Confessions of a Sydney Anglican - an address to the Rotary Club of Sydney, September 2003

Archbishop Peter Jensen | 5 September 2003

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Mr President, Rotarians, Guests and members, one of the men that had the most profound influence on me and whom I admired and who’s memory I really revere was Bishop Clive Kerle, and one of the first things I noticed about him was that not only was he a convinced Christian or course and a Bishop in fact, but also a Rotarian, and it has meant that although in the course of life my in Ministry as it happens I haven’t had a great deal to do with Rotary I’ve always had an interest and a respect for the ideals for which you stand and I recognise that if a club could have a man of the stature, and he was an outstanding Gentleman, of Bishop Clive Kerle, then clearly it was a club which deserved my respect as well.

You will know that we have as the Christian Church and Rotary at least intersecting interests because of our keen interest in the community in which we find ourselves and our concern that our community flourishes and is healthy in every way. I’ve given the title of the address “Confessions of a Sydney Anglican” because I didn’t really know what to say so I thought that would cover almost everything. I hope you don’t think that it’s going to be too intimate.

If you believe in the media (and that’s a question to start with) Sydney Anglicans are and obscure, quarrelsome and fundamentalist tribe destined to quick extinction, and in fact would say the quicker the better!

In fact ever since Europeans have settled in Australia, Sydney Anglicans have been here. In the first fleet the Reverend Richard Johnson was a member of the first fleet with Mrs Johnson and they settled here for 10 years, built the first Church in Australia, preached the first sermon in Australia, and celebrated the holy communion for the first time in Australia as far as we know, so the Sydney Anglican history is coterminous with the white settlement of this colony as it was.

During the course of the those years we have been represented by many notable leaders of business, law, politics, education, sport, philanthropy, and so forth just to give a brief profile in case you don’t realise there are something like 400 Anglican Churches throughout the suburbs of Sydney and Wollongong as well for Wollongong forms part of our diocese, there would be well over 500 clergy in parishes, in youth work, many non-ordained people working in those areas, in prisons, in hospitals, and we are active in major social welfare work not least aged care and hospices. Anglicare which is one of our organisations in the diocese of Sydney is one of the major players in social welfare in the whole country.

Much respected for the work it does as well as that the Anglican retirement villages, once again is one of he largest retirement villages in the whole country so as I quickly discovered on becoming Archbishop, the diocese of Sydney is a really vast and complex organisation, but not only that, not only true of our organisation, but of course many, many Sydney Anglicans no doubt represented here today too are very active in community service in their individual capacity and by getting together and working.

We have significant contributions to make in the area of education with our church schools but also in state education we are always committed to the public system of education as well, our theological college which is at Newtown next door to the University of Sydney was the second or third tertiary institution founded in Australia and it is now full I’m glad to say, as soon as I left the numbers grew significantly and more are expected. There are 287 students this year and we are looking to increase the size of our college to 500 to even 1000 if we can, and who are these folk? Well they are young men and women mainly from this part of the world most of them graduates, most of them have a professional life or a business life before they come to college and they study for the Ministry. In short, Sydney Anglicans are well and truly woven into the life of Sydney and Wollongong, our diocese goes gown to Ulladulla, and to Lithgow and to the Hawkesbury. It’s far more diverse than people think when you see that big picture, you realise it’s got to be very diverse, but basically I suppose what Sydney Anglicans stand for is a basic orthodox Christianity with a strong commitment to the Bible and the importance of the Bible naturally as the word of God.

We get in the news a lot, partly because we are democratic, we have a Synod and the Synod is held every year and people can come and see what’s going on, our media website tells everyone what we’re doing and the newspapers report on us a lot. They don’t always report on everyone else, they do report on us because we are fairly open and people can see what we’re doing. When I became Archbishop it was as a result of an election. I’m a little different from other elected officials in that they can’t get rid of me, I’m here for the long haul, I then have be really re-elected in the next 2 years let me put it that way. If they try that…I’m going.

