It started when we were planning to go over to this other station for a weekend. I had a Long Wheelbase Landrover. This is a four wheel drive vehicle, a minority machine in the U.S.A. admittedly, but the type of conveyance that made Britain great in the colonies and the tropics. Every New Zealander and Australian knows what a Landrover is. There is only one place in the world where it has become a cult vehicle, and it is a fitting location – the highlands of Malaysia. This outpost of colonialism has towns completely populated by Landrovers. I have a photo of me standing in a street full of parked Landrovers. No other vehicle. But I digress.

Well, we loaded up about twenty gallons of diesel oil to take over with us, because that was what the lady on the mission station had asked for. Then we drove over and got there later that afternoon. Unloaded everything, and took the fuel over to this pumphouse. Then this lovely chatty Irish lady took us down to the village and introduced us to some people. Only it wasn’t a village. It was a leper colony.

That’s right. A leper colony. A place where the rejects of poverty stricken Africa, with pieces of their anatomy missing, go and live. So understand the scene. These are people who can’t even fit into the normal filth and dust of a third world African township. They are shut out from even that. Living in a leper colony in Africa is the bottom of the pile. There is nowhere lower to go. In the whole world.

This lovely lady breaks into their language for a while. Don’t underestimate even this. The language was a tonal one. Us English speakers have a very hard time learning tonal languages like Chinese, and the West African tongues. She had spent years training herself on this lingo so she could go talk with the lepers. Not so that she could arrange foreign exchange transfers, or listen to them chat through financial deals in front of her thinking she couldn’t understand them. Oh no, she learnt it because it was proof of her commitment to them in particular. Sounds awfully serious, this little point, but we are talking years of effort. To speak with lepers.

Well, she told them the following, and then explained it all to me. In the middle of their compound of 300 people stood a solitary water tap. The water out of this tap came from a tower. The water tower was replenished by a pump. The pump was fueled with diesel. Prior to our coming, the diesel had run out a long time ago, so no water in the tower, and therefore one dry tap. But now, the water would run, and the lepers would not have to walk down to the river and bring it back on bowls on their heads. For a while anyway.

Then these wretched souls poured out of their huts, smiling and laughing through their missing lips, clapping despite their absent digits, and dancing without their long gone toes. Circling around, they happily chanted away, seemingly without a care in the world now that their single water tap would work again. For a while.

And I had nothing to say.

Let me give you an example. An Elder in a church I went to once told me several times that he thinks it is good for the church to set one person aside fulltime to hear the leading of the Lord. I pointed out this strategy had been practiced for the past 1900 years in Christendom with some… interesting results. Oddly, he was a little surprised, but had to agree.

In fact most religions in the world at one time or another go in for leaders who ‘tell them the will of God’. Its the oldest sociological trick in the book, and very easy to expose if you are outside that religion. We Christians feel sorry for the poor Arabs who are basically conned into giving their lives in Islamic Jihads marching over minefields with the key to heaven strung around their necks. However could the Muslim’s see the sociology that drives us? We might not be picking it up because we are inside our own environment. As the old Scotsman said, “Oh that God would give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us”.

So let us proceed. The other day I put a question to a Pastor I know. I asked him, “shouldn’t Pastors try and work themselves out of a job?” What did I mean by this question? Well, let us say Pastors have a certain set of activities they do – encouraging others, visiting the sick, running Bible studies, and preaching on Sundays. Shouldn’t they be searching out members within their congregations to do all these tasks themselves?

Take preaching for example. I bet the average listener to sermons can’t remember last weeks topic. I’ve been in churches where they ask this from the front, and I’ve seen the proportion of hands raised. But one sure way to get at least one person to learn something from the Bible is ask him to preach on it. Or take a study on it. Bottom line is, eventually you could get a church group running itself. The Pastor could fade out of it. And then go start another church. Such was my question. To my surprise my Pastor friend didn’t agree. So I went home and worked out some reasons he might have for keeping his fellows on the payroll.

Firstly, and most cynically, he may be an Empire builder. However I don’t believe this one myself. Simply because if anyone was primarily after power and influence in the church, they would be the last to admit it. They would say “Oh no, I am working so that my congregation will become strong and self sufficient”. This is what Alan Pease calls ‘Talk Language’. Like if someone starts a sentence with the phrase, “No offence meant but, ….”, you can be sure what they say is intended to offend you.

