Obituaries: Mary Rowlands and Rex Meyer

Mary Rowlands (1923 - 2007)

Sometimes God uses very ordinary people in very extraordinary ways. Mary Rowland was a very ordinary person.

Born in Lidcombe in 1923, the youngest of nine children in a family which struggled through the Great Depression, Mary grew up to be a feisty, can-do woman. She gave her all to everything she did; this was especially evident in the way she lived her Christian life.

As she matured in faith and grace, she passed on her blessings with generosity to countless others. With her husband of 62 years, Stan, she was involved in many ministries at her church of St Philip’s, Caringbah, and led a Bible study right up until the day before she died.

Past and present members of St Phil’s are in no doubt that Mary was the heartbeat of the parish. She touched countless lives. Always available to talk to, she took every conversation back to the Scriptures which she loved and studied with enthusiasm.

Mary was a person of prayer, never missing her morning hour with her Father. She supported CMS and missionaries with money, time, practical support and prayer. She loved, prayed for and promoted Moore College.

At her funeral, it was said, “she was 40 years younger than she was”. Mary refused to get older, or to let the world around her get smaller. Her outlook was for outreach, and she took (and made) every opportunity for evangelism and encouragement she could get.

Mary died suddenly at home on 14 February. Her family, and the hundreds of people that she met and encouraged in her life will miss her greatly.

Cecily Paterson
additional text: Jeremy Halcrow

Rex Meyer (1916 - 2007)

Rex Meyer, best known for his 20 years as editor of the Australian Church Record, died 8 March 2007. In the 1970s, this publication was a strong voice for the evangelical cause in Sydney. As a journalist, Rex was a professional, retaining membership of the Australian Journalists’ Association.

Yet Rex’s faith was simple and certain. He had no doubts whatsoever.

This is not to say that his mind was closed. On his bookshelves was discovered Karl Marx’s Capital, surely the most impenetrable book ever published. It was a standing joke among socialist intellectuals worldwide that none of them had ever read it. Rex was once asked if he had read it. “Oh, yes,” he said, as though nothing could have been simpler. And how had he acquired this heretical literature? Why - it was the Barker Prize he had won at Moore College!  T.C.Hammond, another mentor, knew his students. 

More church historian than theologian, Rex topped Church History at Moore College and later returned to lecture in this subject. He also lectured at Deaconess House [now Mary Andrews College] and the Croydon Bible College [now SMBC].

After college, Rex headed to Wyan-Rappville in the Grafton Diocese in 1945. It was an enormous parish of tiny, scattered settlements. The parish struggled to maintain a vicarage that was little better than a hut. Rex, ever handy, rigged up a generator which powered a few light bulbs and a pump to raise water from the well. He soon had both record congregations and offertories. Many were converted.

Rex become curate-in-charge of the new provisional district of Abbotsford and Russell Lea, hived off from Five Dock parish. The Archbishop impressed upon him the financial weakness of the situation he was moving into. Rex was confident he would make a go of it. And did.

Rex was very good with money. He knew how to raise and invest it and was briefly the Director of the Diocese’s euphemistically named Department of Promotion. The Department sponsored stewardship campaigns which significantly increased the financial resources of the parishes.
For 16 years he was chaplain at Callan Park Hospital after which, in theory, he retired.
However, within weeks he commenced a series of appointments as locum. The first of these was at St Martin’s, Kensington. No sooner had he arrived than an arsonist burnt down the church. In the face of considerable opposition from some quarters of the Diocese but with the support he contrived from the secular press, he rebuilt it.

Rex was also a skilled politician. He was a long-time member of the Sydney Diocesan Standing Committee and was secretary of the Anglican Church League.

He founded and, for over thirty years administered, the Church of England Bible College which provided correspondence courses in Bible studies for the laity all over Australia including, he was proud to point out, its prisons.

Above all, Rex loved the Saviour and in his last four years in a nursing home always came alive whenever the Bible was read. Lois Meyer’s comment sums up our Christian hope: “I just rejoice that he is in heaven now”.

Peter H R Meyer
additional text: Mark Calder