship and even in contemporary religious dance.
In 1966 I started to run courses for the community. Of course I had run Bible studies and the like for church members, but in the Cheltenham Church of Christ we discovered and implemented a program of providing a course of studies for people who were not church members, on matters which were not specifically religious, but presented by outstanding Christian lecturers. The big difference in the courses that we ran was that they were professional in scope and were paid for by people who attended.
To my knowledge no other church in Australia was attempting to do what we were doing. It did not start in a big way but rather in a very humble way with the birth of our first son Peter. When Beverley and I arrived at the Cheltenham Church of Christ we had a three-year-old daughter and son who was under one year. We had been through some difficult days soon after Peter was born in the country hospital at Ararat. We had looked at a number of issues that we had dealt with concerning our own children – what to do when your child was sick, how to develop a child’s social skills, how to explain death to a young child, how to help a young child get ready for the coming of the next baby and so on. Everything that I had learned in that last year as a country parson came into focus when we moved down to Cheltenham and I started visiting the people and discovered there were many other young couples of our age in the area and many of them were facing the same problems of bringing up children.
I decided to run a course for young parents. I would organise a central location in one of the Church halls, seek out the half dozen outstanding paediatricians and child experts in Melbourne, run a crèche so mothers could pay attention without having to be distracted by little children, and set the whole thing in a warm and friendly environment where parents could ask questions about bringing up their own children without feeling as if they were inadequate or incompetent.
So the first course was born – “Your Child and You”. I gathered together six of the outstanding professional experts in Melbourne in the field of Child Rearing and put their photos and a brief description of their capabilities into a glossy brochure, and on the front page of the brochure had a photograph of my wife and I with our young daughter and baby son. The one line on the front cover just said simply “Even the minister has young children….”. When you opened the brochure it then showed pictures of young children all round our church and raised the issues that parents worried about, what to do when your child is sick, how to help your child get on with other children, how to discipline your child, how to explain death to a child, how to prepare your child for the birth of the new baby, how to help a child understand God and so on. All of these issues would be covered over a period of six weeks by the six outstanding lecturers and there in the midst of all these experts was my own photograph lecturing on how to talk to your child about God. It did not hurt to associate with the famous!
We popped these in a few thousand letter boxes around Cheltenham and put some advertisements in the local paper together with some news stories on these famous paediatricians who were coming to Cheltenham for six continuous sessions. I had swotted up on the subject and to my surprise as each week went by the numbers of people attending grew so that by the last week when I spoke about your child and God we had a packed hall of interested parents with questions flowing thick and fast.
Of course, many of these parents never went to Church and their children certainly did not go to Sunday School, but by the time the course had finished they had been used to coming to our Church, had gotten to know me as Minister, had used our Church facilities and found them convenient and comfortable, and their children were used to playing in our kindergarten or crèche. Consequently it was the easiest thing in the world for those children to continue on to Sunday School every week with some four hundred attending, and for the parents to become part of a second morning service that I had started designed especially for young parents where the Church service would be bright and brief and special attention would be paid to children. It worked like a charm, and the amazing thing was all of these parents paid for the privilege of coming to hear about how to bring up their child in a Christian fashion.
On the last day of the course I sent around a sheet seeking their reactions and the positive comments were overwhelming. However, I noted that more than a few said, “You have helped us bring up our young children, but it is the older teenagers we are having problems with”. So the second course was born out of the first – “How to bring up teenagers without going off your head”. Again, I followed the same pattern, bringing in six more experts who had dealings with the problems of teenage rebellion, teenage discipline, helping teenagers improve their study concentration, getting teenagers to complete their homework, developing a sense of dress skill in your teenager and even a session on how to understand your teenager’s music.
This time it was an older age group of parents, struggling with teenagers and trying to do their best. Again, the Church hall was packed and my line-up of experts delivered the goods. Everybody had a warm feeling towards the teenagers and many young kids made comments on how their dad had completely changed and how parents had even asked for copies of their Beatles records so they could listen to the words.
However, this particular course spawned another course, because people filling in the questionnaire at the end indicated that where they needed help as parents was explaining the facts of life to teenagers and they would appreciate if we would have a sex education program to help their teenagers.
The Church Deacons and all the members of the congregation were amazed to see all these people who did not belong to the Church queuing up to get into the hall and paying their money to come to a Church program. Especially amazed were they when they saw so many of them starting to come on a Sunday morning and become involved in some of our other weekday programs. But the course on sex education was going to provide a headache. The brochure that went out had a simple cover with the word “Slam” right across the front page. It was only when you opened the page you realised that Slam stood for Sex Love and Marriage. This course promised to deal with the biological nature of sexual development, the seriousness of sexual intercourse, the problems of venereal disease and sexually transmitted diseases, the relationship between sex, love and marriage and all of this again being done with experts from across the city together with some good films, diagrams and full and frank discussion.
Pine Street alongside the Church was crowded with people wanting to get into our gymnasium that could seat about five hundred people. The series was packed out and the interesting thing is that lots of parents came with their children. We had closed sessions for females only and males only. That sounds rather quaint these days but it certainly had the desired objective because on one side of Pine Street the auditorium was packed with boys and their fathers and on the other side the halls were packed with girls and their mothers, as our various lecturers went through describing the onset of puberty and the relationships between young teenagers finding their first sexual urges.
(Part II of Courses will be included in next week’s newsletter).
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.