Having said all that I have talked with Pastors, and its amazing to a simple layman like me how often they bring up power struggles in the church. Recently one told me, “you can’t have two front men as Pastors. They will both want the action, and one will have to go.” I couldn’t believe it. In my simplicity I thought we should be promoting others, and giving up the seat of honour for our brother.

Shattered my naiveté a little, hearing that. But it recalled a further thing to mind. Namely that the very word ‘Pastor’ connotes a visiting, caring, compassionate type of role. But mostly when I look through the papers and visit churches where there is a ‘Pastor’, turns out he is the preacher about 90% of the time. The front man. No doubt there is an explanation for this somewhere.Finally on this point, and worst of all, I got involved once in a series of Bible studies that said, in black and white, we should submit to the authority of our Pastors. And I know there are plenty around who like their name prefixed by the word. When speaking to them you are supposed to say ‘Pastor John’ or ‘Pastor George’. How am I meant to address other members? ‘Salesman Rick’ or ‘Nurse Louise’?

The sad fact is of course that people who rely solely on this sort of input, and don’t check their Bibles, (like at least one early Mediterranean church did) are quite likely to end up accepting and believing this stuff. Which is all very well if you are aiming to mindset a group of people in a certain direction. But it doesn’t speak much for freedom. Now you might say to me, well you have to face reality, those sort of power games go on all the time. You are absolutely correct, that it is unrealistic to expect otherwise. In fact the dynamics that drive people into groups, into organizing themselves along certain lines of thought and action, are inherent to the very basics of social organization and power. Ever since the garden, man has acted this way. God taught us all a lesson about it at the Tower of Babel. We didn’t listen though.

So I’m more interested in a God that can move us to unrealities of social behaviour, that can get us acting against our natural tendencies, that can move us to love. At least I know I need to be moved in that direction.

The second reason my Pastor friend might have is that he just sees day to day problems and can’t lift his eyes to any vision. He may feel swamped by those characterised by Bob Jones as people “who can’t find their way home from work.” In this scenario the poor Pastor lurches from one crisis in his congregation to another. Firefighter supreme. Very little possibility of anyone gaining enough maturity to tie his shoelaces. I take my hat off to these people. They sacrifice their life working at what appears a hopeless task. But it is not without purpose actually, if viewed the correct way. Now, no doubt there are situations like the last one, but I for one don’t know how many. Such churches need a whole football team of Pastors each anyway. No, it’s the options below where there’s some sociology at work.

The third reason my Pastor friend might have is that he doesn’t have a vision of a church body doing his job. That is preaching sermons, visiting people etc. Or, significantly, the church members don’t have that vision for themselves either. I will return to this. Or he may be part of an institution that has a career path in church work. This is actually a variety of the second option. Here you’ve got a large organisation that can’t understand what we are talking about here, and has already given up reading this article anyway. They have far better things to do with their time than argue with people who question the validity of their existence.

Here I will make a terrible assumption. If this is wrong, my whole argument lies in tatters. I’m going to assume that churches actually do want their people to grow stronger, that they do want to develop leadership. Somehow I’ve picked up that this is a Christian type of ideal.
Now Saint Paul (or just Paul if you like) used to wander around the Mediterranean stopping occasionally to build up a Church group. After working with a flock for a while, he would move on. Not to another church by the way. To another town. To start from scratch. And he left churches that had problems. We know this by the letters, usually just one letter actually, he wrote back to them. So they had to sink or swim.

However today we see Pastors continually getting ‘called’ from one church to the next. Perpetual round about. Sure a few of them start up brand new groups, but the statistics are against it in the Western world at least. And human nature being what it is, so long as you have someone else running affairs in your church, you don’t need to do anything. Or very little anyway.

In fact there’s an immutable logic which says if you appoint someone to do these tasks, by definition you are not planning to do them yourself. And therefore the average church member doesn’t get experience in a whole range of activities run by the Pastor. Simply then, how can this leadership we spoke of earlier, emerge?

I’m serious, I don’t think we realise we’ve got a battle on our hands, the way we run things. We need leaders to grow. And fast. Oh, I know everyone agrees with this, but it is basically lip service. Because we don’t see many Pauls around. We don’t see people developing church bodies, and moving on thereby allowing, perhaps forcing those they’ve left behind, to run things themselves. Instead we see Pastor swapping.
Now here’s a little analogy. Prior to World War II it took several years to train a fighter pilot in Britain. During early WWII the training period was cut to three months. Britain had to. There was no choice. Those rapidly trained young men had to fight in the skys because there was no one else. Poorly trained as they were however, they helped win the Battle of Britain in 1940. When people realise there is a war on, amazingly rapid strides are made through necessity.

