In and Out of Sync

By Dave Mullan

For anyone in ministry in New Zealand in the decades from 1960 it was never going to be an easy ride. Loren Mead of the Alban Institute once described this country as the most secularised he had ever encountered. So it was easy for many clergy to find relevant service in other fields than the institutional church or the parish. But for those who stayed that less than popular course during that period there was the privilege of engagement in one of the most remarkably turbulent periods the NZ Methodist Church ever experienced.
Written around the segments of life created by his appointments in the denomination, this book offers sketches of Dave’s professional life and the many opportunities of interesting service that came his way. In an age of adventurous theology and ambitious re-structuring of the denomination, its ministry and strategies, Dave played a significant role on central councils of the denomination. He was one of a group who came to institutional leadership a decade ahead of when their predecessors did—he offers an interesting theory to explain this situation and its consequences from the early 1980s.
In a later age in which the adventurous vision was gradually muted, he was able to contribute much less to the denomination. But his commitment to small congregational life flourished. Self-supporting ministry and—more recently—lay ministry team strategy has been at the centre of his voluntary working life since retirement. His passion for communication is evidence in over 130 books published using his own short-run binding process. Dave has done a considerable amount of video production and from time to time posts thoughtful observations on life and faith.
While this book offers a full account of Dave’s own childhood and youth, there is less attention to the next generation of family life in this redacted version of a much fuller and more personal account. This book has been most appreciated for its insights and commentary on the denomination which Dave described as an often nurturing mother but also a somewhat overbearing father in the different stages of his pilgrimage.
The book has been commended for its fresh writing. Reviewers with a historical bent have appreciated some of the detailed insights from busy parish and administrative ministry. One reviewer noted that the photos were a little small; that problem has been solved in this version—they’re left out. But it is felt that the text alone is adequate to convey a story of a style of being church that has largely disappeared.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dave Mullan
• Release date: Apr 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781877357190

Dave Mullan

Retired Presbyter of Methodist Church of New Zealand. Passionate pioneer in Local Shared Ministry, consultant in small churches, publisher of over 100 niche market books, producer of prosumer video, deviser of murder mystery dinners and former private pilot. I trained for the Methodist Ministry at Trinity Theological College and eventually completed MA, Dip Ed as well. Bev and I married just before my first appointment in Ngatea where our two children arrived. We went on to Panmure and Taumarunui. Longer terms followed at Dunedin Central Mission and the Theological College. During this time I was also involved as co-founder and second national President of Family Budgeting Services and adviser to the (government) Minister of Social Welfare. My final four years were part-time, developing the first Presbyterian or Methodist Local Shared Ministry unit in this country and promoting the concept overseas. Retirement has brought a whole lot more opportunities and challenges. We are now living in our own villa in Hibiscus Coast Residential Village.

Book preview

IN AND OUT

OF SYNC

—

The Book

Dave Mullan

Paperback 2011

This Smashwords Edition 2015

ISBN 978-1-877357-19-0

ColCom Press

28/101 Red Beach Road,

Hibiscus Coast, Aotearoa-New Zealand 0932

[e-mail]

http://www.colcompress.com

http://dave-mullan.blogspot.co.nz

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 or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Foreword

1 — Early Days

2 — Primary School

3 — Secondary School

4 — To Work

5 — Lower Hutt Again

6 — Trinity College

7 — Hauraki Plains — Reflections

8 — Panmure — Reflections

9 — Taumarunui — Reflections

10 — Dunedin — Reflections

11 — Fieldworker in Ministry — Reflections

12 — Bay of Islands

13 — Retirement

14 — Reflections

Afterword

About the Author

Dave’s other general books

Dave’s books on church and ministry

Foreword

Under this title I wrote Notes for a Book on My Life. However, at 550 pages, with over a hundred key words missing from the very last revision, and with a few controversial pages, it’s OK for the family but not suitable for general circulation. Ask to borrow a copy if you must!

I kept the title. I was always fascinated with audiovisuals and, especially, moving images and sound. Getting the loop exactly right on a 16mm movie projector so that picture and audio were perfectly in sync was an early learning. These days I’m still struggling with lip sync while editing video on the computer. What’s changed?

This account will reveal that my life hasn’t always been in sync. There have been highs and lows; there have been contrasts and contradictions. There have been moments of brilliance and some of near stupidity. Sometimes my church-ship has seemed to be too conservative and often it was too radical.

But that’s life. For anyone in ministry in the decades from 1960 it was never going to be an easy ride. For those who stayed the course during that period there has been the privilege of engaging in one of the most remarkably turbulent periods the Methodist Church, as an institution, has ever experienced. I don’t want to add to that stress by now handing out blame.

Indeed, if this account seems to be a little critical of the church’s leadership since the early 1980s it may be because many people found themselves thrust into responsibility for which they were sometimes not well prepared. I pay tribute to those did their best while lacking the depth of experience that used to flow strongly through the veins of leaders in earlier decades.

