A Follower of Jesus: From alpha to omega in faith

A Follower of Jesus

From Alpha to Omega in Faith

By Ewing C Stevens

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Ewing Stevens

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Preface

Part One: A Life of Faith

1. Childhood – how I came by my faith

2. Teenage years – influences on my religious understanding

3. How a five-year illness affected my understanding of religion

4. The decision to enter training for the Church ministry

5. The realities of parish life

6. Great changes for theology and the Church

Part Two: The Book Jesus

7. The birth of Jesus

8. The stories of Christmas

9. Jesus the teenager

10. With Jesus in Galilee

11. The miracles

12. Jesus’ teaching

13. Jesus’ death

14. The continuing story

15. Jesus now

Part Three: New Challenges, New Directions

16. Worldwide reaction to the Jesus story

17. Life after the Jesus story

18. Expanding my understanding of the social gospel

19. Another health crisis precedes a new life challenge

20. Family changes and a challenge of Christian journalism

21. Decision time for a middle-aged cleric

22. A closing door leads to a door opening in radio

23. A church in which I found some comfort

24. The ministry of secular radio

25. As an octogenarian clergyman, what do I believe?

About the author

Preface

It was Friday, 6 August 2010, about 4 a.m.

I awoke in the darkness. I’d been dreaming about a breakdown at the radio station where I work as a talkback host. Normally, things run pretty smoothly at the station, but in this dream everything that could go wrong had gone wrong! The callers couldn’t get through to have their say. The screen which registered calls had frozen and we’d gone off the air. I was surrounded by technicians desperately trying to sort out the problems. As they worked, I got up from my chair and walked out to the reception desk where the receptionist was talking with a visitor. The visitor had brought in a collection of antique articles for me. Amongst them were two small boxes of matches. These matches she explained to me were from her safe and intended for future generations. As I was turning back to the technicians and the broadcast desk I woke up.

My wife Annette lay sleeping beside me but she too was restless. I whispered, Would you like a cup of tea? She murmured: I wouldn’t mind. I went out to the kitchen, put the kettle on and turned the radio on to listen to Dudley Stace on Radio Live’s All Nighter talkback programme. I am no interpreter of dreams but as the kettle boiled I pondered about the meaning of the vivid dream I’d had. The message for me was that the boxes of precious matches represented the gift of life given to me by my father and mother. What happened to that gift depended on me and what I did with it amidst all the problems and ups and downs I encountered in this short time on earth.

The cup of tea and a couple of slices of toast had the desired effect and we both went back to sleep. No dreams this time!

I next woke at 6.45 a.m. As I lay on my side and looked out through the ranch slider door on our Waiheke Island bedroom, my eyes began to focus on a smudge in the sky. As my eyes focused better the smudge turned out to be a quarter moon peeking from behind the giant pine tree which grows on the boundary of our property. As I watched, the moon, ever so slowly and steadily, emerged from behind the branch into the open sky. As I lay there my mind went back to my childhood in Southland, New Zealand, lying on my back in the grass on a summer evening, contemplating the night sky in wonderment. In that moment, as I gazed out through the ranch slider, the same wonder came over me again. The movement of the moon reminded me that what had appeared to ancient humans as heavenly bodies, such as the sun and stars, moving around our earth, we now know, was exactly the other way round. Understanding the reality of where we fit into the universe on this earth, it wasn’t difficult on that August morning to imagine ourselves on a ship passing through space. We were passing the moon on one side and turning next to the reddening eastern sky, with the sun like another bigger island just over the horizon ahead of us as we moved smoothly over the sea of space.

This all started me thinking of my own life on this ship of earth, endlessly spinning in space, and what has emerged in the tiny space-time that I have been given to live. I realised that at eighty-five years of age I haven’t much time left on this ship of discovery. I got out of bed, put on my dressing gown and went down to my office and began to write. I wanted to put down in print some of the things I had concluded about this gift of life that I had been given by whatever powers or forces there may be at work in our universe. I wanted to do this, especially for my family and friends in regard to my thinking on faith and religion, since so much of my life has been absorbed with these matters. As I began to write I realised, first of all, that there is just as much room for wonder and amazement at the immensity of our universe as there was when I was a boy in the Southland village of Wallacetown, lying in the grass.

Part One: A Life of Faith

Chapter 1: Childhood – how I came by my faith

In childhood our beliefs, attitudes and views on religion and faith stem from the beliefs and attitudes of our parents in the main. If I had been born of Indian parents, for example, I would have grown up with child beliefs shaped perhaps by the predominant Hindu or Muslim religions, or even Sikh, Buddhist or Christian or Jain, depending on which religion my parents followed. If I had been born to Irish parents in the south of that country my beliefs would have been naturally of the Roman Catholic kind. It is all a matter of the accident of birth and the customs of the community into which we are born.

I was born in Invercargill in Southland, very much a Presbyterian city. To make matters more certain I was born the great-grandchild, on my father’s side, of a pioneer Presbyterian minister in Southland. The manifestation of the Christian faith I was moulded in and from which I took my earliest impression of religion was the Christian faith of the Presbyterian kind.

My mother and father were interested in religion to a minor extent but were not churchgoers. My father had developed a certain resistance to the Church through some experience he had had earlier in his life. I never fully understood what had happened. My mother’s parents, my grandparents, were from Anglican and Presbyterian backgrounds respectively, but as far as I knew had no active connection with a church. However, both my parents had the view that an inoculation of religion through Sunday school was good for their growing children.