So here is a radical suggestion. If you have a fulltime, salaried Pastor, get rid of him. That’s right. Out he goes. Send him to the other side of town, and rent a school hall for him there on Sunday mornings. Let him start another church over there from scratch, and run your’s just with your own ordinary members. Honestly, this may be a crazy recommendation, but it’s not necessarily stupid. Your church will learn more from that experience of independence than you could ever believe. And if your old Pastor is worth his salt, within two years he will have a new thriving group across town.

Plenty of congregations exist without clerics. The Open Brethren generally don’t have Pastors, and yet they get by quite well. In fact ask anyone that knows any actual facts about this often maligned denomination, and they will agree that those people really got into the Bible, and learned it well. Somehow without any career people, without any salaried pastoral team, they did better than most other denominations in teaching their people the Bible. Isn’t this significant? It’s not that they constructed better buildings, or sang more songs, or protested more about racism, or condemned the government more etc etc. No. Without an institutional leadership setup, they taught their people Biblical truths better than most. Which strikes me as pretty central to what we are all about here.

A second benefit to this strategy is that you will get to know others in your church. Hundreds of nice congregations currently exist where the members don’t even know each other well enough to fall out. If you have to work out what you’re doing together, you will soon get to know each other. It might be tough, but getting out of our comfort zone is invariably good for us. This is one part of Sociology neatly designed to give us opportunity to learn to love each other.

Furthermore your church cannot grow too big without splitting off new cells. Seventy people is about as big as you can get and still maintain strong interpersonal relationships. So you run the risk of working in a church body that hopefully resists the alluring pull of institutionalising itself. Which could be quite an adventure.

Now why did I say at the start that the fault was with ourselves? Because I don’t think most congregations want this kind of challenge. After all, I hear you say, the church is probably the longest standing institution the West has. And it is under enough threat from secular pressures as it is without suggesting getting rid of the various ancient or modern heirarchies governing it. (Personally I think these two issues are related, but that is another story.) And there’s another reason – we are lazy. As always it is easier to hand over responsibility. 

Not for a minute do I believe these institutions will be unravelled from within. It is a social maxim that people do not get into positions of authority, only to dismantle them. Even Winston Churchill said he did not rise to power to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. But unfortunately for him, it happened anyway.

So will they be pulled down from the outside? Probably not either. In fact the worst thing an antagonist can do to any religion is persecute it. That strengthens inner resolve like nothing else whether you are talking about Russian Orthodox, Mormonism, Pentecostalism, Judaism, or Bahai. And therefore it follows that church structures will also stand for a long time to come. There is a tremendous interia in society. Religious institutions, ancient or modern, are left weatherbeaten, but largely intact. In tough times adherents cling to their structures like they had six arms. It gives them a pillar of solidity in an uncertain world. Which is one of the differences between religion, and a living faith in Christ. Because He and his dividing sword are always attempting to cut through the veneer of institutionalism. He reminds us yes, the world is uncertain, but He is not.

One verse we need to remember in this context is Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:12 “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it.” (NIV) The historical reality is that forceful men have arisen and influenced the churches direction on earth for the past 2000 years. They still are today. The amazing thing is that God works within the historical and modern reality anyway.

Let me finish by telling you what happened to my Pastor friend. He gave up Pastoring. Deliberately he went out and found himself an ordinary job, the type of boring, meaningless work that characterises the Western world. He found it hard, and he told me it was very rewarding. He reckoned that all Pastors should do this from time to time, to experience the pressures and tensions and problems that other people undergo all their lives.

I thought it was a courageous act.

Maud walked into that classroom looking for someone to cut to pieces, and Murphy Dahn happened to be there. He came out from town every day to attend mission school.

‘That Murphy Dahn, he should be beaten,’ she said without warning before turning on her heel and heading back to check that the dough was rising for the afternoon’s snack.

‘What I did, what I did?’ his wide African eyes rolling delightfully, looking like some character out of a Steven Spielberg movie on runaway slaves.

The rest of the class crack up at this superb clash of cultures. White people are so strange, even though they have all the breaks in life, all the money and the power, they are so peculiar.

