I thought to share the reflections I offered recently when we had a mini launch of my biography of my biography of Mervyn Himbury, at the Collins Street Baptist Church, Melbourne.
Simon Holt has kindly invited me to share with you the story of my last 3 years, working on this book, a biography of Mervyn Himbury, the founding principal of Whitley College—from humble beginnings in a Welsh mining community to head of the leading Baptist college in this country.
What has it meant for me, to spend much of the time in lock-down, and some time before and after, digging deep into the life of someone I knew and was taught by and admired, and owe so much to—but also who is now gone from us and indeed not even known by the current leadership in our denomination and college?
Was it worth all the work—digging deep in our collective memories and my own memories, spending hours upon hours transcribing sermons and lectures from cassette tapes, rummaging through plastic bags stuffed full of archived documents, unclassified, in Cardiff, and the college minute books there, and in Oxford, and Melbourne?
The reality is, this story has meant a lot of digging deep in my own story too.
Very early in my training to be a pastor, I was appointed as the youth minister at the then Blackburn Baptist Church. Prior to that, I had had a wonderful time as the youth minister in this church. At Blackburn, it didn’t go well, at least in the eyes of several influential families, who petitioned the Deacons of the church to sack me, which they did after just 7 weeks and one day. For their own reasons, the church declined to inform me directly but instead asked the college principal, Mervyn Himbury to tell me of their decision. After he did that, he said to me: ‘Whatever else you make of this, this must not affect ultimate things.’
‘This must not affect ultimate things’.
What ultimate things? For him—for me?
For Mervyn Himbury there was indeed one ultimate thing. More than once I heard him put it like this: ‘The Almighty took two minutes off from running the universe to call me to the ministry.’
And since in Himbury’s teaching to us all about preaching we must always have a scripture text, this thought leads me to the first four words of the Bible, which in fact are quite enough. ‘In the beginning, God…’
In the beginning, and at the centre of all reality, amidst all the changing tides of history and politics, and all the ups and downs of our lives, church life, consumer prices, even football seasons, at the heart of it all, God.
So to explain what this digging deep into Himbury’s life story has meant for me I want to try to exegete and comment on his statement, ‘The almighty took two minutes off from running the universe to call me to the ministry’.
I know a very Himburian sense of humour might wonder what happened to the universe during those two minutes. But let that go.
‘The Almighty’ —to be honest, that is not an expression I would use, not how I think of God. But it points to Himbury’s profound sense of the reality and majesty of God.
Himbury preached most often from the Old Testament, and had a great talent for finding texts with amusing or intriguing images, such as an axe floating, or Abraham at 100 years old, planting a tree, or one that I heard him preach at a youth rally, ‘Is not the Yarra as good as the Euphrates?’
He loved these stories and their images of a God who is deeply involved in the life of the nation and the lives of people. And that very powerfully expressed itself in his prayers, which were legendary. When he preached, he almost always finished with a prayer; but he did not announce it: ‘Let us pray’; he’d simply continued on, speaking with God, as in a sense he had been all along. The Almighty…
‘Took two minutes off from running the universe to call me’. This was his sense of being gifted, graced. It was God’s providence that gave him hope, even during years of long struggle to develop and defend the college that powerful people did not want and tried to bring down. That gifting from God led him and Marion to venture halfway across the world, to a country and people they did not know.
He was a gifted scholar, preacher, teacher, and often said that the study of history was the story of God being with people, through all sorts of turmoil and change—the great works of God and the little things of God. Presence and gift.
More than once he summed that up with the word ‘kindness’. In the year after he retired he began here as an associate pastor, and on one occasion he spoke about two of the wonderful older women who had just that week died, and how each of them had been kind to him, with words of encouragement, kindness when many others had criticism. Here was the almighty, engaged in the universe with words of hope.
And then, ‘To call him to the ministry’: that sense of calling was the very essence of his being. He always used the word ministry, because its root meaning is service. Calling as service.
Many people noted what a great team Mervyn and Marion were. They decided together to come to Australia and they did it all together, a life of service. Himbury loved his students, his college, his Baptist denomination and the whole church.
There were two important parts to this. First was the sense of obligation. One of my most valued possessions is a card he wrote to me when I obtained a first class honours degree in theology—something he had achieved too, in history. These were his words:
This is an amazing achievement and opens up many possibilities for your future. The gifts which God has given you put a great burden on your shoulders for much is expected of those to whom much has been given. May your future realize all of your present potential.
He said much the same thing in his sermon at our wedding: ‘Don’t go and get lost somewhere in the suburbs’—in effect, be like him and Marion, and reach out to what the whole world has to offer you, and where you are needed.
Obligation: but not, in Himbury’s theology, the kind of thinking that is so focussed on mission statements, strategic plans and key performance indicators. All that seems to think that we have to create, build or ‘advance’ the kingdom of God.