Now, I’m going to speak about a subject of profound interest to me, and marginal interest to you, namely I’m going to talk about myself for a moment, as a typical Sydney Anglican, so let me do that for just a moment. You can see I hope that I have a deep love for Sydney. Thus is the city of my upbringing, my birth, I came from the eastern suburbs, and I think that Sydney is the greatest place on earth, it’s wonderful. Yes, Rugby Mr President quite correct, and an awful thing happened to me quite recently, I came back from an overseas trip on a Saturday morning to discover that my Secretary had said “no he can’t accept an invitation by the ARU for their box to the test that night”. When she told me on Monday morning, even I was speechless, but I tried not to show it……

I have a deep love for Sydney, I‘ve always been a churchgoer, my parents just sent me a long to church as people did in the 50’s, and I went and I liked going to church, enjoyed it and made many friends in that context, but I don’t know that I would be a church goer today if it wasn’t for one particular thing. I think I would have gone and taken the leaving certificate of confirmation, and disappeared from the church like so many other people have, but it didn’t happen like that to me and it was one particular man….let me explain. Some of you may remember the visit to this city in 1959 by Mr Billy Graham.

He was invited by the Sydney Anglican diocese and particularly Bishop Clive Kerle who I mentioned to you earlier as an outstanding Rotarian, and was integral to that invitation to Mr Billy Graham to come and visit our city. He packed them in, the meetings had thousands of people in attendance they were held at the Sydney showground, and the final meeting still must have a record for the number of people gathered apart from the Olympics, there were 151,000 people gathered in the Sydney showground and the Sydney Cricket Ground, they had to have both grounds to hear Mr Graham’s final sermon.

So you see he made an enormous impact on this city and it’s true, he did make a great impact on the city and is one of the great historic moments of the 20th century. Those meetings and what Mr Graham said actually made a huge difference to me, I have to say that. I had been a conventional Christian, I had been baptised, I had been churchgoing from being conventional for me it became personal, that’s the best way I can describe it.

From having sort of a broad general faith, well I didn’t disbelieve it did I? It became a personal faith. Perhaps the best way I can say was that I knew about God, but I believe I came to know God personally. That’s the best way I can talk about it. It was a revolutionary personal experience that changed my whole life it was the most important moment of my life. You’ll notice my wife is not present when I say this, but in fact she too made a commitment at that same crusade and she would say the same thing. Many of us did, many, many people in Sydney in those days made that commitment, for some it was just a commitment and it passed. But for many it was the turning point in their lives and in fact it was in a sense the salvation of our church because the 1960s came along with their very strong radical move, Christian faith fell away from people like old clothes and if you were not personally committed, if you’d not had that deep sense that God touched you, then it was hard to keep on going.

Many folk, my parents for example, now both late, my late parents had been conventional churchgoers but they simply stopped going in the 1960s as if Christianity no longer mattered. My Dad came back at a later point, but that was a very, very personal motivating moment for me.

Now let me ask what do I do? You may be wondering what Archbishops actually do and why they should be paid. Well my job as Archbishop of Sydney is basically twofold. The first is to recruit, select, train and deploy Ministers for the churches. Really in the end, the quality of a church depends on its Minister. That depends on the church but in the end that’s probably right, the good quality of a church, depends on the Minister of the church. So my business as Archbishop is to make sure we recruit, select, train, deploy and then nurture the Ministers. I would guess that many of you have similar tasks within your organisation, you’ve got an eye to the future and you’ll be selecting people and training them, bringing them on, indeed what Jackie said about her trip to Switzerland, is an indication that Rotary itself sees a need to nurture people and to bring them on. So that’s my business to recruit, select, train, deploy and nurture Ministers nurture ministers who will themselves nurture churches and prove to be good ministers of churches and then create more churches.

From time to time I think about how many churches we should have, what’s the right number of churches for Sydney? Now the answer to that is far more than 400. 400 sounds like a lot perhaps, but we need many, many more churches than that and I’m hoping then that the Ministers that we train, recruit deploy and nurture will be church creating ministers, so keep an eye on this space and see if we are multiplying these churches in years to come.