The pastries are brought out. I love these pastries and will endure any religious instruction to obtain one. Maud is in full flight this afternoon having offloaded onto Murphy Dahn that morning. She is in hysterics telling us about when she and Dave, her husband, the sixty eight year old patriarch missionary, first met on the ‘mission field’. ‘Do you know what?’ she shrieks excitedly at us. ‘Do you know what Dave was like when I met him?’

This is obviously a big deal, and I’m not about to spoil it by coming out with some ridiculous comment even though it is begging to be said. There are pastries at stake. So Robyn and I munch in silence. Waiting for the blow. ‘He didn’t wear singlets under his shirt!’

She is rolling around on the couch, beside herself. Robyn looks at me, and I gingerly pull my chest in, letting my shirt droop forward so she cannot see that in the blazing African dry season neither do I wear singlets under my shirt. Dave smiles broadly, happy to accept some blame for this misdemeanor. Reveling in rebellion.

-

The next day we sit in church. It is a Sunday, and the men sit on one side, and the women on the other. I always grab a window seat. No air conditioners, and at least you get a view. These church meetings are classic. African ladies, worn out from a week of raising children, washing clothing at the river, planting rice, cooking meals over a fire, and the other thousand tasks of village life, tend to fall asleep on Sunday morning in church. So there is a guy at the front with a stick, prodding them awake. He runs around helping out this way.Robert is preaching. He can’t speak English, but he has class, this guy. He is a performer, he is marching up and down, really giving it to them there. We get an English interpretation from one of the schoolboys, a stiff unemotive boy who is rolling out the phrases very well. Should get a job in the diplomatic corps one day.

I happen to think Robert has gone astray in the sermon somewhere because I cannot follow his line. He started with Samson pushing down a temple and ended up with how many petticoats the women should wear. His general theme seems to be that the ladies ought to have on at least a couple of pairs in the event of a car accident. Then when rescuers come and see the bodies, living or dead, they will see this one has multiple underwear on, and know that there lies a Christian.

Thing is, the whole congregation is deep into it. Like I mean deep. They murmur assent at every finger stabbed through the air, at every spiritual lesson driven home.

Later on Robert and his wife come round for lunch. She doesn’t speak much English, and he only has about fifty words. Somehow we manage to talk for several hours, juxtaposing those fifty words around into different combinations. His wife is flat out on the sofa, snoring. We don’t mind, it is so cute watching them. I ask him if he minds if I see him during the following week. We decide on Thursday.

Come Thursday, Dave wanders down and tells me maybe I should take a couple of the boys with me if I want to visit Robert. I don’t really know why, but he says, ‘well you never know what is going to happen.’

Eventually he handpicks a couple of nice kids, friendly guys, and we pile into the Landrover. Robyn stays behind because I think well, we are only going over for an hour or so, chew the fat. No big deal. We drive on through the African bush, along the gloriously potholed roads of West Africa. The red dust, the green trees, the blue hazy sky. As we pass along a hill section, the view extends out over the endless forest, the emerald fading into the shimmering horizon, an occasional village visible as a brown patch in the middle of that unchanging scene. It is timeless.

It is wonderful being there, bouncing along in my Landrover, in a completely foreign land, thinking I am helping these people, loving their acceptance of me. They are so friendly, their wide warm smiles, their pride, their desire to be part of the white man’s world, while I, twentieth century boy, recalling Bob Dylan and Don McLean, try to tell them development is not where it’s at. As I drive my Landrover. A vehicle they can’t afford. Then we draw near to the village, and blow me down, there is Robert waiting on the outskirts for me. Waving away. Oh my, I begin to think. This is not a good sign. We welcome him into the Landrover and drive on into the compound. Park and get out. He is so enthusiastic. ‘Where is your wife?’ he is asking excitedly.’Well, she needed to do some work, she sends her apologies,’ I lie away to him.

We go for a walk. Into the forest, along the banks of the man made swamp banks that the villagers built. These enable them to reclaim rice padi land, a more efficient way of farming rice like the Asians do. It is fascinating. My learning curve is so high, absorbing all these sights, wondering if I have enough brain to store it all.

After an hour or two we wander back. Robert greets every single person he walks by. This is small town stuff of course, people he has grown up with. There are manners, politeness, etiquette and culture all tied together here. He leads me to the best house in the entire village. The evening meal will be served there. People start to crowd in as dusk comes. The picture unfolds for me. I am the honoured guest. He has arranged a large banquet in the best house in the village for me. Because I said I would visit him. The white man. I feel deeply honoured at this action, but also angry at the responsibility and fortune of my own race. We are screwing up the environment at an alarming pace of knots, and these villagers want to join our world. They take on our religion, with all its paraphernalia of churches and rules and social behaviour. God, why must it be like this? Why can’t we move ahead in Christianity? I didn’t come to Africa to be a bwana.