I will always be grateful for the students of the 1980s Home-Setting programme. We enjoyed a synchrony of purpose and passion that drew out of me resources that I didn’t know I possessed. If the result was that my commitment led to enhancing lay ministry rather than further developing voluntary ordained ministry, that was never going to be their fault. In any case, the church changed its views on that, too.

Since 1990 my most enriching moments have been with small congregations who often felt abandoned by the denominational hierarchy. Those who, in small workshops in Bay of Islands, rock rural Ontario, the Murray Valley or the slate-grey valleys of Wales, pressed the hard questions and demanded clarity and inspiration from my answers, stimulated me in ways beyond description.

In and out of sync, it’s been a great life and it owes me absolutely nothing. Bev and I have had the privilege of over fifty years of marriage. Keeping reasonably in sync has always been worth the effort. We’ve had the satisfaction of raising a couple of great kids and with them we share the joys of their own marvellous children. They may not follow our particular stars but in each of them we see something of the passion that energised us.

However, this volume is first and foremost for the Church which was for Bev and me a chosen lifestyle, our nurturing mother and our somewhat overbearing father in our pilgrimage together. It is offered with humility and grateful thanks.

Grace and peace to you all.

Dave Mullan

Autumn 2011

1

Early Days

There’s a Butcher’s

(Little David, looking up the chimney)

Employment regulations after the great depression required Mum to give up her full-time position when she and Dad were married on Boxing Day, 1933. He had steady work in the motor industry so they could get by. But keeping house in the small flat in Pirie St in central Wellington didn’t extend Mum in the slightest.

So the decision was made to sell Dad’s beloved Chev coupe and start their own £1600 home at 16 Kauri St, Lower Hutt. I guess it was about that time Mum began to Knit Little Things. And in due course I arrived in the early hours of 20th May 1935 at the unpretentious nursing home in Penrose St, Lower Hutt.

There were no refrigerators in homes like ours, of course, so there was a problem with meat. Mum had to gather me up and walk to the butcher’s at Ludlam Cres. to buy meat every day or two. Come along, David, we’re going to the butcher’s, meant not just a ride in the pushchair but actually a trip outside the house. Naturally, it wasn’t done on a rainy day so trips to the butcher’s became associated in my needle-sharp mind with fine, bright days. One day, I am told, I was peering up the family chimney and caught a glimpse of the sky and announced, Oh, look, there’s a butcher’s!

Along with others of his generation, Dad did body-building exercises that must have made an impression on me. Early in my efforts at communication I am supposed to have seen a traffic pointsman managing a difficult intersection in Wellington and exclaimed He’s doing eketises.

* * *

Barbara arrived a couple of years after me. I don’t appear to have been greatly upset by this invader to my exclusive domain. Our little family could manage modest bicycle outings with me in a seat on the bar of Dad’s bike and Barbara in another seat behind him. Of such simple pleasures was life made.

When I was a little older, one trip to the butcher’s had some extra excitement. I was old enough not to be actually gripping Mum’s hand—she was doubtless managing the pram with Barbara. We had come through the pedestrian right-of-way onto Ludlam Cres. and there, on the pavement, where my eyes were a bit closer to the ground than anyone else’s, was a bright one-shilling piece. Now in those days a shilling was a shilling, not a mingy ten cents. Having mastered the ethical dilemma by resolving that if anyone saw it and said it was theirs I would give it to them, I began saving up.

But my familiarity with things financial didn’t run to understanding when Great-Grandma Rose Attwood told me there was a thripp’ny bit on the windowsill for me. I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what she meant. It was threepence.

A highlight of my pre-school years was to go on firewood expeditions in the riverbed near the Melling suspension bridge. Dad and Albert Maud would scavenge on the wide banks for old timber stumps that had washed down from the felling and clearing work done in the valleys in earlier decades. Much prized were sweet-smelling rata stumps.

* * *

By the time Marion came along we had managed to cash in on one of the privileges of middle management at Ford—the right to purchase an ex-company 1936 Model C Ford Ten, fawn, low mileage, indeed only a few months old, at a very favourable price. Petrol was only about 1/7 a gallon—say five cents a litre. In terms of earning power that wouldn’t actually be much different from modern times. Of course, wartime rationing meant the car had to be used very sparingly.

Until some additions were made to the house there was a certain amount of doubling up in the accommodations when there were visitors. I still have the slightly eerie feeling that overcame me when I was put to bed one night in the double bed that Mum and Dad had vacated—because of intolerance of their sleeping habits, I gathered later—and woke up in the morning to find Dad’s sister, Aunt Mollie in the bed with me. While she made all the right noises for an aunt, she always left me with a feeling of awe. I had the feeling that you didn’t mess with Aunt Mollie. So to wake up in bed with her, even in the most innocent of my years, was something of a shock.

