Courses (part II)
Over the next few years “courses” became a way of life at the Cheltenham Church of Christ. I decided to run a series for people who had been married but were getting bored with it. I used the same principle – advertised in the local papers, produced a brochure and dropped it in letterboxes all over the district. The front page this time simply stated “How to be happy though married” and inside again gave the pictures and the run down of half a dozen experts who would help people work through marriage difficulties. I expected this course to be poorly attended as I felt if people were having troubles within their marriage they would not want to go out and sit in a public hall to be lectured by some distinguished marriage counsellor, letting the world know that they were having their problems.
So I made a good point in the brochure that this course was not only for people with bad marriages who were trying desperately to save them, but for people with good marriages who wanted to make them better. Striking that positive note seemed to do the trick. On the first night the car park was packed out, and we had some gentlemen with torches waving vehicles on, indicating that all car parking spaces were now occupied. Couples came and sat together in the middle of a cold Melbourne winter, week after week, and went home and talked about what they had learned, and if my guess was right there were probably delighted couples developing their sex life all over Cheltenham, having been encouraged by the specialists who had been talking about coping with differences, finances, the threat of divorce, sexual difficulties and the like.
We did also offer courses for people in specifically Christian subjects. In 1966 the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational Churches were studying the proposed basis of union between the three denominations. It seemed to me that our local Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational Churches were not taking their own union seriously enough. So once more, Cheltenham Church of Christ ran a series of studies on the proposed basis of union, bringing together the outstanding foundation proponents of the coming Uniting Church to lead a study program on what would be involved.
Here again, our Church halls were packed out, except this time they were from the other denominations. I found the series incredibly interesting and it forced me to study the foundations of the Uniting Church and, as usual, I gave the last lecture as I did in every course, with some specifically Christian content.
Looking back in my journals I see that in 1968 we ran seventeen courses. Each of those courses ran for six or eight weeks and by now the numbers of people attending in a year were well into the thousands. We never ran any courses in January because people always felt that was the time when Church life slowed down and people went on holidays.
I had started to look at January when the holiday slump meant many Churches closed their evening services and Sunday attendances dropped right down as people headed for the beach. I decided that this was the time to produce another course, this time for Church leaders and ministers, so the Summer School for Successful Ministry began. This was a big venture as I wanted to bring together outstanding leaders in the field of growing Christian congregations from across Australia. This time we were not planning for the people merely of Melbourne but of Australia. We advertised in all of the Church papers around Australia and indicated that we had secured the services of Australia’s outstanding ministers as guest lecturers. In the first program Reverend Doctor Alan Walker from Sydney was attending and a host of others. People like Bishop Jack Dain, Reverend Bill Adams, Mr. Kevin Crawford, Reverend Michael Dennis, Doctor Bruce Peterson, Reverend Doctor Dudley Ford, Jay Bacik, Reverend David Cohen and a dozen more joined our lecturing panel. Bishop Chan do Ray came from Singapore and spoke about contemporary Evangelism in a pluralistic society. Reverend Doctor Alan Walker spoke about Evangelism in the local Church, Bishop Jack Dain on being committed to ministry, and we had other sessions on using the media, developing an Australian theology, how to improve your communications skills, strategy of Church growth in the eighties, harnessing youth power in Evangelism, reaching children in worship services, conducting a ministry to single adults, releasing the power of people and so on.
The idea was to provide throughout January an experience where Ministers and Church leaders from across Australia could live in the homes of our Church members, attend lecture programs each day in small groups around our complex, share meals together and then at night listen to some great preaching from some of the finest preachers of all denominations in Australia. The first Summer School for Successful Ministry was an outstanding success. Over five hundred people attended the course and we were packed out in each of our mid week preaching sessions.
That developed friendships with Ministers across Australia from various denominations who had never met each other but whose names were well known. The following January and then for the next four Januarys I ran these Summer Schools for Successful Ministry, with the final one being conducted here in Sydney for some three hundred ministers and fifteen hundred Church leaders.
It was the first time in Australia that such a course in in-service training for people in the Ministry was ever conducted. I had recently written a book “How to Grow an Australian Church” which took off like wildfire when the first year some ten thousand copies were sold and indeed to this day several thousand copies a year are still purchased. This was the first handbook on Church Growth in Australia to be published and there obviously was an important market for it. Even though it is now dated and thirty years old it still covers all basic principles and “How to grow an Australian Church” has become a byword in Church growth literature. It was republished in Britain and Canada with the titles “How to Grow a British Church” and it had a new life in those areas.