I said there were two bits to my role, the second bit is this: It’s not actually any different from my role when I became an ordained Minister, it’s the same role although I have different opportunities for it. It’s really to help people to come to know God through Jesus Christ. That’s what they pay me for, that’s what they’ve appointed me to do. To help people to come to know God through Jesus Christ, to have basically the same experience that I had myself way back there almost 45 years ago…to help people to come to know God through Jesus Christ.

So that’s what I do, I keep talking about God, keep talking about Jesus, I have a little thing that I have in my head when I’m on the media, I want to talk about God, Jesus and the Bible. So even if they ask me about what do I think of the latest train derailment, I always try to get God, Jesus and the Bible in somewhere. One of the better known reporters in our city said to me recently she said what else would you like to say about this story Dr Jensen, well I’d like to say I love Jesus Christ and I want other people to love him too, and she laughed and said they’d never print that, and you’re right, they didn’t.

Well what is it that I am saying? I’m saying first of all that there is a God. Most Australians (very few are Atheists), how can you be, you look out in the world and you say to yourself, well of course there is God. I say yes there is a God, he’s the creator of all things, and he owns everything and everybody. That’s the fundamental truth of human existence. And the second thing I want to say about God is he’s just. I notice that one of your values, your first value is truth, your second value is fairness, and these values reflect exactly the same great truth that we live in a world where truth matters, and where justice matters. And so I’ve really got to say to people that God is a just God, he’s got a good memory and there is a day of judgement, and he treats us with justice.

Which brings me to the third point, and that is God is a God of love, as well because if he treats us with justice, then I don’t know how you feel but I’d rather not be treated with justice myself, well I would and I wouldn’t – if you know what I mean. I’d like people to be fair to me, I’d like God to be fair to me but I’d like some latitude.

WC Fields the great comedian (who was a terrible man, he was a shocker!) he was once found studying his Bible, and they said “what are YOU reading the Bible for?”, and he said “I’m looking for a loophole”.

WC Fields had discovered that God was just, but he needed the next bit too, that God is a God of love…and that’s what Jesus Christ has come into the world, to express the love of God, and then to do something for us, namely to die for us that we may be forgiven. So Christianity is about God’s justice, and it’s about his forgiveness, and those two things….you can’t do one without the other. Fields had discovered his justice, and he was going to discover, I hope he kept reading, I hope he came across Jesus, and I hope he realised that through Jesus there is forgiveness.

I guess the other point that I always like to make, is well that’s the information, what are you going to do with it is the difference between knowing the truth and knowing the person, and I’m hoping that as people hear this message that God is creator, God is just, God is love that they will come to know the person of Jesus Christ and come to know God through Jesus, because that is a privilege which anyone in God’s world can have.

Well how well am I doing with that message?

Well….we have our ups and downs. You will have noticed and I know there’s a problem in a sense for service clubs that this is not an age of commitment. The service in the community is suffering. There’s less commitment to service particularly amongst the under 40s than there was, but on the other hand, many young people are looking for something more than the husks of materialism and we find that they are interested in God and spiritual matters.

And I would say to you here that our interests here intersect very much, because we discover that as people come to know God and give their lives to him, not only those people, but we find that as people do, it sets them through free to serve the community. So there is a connection actually between your interests and ours at this point, we want to see many more people serving the community, serving God, serving the community and we believe that challenging young people about commitment is a very important thing for us to do.

Well briefly as I finish, Sydney…I love it! I hope you do, it’s a great place to live. Its beauty daily reminds me of the creator, and God clearly loves beautiful things, because he has made so many of them.

The most sacred place in Sydney? The Sydney showground as far as I’m concerned, because that’s where I came to know God. You may look at it and say “what…that place?”, I say “wow, THAT place” because it was so important to me.

And the challenge? Well the challenge is for us all, you and me to be involved in the life of this great city, I know your club commits you to that, and we are committed to it too. We’re committed to being part of the meeting of the needs of the citizens of this city, the need for justice in human affairs, the need for the basics in life, food and drink, housing, human relationships, the need for education, and I would say for the need for the knowledge of God.

Peter Jensen
Archbishop of Sydney
September 2, 2003

This address originally appeared on the Rotary Club of Sydney’s website.

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