No, in the words of the New Testament scholar T W Manson, ‘in the kingdom of God, God is king’. When the Almighty calls you to be a servant, it is your place to serve. Work hard, build, lead, nurture, educate, care for, evangelise, and all the rest of it. But the state of the world, and the church, is actually in God’s hands, not yours.
This was Himbury’s sense of being a minister.
He had lived through the decline of the great Nonconformist churches in Wales and he saw the declining church attendances here. It challenged the old model, which he knew and loved, of the church as a preaching station, and all that magnificent singing. Ithel Jones tried to bring it back here, but Himbury wrote, in his history of this church: it failed.
Just as, in his historical study, he showed that all those radical attempts in the 17th century to force Parliament to legislate the kingdom of God failed.
You do not own the church, or college, or any other venue of ministry. “In the kingdom of God, God is king.”
This too is one of those ultimate things. Whatever is happening, in so called success or struggle, your place is to serve what God is already doing in the world—give yourself to that. Learn to see it, look for it, prepare for it, work hard for it, but you never own it. You are its servant—and that too was why Himbury was able to let it go, in the end, warmly and kindly to hand it on.
So what have I learned from all this, the story of his long and passionate struggle to lift the standards in ministerial education, build a new college, raise up future teachers, no fewer than 10 of us who have taught at Whitley, and across our whole denomination remind us of that radical freedom that belongs to Baptist identity? I am so honoured to be part of this story and legacy.
But I do think there are important areas where I am different. As I have thought about all this, I realise how important for me is the idea of God as Trinity.
The doctrine of the trinity was something named by the church for centuries but largely ignored till this last thirty years or so, when there has been a great renewal of trinitarian theology. And with it has come a great appreciation of the life of the Spirit: God as living spirit, in people and communities, but also most importantly in the creation, the universe.
Himbury’s almighty God was shaped very much by the Old Testament, and the story of Jesus. But I guess my faith and preaching is more often directly focussed on Jesus and his radical sense of a new reality, a new creation, for all people.
The idea of God as Trinity is the vision of all creation as one community, a community of life in God, because of God, needing God and blessed by God, capable of being with and in God: a vision as Bonhoeffer put it: of life together. In the beginning, and at the heart of all things, God.
This is the story, and mystery, of all life, of creation, of Israel and Jesus and the church and the world: and that means the idea of a truly ecumenical community: Not just the churches being nice to each other, but a community of church beyond the churches, if you will: a new community of all creation.
And if you ask me what exactly this means, I have to tell you I don’t know.
I know what it doesn’t mean, any more. For the last 300 years or so the Christendom models have all been slowly collapsing. This is not the invention of the so-called ‘emergent church’ people a decade or two ago.
Something much bigger than all that is happening: That is why we need to look to our history, to see what is happening now: the story of God, the Lord Almighty if you wish, the God of Jesus, the Spirit of all creation, the story of God is inviting us into this adventure—to travel to a country and a life we have not yet known, to open ourselves to a new possibility.
This calling, this life with God, is not without history. That is why stories such as this life story must be told and passed on.
We need our saints, our guides, our great ones, who help us to keep going!
We need our history, but if we learn from it properly, we will not repeat it; we will reach out for what is coming, what is promised, what is not yet fulfilled:
It is the way of God, the trinitarian life, the inviting community of all things.
In the beginning, God. At the centre of it all, God. Himbury lived and adventured and served because of that reality and that calling.
‘The almighty took two minutes off from running the universe to call me to the ministry’. Well, the universe did not go haywire or amok, just then, because the universe is in the hands of a loving, creative God.
Any of you who know my own life story know that I do not say this lightly. This is no Polyanna view of life. We live in a beautiful, fragile, and sometimes very dangerous world.And how we shall live into the future, as communities of faith, is not such a simple thing either.
As I said, I do not know exactly where this is leading us all: but I am so glad to be part of a church community that is open to this extraordinary challenge.
We do so, in these days, with our hope and faith in God, and to that end I offer you, finally, my scripture text:
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.4There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, 5one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.
Thanks be to God.
Copies of my book are available from suppliers such as Amazon, and at a reduced price from the Whitley College office, or from me directly.
Frank, thank you so much for your words which have come as the reminder to whom I have been called in ministry and to whom I am ultimately responsible for this gift of grace. Your words have ignited within me Mervyn Himbury’s legacy as one of his former students. Thank you for the expansive landscape of your insight of “the vision that awaits its time.” Yes, “be patient and wait, for it is coming” and we are invited into its co-creation.
As a tutor I was invited to sit at the high table for “high tea” right opposite Principal Himbury. Lacking anything useful to say I asked The Prin: Principal, what would you say to the proposition that the basis of Christian ethics is ‘that a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do?”. Principal Himbury looked at me for a moment, cleared his throat then replied “that’s all very well Mr Bell but the question is What does a man have to do?”
Thanks for that response, David. Typical of him, not to give anything away but to invite you to say more …And have you got an answer?