GordonMoyes.com

It has been an interesting life being a minister of religion. The twelve facets of my expanding ministry have all enlarged my capacities and competencies. They have all had freedom, while in ministry to God, in proclaiming the Word and in caring for people.

In 2002, I added to my role as Superintendent. I decided to stand for election to the Legislative Council in the NSW Parliament. At a joint sitting of both houses of Parliament, I was elected to take the seat of The Hon. Elaine Nile who retired because of illness after 14 years of working beside her husband, Rev. The Hon. Fred Nile MLC the leader of the Christian Democratic Party. 6 months later I received in a general state election over whelming support to win one of the 21 seats in the Legislative Council. There were 292 candidates.

After I had been a student minister in the Newmarket and Ascot Vale for three years, the church invited me to stay on as a young married man. I was married in the Christmas vacation and after returning from a rather unusual honeymoon on which I ended up violently ill and had to be hospitalised, we settled into the first of six houses which would be our homes for the future.

Billy Graham once told me that if I was absolutely honest, God would allow a lot of money to pass through my fingers provided none of it stuck to them!

Yet, when I commenced as Superintendent of Wesley Mission following my appointment in December 1977 the first challenge that stood out was debt. Debt was written everywhere.

I previously had learnt to cope with debt in church life. In fact in each of the churches where I had ministered, in the slums, in the rural sector and in the suburbs the churches had debts.

One of the tasks I was looking forward to when I became Superintendent of Wesley Mission more than 27 years ago was providing some leadership in the field of counselling. Every city church has a huge load of people coming for counselling but Wesley Mission even more so. The Mission has always taken care for those people who are troubled, disabled, perplexed and confused, therefore the counselling load was high. But more than that a few years earlier Sir Alan Walker had founded LifeLine and therefore we had an enormous stream of people coming to be counselled and other people who needed to be trained as volunteer counsellors.

I write a lot of hand-written letters. Whenever I have a moment to spare, I reach for my pen and paper and dash off a letter to someone. Every person I know on the annual Australia Day and Queen’s Birthday honours list receives a letter. About a hundred people each month are listed by their date of birth to remind me to send them a letter just before their birthday. Everyone having a baby, or graduating, or getting a new job, or facing surgery, or grieving – as far as possible – receives a letter.

While our new Wesley Centre was being built, we met in temporary premises, in the area of the city where lots of teenagers hung out. We developed two programs:

CITYROCK captured the interest of young people. For many years I have wanted to see a citywide youth rally of a Saturday night providing good Christian entertainment for young people, and a strong outreach to street kids. Both purposes were served with strong attendances from Christian youth and up to 100 street kids being invited into the presentation each time to hear the Gospel message. A number were converted.

I was always interested in communicating the good news of the Gospel through the media. If people came to church then I wanted to show them in the best way possible the good news and this would involve music, drama, film and audio-visual. If people didn’t come to church then I wanted to find ways of getting out to those people where they were and show them in pictures or in word-pictures what it was they were missing. In any event the main aim was to communicate through the media the good news of Jesus.

For the last fifty years of my life I have been building. Although trained and called to be a preacher of the Gospel, I have constantly spent time planning, designing, building and altering houses, hospitals, churches, nursing homes, retirement villages and so on. I have had some part to play in the building, occupying or developing of over 400 buildings, together worth several hundred million dollars.

The process of becoming Superintendent to the Central Methodist Mission in Sydney was a very protracted and onerous one. I discovered I had to be patient. There was much waiting in this game.

During 1977 I had been to the Central Methodist Mission in Sydney, on a number of occasions, at the request of the then Superintendent Rev. Dr. Alan Walker. He asked me to address about 100 ministers during January 1977 at a conference held at Vision Valley. I was then back to speak at the Mission Anniversary in May 1977. That was a significant occasion because Alan Walker had indicated to the congregation that after 19 years of ministry, he was planning to retire at the end of that year. A new Superintendent would have to be appointed.