But the meal was great anyway. We talked like there was no tomorrow, the lights of the lanterns shining off the faces and laughs of those African men as we talked about hunting and guns and all the boyo things that men talk about the world over. I cruised home on a high, the lights of the Landrover weaving through the dark night. Felt like a drug. That is until I ran over a raccoon and the boys forced me to stop, tumbling out of the car to despatch the hapless creature before my very eyes, gleefully dragging it’s carcase back into the vehicle.

They would dine on meat the next day.

-

I am down at the local garage with Dave. Getting my tyre fixed. There is a lot of banter going on between the lads, but they know how to use wheel braces, so all is well. This garage, really a shed, is next door to the mosque. Islam. That religion of fanaticism. That scourge of world oil prices. The infidel. People that must be converted from their heathen ways leading them to hell.I wonder what it is like inside a mosque. I wonder what Muslims are really like.

A lady steps out of the mosque as our group is slightly dispersed, some working on the vehicle, others standing around. Somehow we start talking for a few minutes. She is wearing Islamic headgear, and the gently flowing robes of the Mandingo tribe. She is older than me.

Kindness shines from her face.

I am transfixed by her look.

She is not beautiful in a physical sense, perhaps she was pretty in her youth. She talks briefly with me, delighted that I am in their village to assist, to help the people of their district.

I watch her walk away. She seems to be the loveliest person I have met in Africa. But she is a Moslem.   

-

The revolution was coming. Youth everywhere were emboldened to speak out about injustices. Underground newspapers appeared. It was not like New Zealand, there was deliberate corruption, blatant deceit and police buyoffs. Voting took place, but there was only one party. So I could understand why they were discontented. As I welded my Landrover back together each week, an unending requirement due to those bone shattering roads, they would tell me how they were going to line all the current leaders up against a wall. And shoot them.I was so excited. In the middle of a third world revolution. This was where the rubber met the road. Rumours started to spread. Government troops masqueraded as the opposition and created bad news scenes. The official newspapers would then print misleading stories about the atrocities committed by the rebels. But it was unstoppable. Led by an educated left wing ex professor, the revolution looked like it might change things. Justice might prevail.

But opportunism did instead. Nineteen guys led by an unknown corporal took the chance of their lives. They broke into the presidential mansion, killed a few guards, tortured the swiss bank account numbers off the aging President before cutting his throat, then declared martial law. Immediately they then shut down the radio stations and waited. Sweating it out for a couple of hours. Would the generals move?

On their part, the military leaders were in their own quandary. If they didn’t swing in behind, would they swing another way because their troops were being promised higher pay by the revolution?

And so they broke. A new government was sworn in. Nineteen jokers. That is all it took. The revolution got derailed before it hit the junction. Although the professor was invited in, it was merely to a PR position. Then that corporal knuckled down to the real job. Cementing his place in power. And the older government figures did get their day although it was on the beach, not against a wall. But it was still televised, the gruesome inhumanity of it, aged men at the receiving end of a machine gun.

Inevitably the professor fell out with the corporal, and the academic took to the bush. Guns were provided to both sides, to soldiers, then to villagers, then to twelve year olds. CNN ran stories on child platoons, their fearlessness that nothing could touch them, their coldbloodedness.

Tom and June were the most respected missionaries in the country. He had been there for thirty years, and could speak the language like a native. He earned his stripes the hard way, through rejection and stickability. Got to give it to those missionaries. Wherever they went in their later years, the peoples welcomed them and hung on their every word. Tom was a man of humility too. A man who loved to be with his African church people, to sit with them and joke and laugh.One day the rebels came and got him and June. They knew that any vehicle containing these two would have an instant passport through any roadblock in the country. Nobody else had thought of that, least of all Tom. He was put next to the driver so the government troops could see him as the jeep approached. But it didn’t get that close. As they came around the corner, the machine guns were already aimed, the deadly spray hitting the windscreen and those behind it. Legend has it that Tom managed to climb out of the stopped vehicle and speak.

‘My sons, you’ve killed your own father.’

And dropped down dead.

Anyway this young Maori woman comes out to try and wrest the device from me. I reach into my Dale Carnegie library on such occasions, to turn the conversation. Her hair was in a bun, and it had blonde streaks in it.