Some of my early influences on religion and faith came through two maiden great-aunts on my father’s side. Their father, my great-grandfather on my father’s side, came to New Zealand from Scotland via a period spent as minister of a parish in Nova Scotia, Canada. In New Zealand, he was appointed in 1865 to the new parish of Wallacetown, which stretched from there to Queenstown, over 100 miles distant! He had arrived at Port Chalmers, Dunedin on a tiny ship, the Caribou. The Rev. Andrew Stevens and his wife Marianne (nee Campbell) had fifteen children in all, though some died in infancy. The Rev. Andrew served as minister of the Wallacetown parish until his retirement in 1881. Upon his retirement he took up residence in what came to be known as Retreat Cottage. When I was born in 1926, Retreat Cottage was the home of two of the Rev. Andrew’s daughters. They were my maiden great-aunts, Jinny and Amy. Aunt Jinny had been a Sunday school superintendent at the Wallacetown Presbyterian Church for a good number of years but when I knew her she was aged and in a wheelchair. Amy was still sprightly and attended to the household affairs. It was at Retreat Cottage that I had my first contact with formal Christian teaching.

Every Sunday my mother and father, along with my baby brother Keith and I, would make a kind of pilgrimage to Retreat Cottage. Our residence was at the northern end of Wallacetown and Retreat Cottage at the southern end. This meant a walk of some mile and a half each way in the days before we had a motor car.

The two great-aunts would welcome us with a cup of tea for Mum and Dad and wine biscuits with apple jelly all round! I have always associated the delicious taste of wine biscuits and apple jelly with my first lessons in Christian beliefs. For half an hour Aunt Jinny from her rocking chair by the fire would tell us Bible stories. She was the first person I knew who used visual aids in her teaching. She had some beautifully coloured turnover charts illustrating the Bible stories. David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den and Jesus teaching by the Sea of Galilee held our attention. I can’t ever remember her adding any moral lessons to the stories, but maybe she did and I have forgotten.

I can never remember my mother or father attending church. Father worked at the Underwood milk factory all his life and during the weekend busied himself with our small holding and the cows, the hens, the goats and all that went with them. My father, I discovered later, had joined the Masonic Lodge and that seemed to fill his need for ritual and religion. It was never spoken about and to our young minds it was a part of his life to which we had no entry.

In my early years I have memories of my father’s father, Alex, staying with us from time to time. He slept in the spare room and he didn’t live long enough for us to get to know him as young children. I understood he had been a lay preacher. He and my father’s mother had separated a long time before and nothing was ever said about my grandmother. It was only in my later teenage years that I met her. I was employed as a pharmacy apprentice in Pollok, the Chemist, in Tay Street, Invercargill. A woman came in, bought some product and then said: I am your grandmother. I responded, I thought you were dead! I got to know her a little. She told me she was Irish and was a nominal Roman Catholic. It has made me proud of my Irish, English, Scottish heritage. When I went home I challenged my father about having told me when I was younger that my grandmother, his mother, had died! It was a blazing row between an eighteen-year-old son and his father! He tried to explain to me that when the separation came they tried to think of her as dead. Grandmother took her baby daughter with her and the rest of the family stayed with my grandfather. Divorce in those days was such a disgrace it seemed that no one ever mentioned it. Whether the difference in religious background had anything to do with the break-up between a Presbyterian parson’s son and his Catholic wife I have no idea, but one can imagine it didn’t help with any hope of reconciliation. This experience probably was most influential in breeding in me the spirit of religious toleration. It was one of the most satisfying parts of my life when as a young minister of the Church I was able to help steer my father and his mother to reconciliation. In the end he was the one who visited her in the rest home where she spent the end of her life and he was with her when she died. Later still when I moved to Auckland, my wife and I met and developed a friendship with my aunt and her family. She was the little baby who left my grandfather’s home with her mother so long ago.

My first close brush with death and loss came with the passing of Grandfather Alex Stevens. He lay in state at our house before the funeral and we were allowed in to see him lying there. Ever since, I have believed children should not be shielded from death because it was the beginning of my own realisation that none of us are here forever and that this knowledge helps us later to deal with other deaths and even our own.

My mother’s parents were younger and so I had time to know them better as I used to stay with them in their Invercargill home very often during my teenage years. While I was playing secondary school rugby I stayed with them one night a week when we had evening practice. Granddad Croad had been a railway worker. His days in that job ended when he slipped under a shunting train and subsequently had his leg amputated. His amputation was not a big handicap even in his old age and he had learned to use his crutches well enough to keep a good garden and make splendid rhubarb and parsnip wine. Later in life as a teenager, it was also from time in my Croad grandparents’ home that I developed my enduring interest in politics. In the evenings that I spent with them I watched and listened as they huddled over their Gulbransen radio and made all kinds of comments as they listened to the broadcasts from Parliament. They had strong political views of a conservative nature. I can’t remember them ever commenting on religion, but no doubt they had their own convictions on those matters too, although I never gathered what they were.

After Aunt Jinny died her sister Amy came to live with us. I was then about seven years of age. My mother and father never attended church, but they must have considered it was their duty to ensure their children received some indoctrination in the Christian faith for their moral welfare. Later in life when training for the Presbyterian ministry I was reminded of those days by our New Testament professor John Allen. He said, during a lecture, that a Sunday school education was good in that it provided young people with something they could rebel against later in life as well as introducing them to the writings of the Bible. It gave young people some kind of religious and moral base from which to construct their own philosophy of life.

The fact that Mum and Dad weren’t at church meant that while I was still young I and my younger brother Keith had to sit with our Sunday school teachers during the church service part of the proceedings on Sundays while others sat with their parents. That did make us feel a bit like outsiders and certainly different. We missed feeling this as a family experience in other words.

Now at church we heard a lot about God’s House. So my young mind turned to thinking where God could be in his house! In those days the organist of the church, like most women attending, wore a hat. From where I sat in church with my childhood height I was unable to see anything of the person behind the organ except for her