I started preaching in Melbourne’s slum areas.

Looking back on it I guess I must have looked very much like a boy preacher. I started preaching during my 17th year but I had been preparing for it for some time. All my first sermons were preached to a congregation of none in the quietness of the lounge room of my mother’s house. My first pulpit was an upturned banana box on top of a piano stool. It held my notes and I took turns in leaning upon it, leaning over it, holding onto it and thumping it as I went through my sermon manuscripts. Continue reading →

I have always been blessed with a number of key laymen who taught me how to be a minister. What I had learned in theological college and university were only the tools for the job. The real teaching came at the hands of the mentors around me. Continue reading →

From my earliest days as a teenage Christian, I wanted to be an evangelist.

1952 was a great year in the Melbourne Churches of Christ. They were host for the World Convention of Churches of Christ, and 10,000 people attended the great public rallies in the Exhibition Building. Thousands of over-seas visitors were accommodated in the homes of Melbourne Church members. I was taken to the World Convention by two ladies who worked in my mother’s cake shop, Jean and Maggie Perry. They were devout members of Churches of Christ, and they had first taken me to Sunday school, and were part of all of my life from teaching me to sing to teaching me Chinese words and characters. Continue reading →

As a young teenager in The Box Hill Boys High School in the early 1950’s, I was challenged with my class, by our geometry teacher, to work out the angles and make a polygon. Most of the boys decided to make a cube as that was easiest. Some decided to make an octagon. I decided to make a do-decahedron; a solid figure with 12 equal faces or planes. I calculated the angles, cut the pieces from very thin wood then sand papered, glued and painted the model. Continue reading →