Profitable

A third piece about someone I owe — after An Interview with a Saint and Sitting with a Sinner.

It still happens. I will be talking with men I have worked alongside for thirty years, and somewhere in the conversation we arrive at Bill. We all respect him. Every one of us would say so without being asked. And then, somewhere after that, we begin correcting his faults.

I do it too. I have never once come away from it feeling better.

It was not a gift handed to me. It was done to me, over years, and most of it I did not notice at the time.

I met him in the mid-eighties. He was pastoring the Christian Family Centre at Seaton and was state chairman in South Australia, and he had started coming to Papua New Guinea. He kept coming. Every year since, he has kept coming.

When our time in PNG came to an end he invited us to Seaton. Cathy and the family and I moved there in July 1993. I came onto the staff and worked close to him — administrator, then executive pastor, then coordinating the CRC. In 2003 he became national chairman, and for the years that followed I was the one attending to the detail of what he had decided to do.

Some of what he decided to do was change the name. We had been the Christian Revival Crusade. We became CRC Churches International. It was not a retreat from where we had come from. A crusade had been a word painted on a sign over the door, and he wanted it down off the sign and into the engine room — not a thing we were called but a thing we did.

I sat in those meetings and took the minutes. Days of discussion, and I wrote down all of it. I was there when Creating Churches — Changing Worlds was said aloud. The words had been going round the table for a while in different arrangements, none of them quite sitting. Then someone said it in that order and there was a gasp. Nobody argued with it. It was the phrase now, and it never went away again.

We read Built to Last and Good to Great together and argued our way toward a set of values. The first conference under them was called Imagine, and there is a book of it somewhere on my shelf.

Then he came back from another trip to PNG carrying a thought. Every nation on earth by 2045. He had gone up there and come home having stopped believing that geography was a limit on anything. He did not have it worked out when he first said it. It got nursed along, and prayed over, and eventually planted at a national conference, and it grew.

Who could have imagined what it looks like now.

I suspect Bill would say: I could.

Bill is not a relational man. He is a business-focused one, and I do not mean that unkindly — it is simply the register he works in. He is principled. He takes hard decisions, and he has always seen discipline differently from most of us. I think he has walked a lonely road because of it. I am not sure he always got it right. I am sure he was true to himself and to the Jesus he serves.

He knew what he was not, and he staffed for it. He gathered people who cared the way he did not know how to, and people who could administer what he could only decide, and he did not require any of them to care about it in his manner. He only required that they cared about the same things. I was one of those people. It took me a long time to understand that being hired for what he lacked was not a lesser thing.

The care is real. It is not soft. It arrives practical and committed and in his own Greek way. I can picture him at a bedside. I can picture him standing between a woman and the man who has been hurting her. I can picture him with children who have been hurt, saying very little.

After my heart gave out, he flew to Tasmania to see me.

And it was during that visit that I had the most relational time with him I have had in forty years. He was different. He was interested in me — not to change me, not as a project, not as something to be developed. He was just interested. We did not talk about what he was doing or what I was doing. We talked about what was happening in the room we were sitting in.

I wrote several resignation letters over the years. I only ever gave him one.

It was never hostile between us. Neither of us went there — no raised voices, nothing you could point at afterwards and call a row. But there were decisions I sat with at board level that I genuinely disagreed with and did not speak against. I told myself I was being loyal. After a while it was simply easier not to be in the room.

The letter I did give him was not about any of that. It was not an issue; it was issues, and what they were making me. I had become negative. I could feel it. I wrote that it was time to get out of the nest and fly.

I kept serving him for years afterwards. I did it from Hobart.

He raised a great many leaders. Most of them are pastoring churches now, and most of them do not follow him the way we used to follow him. We grew up and went different ways. For a long time I heard that as the sad part of the story.

It wasn't. It was the result.

My sister Jessica gave me my first Bible. She wrote a reference inside the cover — 2 Timothy 3:16.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

That verse is what Bill has been to me. I want to be careful here, because a man is not Scripture and Bill would be the first to say so. He has been wrong. I have watched him be wrong. But the verse names four ways a thing works on a person, and I can find all four of them in thirty years of working with him.

Doctrine — what I was taught, and I was taught it by him. Reproof — the years of not saying what I thought, and the letter I finally wrote. Correction — when I needed it, and I needed it often. Instruction in righteousness — everything he made of me that I never asked for.

Two of those are gifts you can feel while they are happening. Two of them are not. The word Paul uses for all four together is profitable, which is a cold and useful word, the sort of word you would use about a tool.

And that is the whole of my difficulty. I have been waiting to feel about Bill the way I feel about family, or about a close friend, and it has not come, and I have been taking that to mean the thanks is not real. It is not. He was not being company. He was doing the other thing, the four-word thing, and none of it was designed to produce a warm feeling at the time. It was not a gift handed to me. It was done to me, over years, and most of it I did not notice at the time.

I had not thought of myself as a pastor. It was not false modesty. I had spent my working life in administration and I was good at it, and pastoring was what other men did.

I was sitting in Bill's office when he said it. I do not remember getting there or what the meeting was for. I remember him looking at me for a while before he spoke, and then: you should become a pastor. It had the grammar of a suggestion. It was not one. He had already decided, and he was telling me.

I have pastored a small church in Hobart for years now. I have been part of a revival in Papua New Guinea and part of a movement that set out to reach every nation on earth, and I loved the thrill of all of it. This is the part I have enjoyed most.

I do not know what success looks like to Bill. I have never asked him. If I had to guess, I would guess it looks like the things I have written down here — the movement, the name, 2045, the conferences that grew from a room of pastors into something that actually represents us, and the church at Seaton.

He is not going anywhere. He has not stepped down from the national executive and he has not stepped back from his local church, and he will not, because he enjoys both and he has never had any appetite for stopping.

I opposed him often. Some of it was pig-headedness. Some of the time I was simply the ass talking to Balaam.

None of it stopped him. He kept putting things into me that I could not see.

They say you can count the seeds in an apple but not the apples in a seed.

Bill can.

Thank you, Bill.