‘I love your hair colour’, I said.

‘Oh, you’re not supposed to notice’, giggling away, then, ‘which colour do you like?’

‘Which colour was I supposed to like?’

‘The dark of course.’

‘I love the dark colour of your hair.’

She reached back and freed it, shaking it loose.

‘Wow,’ I said, falling in love. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Yes, it’s the chemotherapy that does it.’

It hit me hard. No, hit is not the right word. Emotional wave perhaps – surge, gush, heave. I stood there, looking at her. Silenced.

She went on. ‘If I don’t do it, I’ll die. I’ve been bad, but now I’m doing it.’

Her brittleness started to surface. I could feel it welling up, synchronised with my rising tears. What could I say, in the transience of a gas station? I wanted to touch her, and I knew if I had, it would have been received. Even without words, we both knew that if I did that, it was not sexual, it would convey what I meant to convey, and it would have brought the grief to expression in both of us.

But I didn’t. I didn’t reach out and touch her. We walked to the cashier together, she telling me the inadequate phrase that ‘it didn’t matter, life was meant for the living.’

I walked away from the fleeting connection, and climbed back into my red sports car.

Turned on the CD player. Started some music.

And left. 

I didn’t know that New Zealand was politically correct decades before the term was invented. I just lived there. I didn’t appreciate it was actually a funky little alternative nation, a drop out place that hip Americans, or fading stars, or surfers, or yachties, or people escaping the rat race, might run to. And neither did the radical university students. They just wrote articles asking whether Barry McGuire’s brain had been cooked by acid.

So he sang songs to the students. Crowded the place out he did. I remember two things. Firstly he broke a lot of strings, but he must have always done that because he could change them real fast on stage, even on a twelve string, and tell stories while he did it. Hey, don’t underestimate this skill. Twelve string guitars are hard to tune. A crowd’s attention span is low.

And secondly there were antagonistic people in the audience. Young intelligent men who were anti-christian, or atheists. Sincere, serious people. Heckling Barry McGuire. Our hero. Our symbol of someone who was once one of them, but had now seen the light and emerged from, from,…whatever there was to emerge from.

He is talking now. As he changes a guitar string. ‘So Mike was like a super depressed guy, man, him and me would sit there in the basement going through all these blues numbers together. Some dude man, we are trying to get it together, he’s down there depressing us all. I’m telling the dude, hey Mike, we’re all trying to move up the stairs fella, you know there might be some sunshine up there, why are we playing all this heavy stuff? And he would say, “well, that’s just the way I feel.”‘

The heckler bursts in. ‘Bet he’s happy now that he’s rich.’

I’m thinking, if you are going to heckle, surely get smarter than that. This guy is asking for it. McGuire comes back, not even looking up from the strings, still turning the tuning knobs, multitasking in an enticing off hand manner up there in front of the crowds.

‘Would’ve been if the taxman hadn’t got him I guess.’

The crowd erupts, mostly Christians who can’t wait to see a protagonist humiliated. We have all taken so much of it ourselves over the years. To see it dished back out feels so good. We are proud of our hero.

Our heckler is not perturbed. He is determined to make his stand against all the oppression of Christianity throughout the ages, the landholdings of the medieval church, the cruelty of the inquisition, the massacres during the Crusades. They are all summed up in this modern threat to freedom and love, this Christianized long haired rock star changing the strings on his beloved Martin guitar. McGuire tells of the death of one of his friends. The guy OD’d.

The heckler makes mock sorrow noises. He is feeling isolated in his awful task, out there alone among the enemy, the Christians. He is trying his best to provoke reasoned ridicule. But of course, nobody gains support mocking any dying person story, so the Christians all listen sympathetically to Barry McGuire, and shake their heads at this interjector.

Later I talk with him. The heckler that is. He can’t wait. Here is someone to de-convert. He launches in and starts telling me how all these Christians, what a bunch of phonies they are.’Do you know how long the average American couple takes to make love?’ he asks in a surprise tangential statement. I take a few seconds to grasp where he is coming from. Then it dawns. He is about to inform me that Americans, i.e. Christians, are very functional about sex, and hopeless at the sensual part of it, and that this is all part of the oppression of their personalities due to institutionalized religion.

‘Two minutes forty seconds,’ he tells me as I pause.

I can clearly see now why Christianity is bad for the world if this sort of thing goes on. But I don’t get a chance in this conversation.

