However, for a young probationer serving his first church, all this was tangential to my vocational exploration. Life was a series of ‘firsts’. I was learning to come up with a sermon every week. Preparation was a long, painful business and required discipline, patience and prayer, but I found an excitement in quarrying into a passage of Scripture and extracting its relevance for my people’s lives. Seeing I was experiencing the joys and sorrows of courtship too, my first marriage preparation classes were probably longer on empathy than wisdom. Baptisms – which are God’s wonderful way of declaring God’s love and acceptance even when we don’t know it – were a trial until a learned colleague advised me that I should always take the baby’s thigh in a vice-grip. “They are shocked into silence just long enough,” he said. “Then if they planned to cry it only happens when you hand them back to their parents.” My first home visitations were approached with much trepidation, but I was surprised by the readiness with which people revealed their deep selves to this inexperienced pastor. Even more astounding was that in spite of my newness to the task, they would sometimes tell me that my counsel had helped them.
My first encounter with bereavement would have tested much better pastors than me. Five Bellville men in one family had gone out fishing in a blustery False Bay and their ski-boat had overturned. Three of them, two brothers and a brother-in-law, drowned. They came from a low-income Afrikaans background, and one of them had been linked with our church. When I arrived at their home, his widow sat in shock while people came and went. The next hours taught me much about pastoring grief-stricken people, the most important lesson being that presence trumps pontificating every time. I listened as a solemn dominee stood before this new widow and launched into a pious lecture about how her husband and brothers had gone to be with God, and that it was not for us to question “the Lord’s will”, and more of the clichés unthinking religious people offer at times like these. As for me, I wouldn’t be interested in a God whose ‘will’ included a wholesale family drowning. I watched her stricken face, and when she looked toward me pleadingly, I got up and said, “Enough! That’s not the kind of God we believe in,” and escorted him out. A little while later, another visitor arrived, this time a woman who had a fairly racy reputation around the town. When she entered the room, there were no words; she simply walked across to the young widow, took her in her arms and they wept together for a long time. Then, still saying nothing, she went into the kitchen and began to do the kind of stuff people do in kitchens. Of the two visitors, I knew which one was sent by God. I know that some Christian traditions differ theologically, but I sometimes wonder whether we don’t have quite different Gods.
There were the inevitable bloopers too. Later that year I stood in the parking lot at Maitland Crematorium commiserating with a grieving family. Looking down the long path to the crematorium itself, I saw the undertaker signalling me. Without a second’s thought I said, “Excuse me, I must go and see what’s cooking down there.” It was only after two or three steps that it hit me; sweat burst from my pores and ran down my backbone, but there was nothing I could do, I simply had to keep walking.
Meanwhile Elizabeth and I were planning our marriage for the end of 1960. We were excited and quite undaunted by our shaky economic situation. My monthly stipend was £11.15s, and the insurance company where Elizabeth worked had recently raised her salary to £20 a month. Neither of us had any worldly goods to speak of. With timber scavenged from a Bellville factory I spent my days off fashioning an upholstered headboard and side cabinets for our first bed – my wedding present to her. Hers to me, given in advance for obvious reasons, was a Black & Decker drill/sander to which I could attach a small circular sawblade. It was my first power tool and must have been sufficient for the task because the finished headboard lasted us 42 years before we promoted ourselves to a queen-size bed.
Prime Minister HF Verwoerd had announced a Referendum for October 1960 to determine whether South Africa should become a republic. I recall preaching a vaguely ‘political’ sermon on the Sunday before the vote, reminding the congregation of the importance of “belonging to something bigger than our nation alone,” and the dangers for South Africa’s voteless millions if we cut off ties with the Commonwealth of Nations. Only whites could vote, of course, and 52% of them said Yes to becoming the Republic of South Africa. Afrikaner nationalism had prevailed once more. It was the first time I saw the newlyweds in in our boarding house become animated; they were clearly overjoyed. The ex-servicemen in my congregation felt very differently. It was as if their six years of sacrifice ‘up North’ in WWII had been for naught.
Our wedding was on 31 December 1960. I had told Elizabeth for some time that I would still have to conduct the Watch-Night service39 at Bellville on our wedding night. She later claimed that she had only pretended to believe me. The wedding was in the family church at Rosebank on a bright breezy morning, with a reception in her family’s garden. Tom Hardie’s roses were in bloom with Elizabeth the loveliest rose of them all. The Bellville youth group had offered their most presentable vehicle, an Austin A30, so we could drive off in something more dignified than the Puch and we decamped to the usual good wishes and confetti. Our happy honeymoon at the Hout Bay Hotel and then in Hermanus was enlivened by a mouse in our room on the first night and coming upon a homeless and hurting old man lying on the beach the next day. It took some hours to see to his needs and in later years Elizabeth pointed to that moment as the one when she realised that in marrying me she had married the Church.
Bellville could not house a married minister so we came back from honeymoon, suntanned and happy, to move into a new home. The people of Bellville had done a good job breaking me in, and while they prepared to welcome their next greenhorn I was now given responsibility for Camps Bay and Milnerton. Our tiny house in Camps Bay was attached to the church premises in Farquhar Road, only a couple of hundred yards from what is now one of the most expensive beachfronts in the world. In 1961, however, Camps Bay was a still a sleepy village, not quite aware that a great city lay over Kloof Nek. There was a small shopping centre, some sports fields adjacent to the Rotunda Hotel and a few hundred homes set on the slopes below Table Mountain’s western buttresses known as the Twelve Apostles. Until we arrived, my new congregation had been an autonomous ‘Interdenominational’ church. Having fallen into difficulties, they had voted to join the MCSA and my job was to shepherd them into Methodist ways. I soon found that while the word ‘interdenominational’ sounded admirably inclusive, it was really code for a more fundamentalist-leaning Christianity and they might have been happier with the Baptists than with the theologically liberal and socially conscious MCSA. They also found that there was a world of difference between the autonomy they had enjoyed and the highly organised and integrated Methodist Circuit system. We had inherited a group of conscripts rather than volunteers, and if they were not feeling too comfortable about the change, neither was I.
Milnerton, on the other hand, was an encouraging contrast: the suburb was in its infancy and the Methodist congregation still very new. Sunday services were held in the local pub, with an early morning team airing the place, clearing out the empties and arranging the chairs. Young families were moving into the suburb in numbers and on the days I was there I simply had to watch for removal vans, drop in to welcome them and invite the new arrivals to our Sunday ‘Pub Service’. It was a different era, of course, with most of them keen to have their children in a Sunday School – these days I’m not sure that would be most people’s priority. During my four years there we grew rapidly, requiring two moves, first to the tennis club and then to the primary school hall, by which time plans were afoot to build our own church. Like Camps Bay, many of our new members knew little about Methodist ways, but there the similarity ended. They were wonderfully open to newness and some of my most enjoyable times were spent in discussion groups in people’s homes, turning over all sorts of questions, debating issues of faith and life.
It was during the Camps Bay/Milnerton years that our first two