People then wanted me to lecture on the principles in the book and so a whole series of probably three or four hundred lecture programs in every state of Australia was held using the material that I presented in that book. Courses had become a way of life but my life was going on and changing. The courses now needed to be conducted by an expert in that field.
All these courses took a lot of time from running an otherwise busy ministry. In fact it was simply the challenge of other things that turned me away from conducting courses, and the appointment of Rev Jeff Benson, an expert in community education, whom I met in Enid, Oklahoma in 1972, saw the biggest development in the Churches program. Jeff joined us in 1975 to minister in nothing else but developing adult education programs through our Church. By the time Jeff arrived we had been conducting twenty eight courses with seventy paid lecturers. The year after he had come we were conducting sixty courses per annum and many thousands of people were attending.
In the last year of my ministry at Cheltenham, Jeff had really taken off with the “Cheltenham School for Continuing Education” as we called it, was using all of the halls throughout the Southern Bayside that could be hired to place groups, and had had in one year thirty nine thousand people attending our courses. It was one of the most remarkable developments in adult education that I had ever seen.
So my thirteen year ministry at the Cheltenham Church of Christ came to an end on a very high note. However, courses were still to be part of our ministry although I was not going to be involved in running them. As soon as we came to Wesley Mission we had the School for Seniors, and other adult education programs, with more than a hundred courses running simultaneously and more than a thousand people booked into our continual program of courses. Soon we had two thousand people in over one hundred and twenty courses each week. Then we started a new centre on the Central Coast of NSW.
Adult education conducted by the Church for people in the community at their expense had become a way of life and a way of seeing the Church as relevant and meaningful. And it was not by accident that the life of the Parish grew and that our evangelism was active because we had this continual source of new people coming under the influence of our ministry.
During the 1980’s I gave lectures to Schools of Ministry in England, Singapore, USA and Canada. Then I gave lectures to courses in preaching at Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities. For the last twenty years I have been giving lectures in Urban Ministry in USA and in 2002 was appointed Adjunct Professor of Christian Ministries at the Emmanuel School of Religion.
All of these courses have been undertaken in my own time while I have been conducting one of the largest ministries in Australia that grew to have over 4,500 paid staff working for our ministry.
Now, at 70 years of age, I have been doing a new course in my local Community College. Each Friday morning at 10am, school is in! I am re-learning the art of watercolour painting at which I was quite acceptable while a young man. Looking forward to retirement painting, I discovered the long unused skills that evaporated over the proceeding forty years, so it is back to courses once more, now with others, learning from an outstanding artist.
Watercolour painting has a long and glorious tradition in both Eastern and Western cultures, and has been a medium practised in Australia since the earliest days of European settlement. There was a very strong school of watercolour painting in England, and it is largely from this school that the use of watercolour developed in Australia. The fine paintings of Conrad Martens are an example of this. In Australia we have a great tradition, Arthur Streeton, David Davies, Lionel Lindsay, Hans Heysen, Frank McNamara are a few of the many great Australian watercolour painters. These artists have been captivated by the magic of working with this beautiful, but very difficult medium.
Watercolour is special because of its immediacy and its luminosity, the sparkle, the brilliance of colour, and the qualities to be found in the gesture and brush-strokes, the textures obtained by the different uses of pigment and water, and the particular paper. The fluidity, the nuances of colour and the brushstrokes can produce work that is as sensitive as the music of Chopin. Unfortunately the subtleties of watercolour can be reduced to a weak and insipid image. The strength of watercolour can be seen in its great adaptability, and its use has resulted in some of the most unforgettable images in the history of the visual arts.
But it is a difficult medium, much more difficult than painting in oils or any other medium. The only light comes from the white paper through the watercolour. It cannot be gone over and over. It is demanding and immediate. That is why the course is so enjoyable.
Life long learning should be the objective of us all. While we live we grow. Keep on growing. Undertake a course! This past fortnight a number of my paintings were selected for an exhibition and sold at the Central Coast Art Gallery. An artist is pleased to be invited to be part of an exhibition. But to have your paintings purchased at commercial rates is a special encouragement. This past two weeks, I was blessed with both.
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.