‘Now me, I take at least twenty minutes. I see a woman sometimes, we have an understanding between us, and I visit her, and we spend about twenty minutes in the act.’

Now I have never had a discussion like this, and am certainly inexperienced in sexual matters compared to this far seeing young man of rebellion against global evils. So I remain silent.

He continues. ‘So why are you coming along here to listen to this clown anyway? Don’t tell me you’re a Christian as well.’

Stumbling into my lines, impressed by this one who no doubt has read Kierkegaard backwards, I know I must confess. The Bible says I must. ‘Sure.’

He laughs, a knowing, cynical laugh. It causes me to cringe, knowing that my suffering has barely started. My inner self tells me he will cause pain, but I am too young to let the thought flow up into my consciousness. ‘Come on,’ he goes on, ‘don’t tell me you believe all this crap that the church spills out. Look at what Christians have done over the centuries, all the carnage and raping.’

He says it with such authority that I don’t even question it. I don’t know for sure the historical circumstances during which these wrongs may have been committed, but I supposed they probably were, so I let it slide.

‘Are you telling me you don’t believe in God?’ I manage to snap something back. Good grief, I was better than this at school, but the university buildings, and the huge library, and the serious men in beards, and the sincere girls wearing beads have all been too much for me. They look so together, as though they understand things beyond my comprehension.

He looks incredulously at me, as if the statement is a folly. He laughs again, it is actually the laugh of relief that the Barry McGuire event is over, that he doesn’t have to sit out on the floor alone, and that he now has this urchin to eat for lunch. But it is only my inner self telling me that, and like I said before, that part is still under wraps.

‘Of course I don’t believe in God, you idiot. God is just an invention of the powers that be to keep us in line. Don’t you understand Marx?’

I have never read Karl Marx, and assume that he of course has memorised every word Marx wrote. So I smile and wait for him to continue.

‘Last century Marx predicted this sort of historical battle would emerge, that Capitalism and its henchman, the church, would eventually conflict with the rising awareness of the people. The people will overthrow these shackles and be free. Don’t you want to be free man?’

Now I have been taught for years that Christ will make us free, not Karl Marx. Furthermore I have been passsionately taught this, with many proofs. In the microseconds that our brain takes to sort out its answer to questions such as this opponent has thrown me, I don’t for a second consider that he too, like me, might need causes, and a group to cling to. He too desires acceptance somewhere, justification, the righteous indignation that youth want to feel as they claim their place in the sun. Instead I only hear his intellectual arguments and assume that he too, like me, has been taught passionately somewhere by wise men who wish to guide the world to a higher realm. I wish I could meet these all knowing, behind-the-scenes, men who understand who really pulls the strings in the world, and are fighting for justice.

In my indecision, and attempts to simply be nice, this guy climbs into me. Destroys me. He drags over one of his mates, pulling him into the debate. ‘Billy, hey Billy, man, good to see you, listen to this dickhead here man, another bloody Christian.’

Billy looks vaguely at me, then away. Like he is meant to be somewhere, but can’t remember where. ‘Yeah, okay man, okay, heavy shit in there today.’

I am too naïve to assess just how high this Billy is, I don’t even know that he is on something. He just sounds cool. Connected into something, or some inner group. I say nothing. He wanders off after a while. My heckler is in full flight dismantling me by this stage. I try and interject but his voice rises, and I think, why is he angry, but then one part of my brain answers he is wild because of all the injustices that Christianity has committed over the years. I know that, I tell myself, but you need to be able to get past all that to see the real thing. So my strategy is to try and outwait him, until there is a moment where we can talk clearly with each other, and I can share what I think.

Because I don’t care what he says, you see, I know I am right. I know a lot about Gods plans. I am convinced of that. This guy just needs to be open to the truth. Then he would see.

He is now getting near the end of his wisdom, the afternoon has turned into evening, and people are wandering off. A couple of his friends come by, and after firing more rounds of buckshot at me loaded with Marx and Freud, he can see the crowd is thinning, and he better get out of there while it is time for cool people, protestors like him, busy workers for justice, to get out of there with their friends and not be the last people to leave.

And I am left standing on the steps of the lecture hall where all this happened.

I look upwards, and realise it is time to go home. Down past the university buildings I walk. Somehow, incredibly, and I have absolutely no idea why, I actually feel great. I feel marvelous. The closer I get to home, the better I feel. I feel like God has looked out a window, seen me in the ring with this devastator, and given me a fix.

All my life I have been able to work out my penance on church grounds. Either painting walls, or weeding, or building pews. Church buildings are never finished. They always wait for me, wherever I live, and their protectors persuade me that I, especially I, must work on Saturday mornings at a series of never ending tasks to maintain their appearance. I have moved frequently in my life, and I am at my most vulnerable shortly after I arrive and settle in somewhere. The friendliest guy in the church, the one who first approaches you after that initial service when you are drinking coffee out the back, is the chief of the church maintenance team. He is elected to this position for his rugged appearance, yet salesman like charm.

So there I was again, working on the church grounds. Moving concrete blocks.

It amazes me that I still go. Years ago I decided not to have anything to do with building programmes, let alone regular spring cleaning of church grounds. Such an activity must surely condone the exploitative landholding operations of the church throughout the centuries. To paint those cloisters must, even in a small way, support the sinful continuation of clerical estates. How could it be that I was yet again at this mundane task which was inextricably tied up with all the global evils of institutional religion?

In the car on the way there, I had mused over these important questions. I even thought I might try and raise some sort of discussion among the boys as we toiled away in the gardens.

But I was late. So instead of such an enlightening conversation, there was much delighted pointed laughter and I ended up pushing this wheelbarrow from the garbage site out to the collection bin by the truck. The recalcitrant wheelbarrow. I tell you, pushing this barrow full of concrete blocks with it’s permanent flat tyre was a form of punishment that should be reserved for unrepentant criminals. Or those seeking pain as a sign of spiritual momentum.

By late morning, when I was on my own with this wretched device, I thought I would try and get positive about the whole affair. So I came up with three reasons why I was working on the church grounds.

Firstly the camaraderie. My wife had pointed this out to me that very morning. “What a great time you’ll have down there with the lads,” she said. She can look me straight in the face and say that sort of thing. Master of misinterpretations. No matter what I reply, she will assume the aggrieved party. “I’m serious,” she would then say, if I were foolish enough to impute impishness. Anyway I decided to take her at face value. Sure, good to get down there with the guys. Chew the fat. Not enough occasions to get to know these chaps as it is. Besides if I refused, do I get the chance to explain why? Can you imagine saying that yes, I would love to help but it would imply a philosophical acceptance of various inconsistencies that my long held perception of pure Christian truth would find incongruent with such activities.

The guys would think, lazy blighter.

Secondly, the aspect of pain and hard work. I’m serious on this point. No fooling. Give you an example. When I joined a missionary organisation for a volunteer stint in Africa, every afternoon they had me building. Hammering and nailing. Or painting or digging. Okay, these mission organisations are poor, and they need all hands on deck. Don’t have the wherewithal to employ fancy contractors. But there definitely was another side to it. An aspect of working and sweating because it was good for mankind to do that. Somehow physical labour was esteemed.

Now, I realise this is a totally outdated concept to bring to this page. Protestant ethic, and all that rubbish that we advanced intellects know is outmoded, and should never have been practiced in the first place. Which seemed a good enough reason to think it through behind the barrow. If it gets rejected nowadays, it might be worth looking into. Often a good sign there is something valid in a proposition. Ghandi once left an intense political debate with his leading band of thinkers to apply mudpacks to goats by the riverbank.

I remember it from the movie. And it seemed like a good idea to mention this incident here even though it is not entirely relevant.

The third reason that occurred to me is an evangelical reason, believe it or not. It works like this. Could be that the great unwashed find it easier to enter a building that looks like a church than one that doesn’t. One Sunday morning, they might wake up and say to their wife, “let’s go to church”. And on a whim off they go. They drive down to a structure that looks like a church, you know, spire and steeple. They expect bells to be ringing, to be warmly welcomed by a bespectacled parson at the door, to be invited to stay for coffee after a service that was sprinkled with tunes of hymns that reside somewhere in their thirty year old Sunday school memory. You can even loose the maintenance chief onto them. Such a strategy would certainly lessen my particular life’s burden.

So making the church grounds look pretty is a tiny part of ensuring the tentative experience of visiting church is not marred, that it is what was expected, and surprisingly, more. Enough perhaps to wake up the following Sunday and say to one’s wife, “let’s go to church again.” These musings made me feel warm and useful again. Doing my bit. I laboured on blissfully. Then one of the boys found out the tyre wasn’t punctured, and it could be pumped up.

After I had finished.