Just before Easter 1939 Aunt Mollie and Uncle Harry lost their Wanganui home by fire. Dad went up there for the long weekend to help them build a shed and fit it out for temporary accommodation while their new house was being built. Somehow, I was taken along for the trip. I guess it was not as much that Dad wanted me under his feet on the building job at Wanganui as that Mum welcomed the opportunity of having me out from under hers at home.

* * *

Dad bred budgies and arranged their nest boxes to be accessible inside the garage on which the aviary was built. He could easily open up the nests and inspect the babies. I am supposed to have insisted on kissing one of them. The tiny bird was not as enthusiastic as I was about the interaction and bit me on the lip. But aviary birds would feature in my life on and off for decades.

One of my earliest recollections is of being picked up on the side of the road by Uncle Arthur in his Maxwell tourer. I had travelled on my trike from Kauri St right across the Hutt Valley. I must have crossed the suspension bridge at Melling for I believe I ended up on the Western Hutt Rd. I was missed for several hours but quite unconcerned when found.

* * *

Mum’s parents obtained a rather dilapidated holiday cottage at York Bay and when measles raged through the family at Kauri St I was allowed to go to the bach with Grandma for a few days. I don’t remember making much of a contribution to the sanding and painting work but I still can recall the aroma and taste of the raisin toast that she made there. The first thing I wanted to bake when we got a bread maker in the 1990s was raisin toast. When it filled the house with the aroma of cinnamon and raisins and yeasty dough I was right back there at York Bay.

* * *

Although Dad had only two weeks’ annual leave from Ford’s, he was up for anything that would make a change from the routine. One Christmas he strapped no fewer than three suitcases on the Model C’s groaning luggage rack and we set off for a holiday trip. To Auckland. For a none too small family, with one or two of us—notably me, actually—prone to becoming violently carsick just traversing Haywards Hill to go for a Paremata picnic, this was a pretty big undertaking. The main route was via Taranaki and the fearsome Mt Messenger. Great sections of the road had only the most primitive seal and many sections were still unsealed. At our modest pace the trip was not particularly exciting for the three in the back. On one particularly boring stretch of road I worked out that it would be a lot of fun to tell Dad that the suitcases had fallen off. He was quite a tease himself.

Well, my tease certainly created an effect but the outcome, overall, was much less than satisfactory. On the one hand, the family capacity for just kidding seemed to be acceptable only when Dad was doing it. And on the other, I guess I’ve always had a little difficulty conveying the difference between a bit of a joke and a serious report. Some people have told me my throw-away lines have sometimes been more memorable than my most studious thinking—a dubious compliment.

* * *

It was a huge trial for my parents to get me to go to Sunday School in 1939. Working with children and young people in the church had been part of their life’s work for the past few years and a rather stubborn youngster upset that routine. I guess it was the first place where I really had to deal with others of my own age and it was not much fun.

However, the pre-school years were generally very happy. There were warm family relationships and many interesting and positive experiences in a very supportive environment. We were well established at Kauri St and Dad had a steady job. And, of course, the Labour Government was still introducing all manner of new social legislation which was heralding the coming of better days for everyone.

All that neatly ordered life was about to change. In 1939-40 the world would go to war and I would go to school. Difficult days lay ahead for everyone.

2

Primary School

Can David come out to play?

(Jenny Day, a ten yr old blonde, after dark)

I am told that Mum had a lot of difficulty getting me off to school. Some earlier reluctance about going to Sunday School had absolutely nothing on the crisis that occurred after I became five. I survived it but with no warm memories of those first couple of years at all.

One compensation was that the lengthy trek from our Kauri St home to Waiwhetu School lay across the railway at Hinau St. Somehow I became a regular pedestrian along the rail tracks lines instead of straight over them. It was exciting to stand beside the track as the WW and Wab locomotives roared past. It still amazes me that I continued doing something that I not only knew was wrong but also quite dangerous.

With the war came blackouts on the windows of the family home. And, of course the 9pm BBC News. Our Morris cabinet radio was high on a cupboard in the kitchen/dining room. It was a family ritual for us kids to kiss goodnight the china pussy that sat on it before we went to bed.

In my first years at school two large earthquakes struck the Wellington region. I can remember the absolute terror I felt at this totally unaccustomed experience. Dad, in a reserved occupation producing munitions and vehicles, had been drafted into the Emergency Fire Service for the duration. It was in that role that he was called out the morning after each of the big earthquakes. I was allowed to go along for the ride and watch as he and others made dozens of shattered chimneys safe and temporarily weather-tight.

Grandad Thomas’s Four Square store had all the stock stacked from floor to ceiling wide, deep shelves around the walls. Tins were on top of each other five or six high. When the earthquake struck everything simply fell to the floor. I remember the shock of seeing the wreckage

* * *

Kauri St was bursting at the seams by the time Peter became the fourth youngster in the family and we moved to 15 Brasell St in Waterloo in 1942. This roughcast home had a huge garden section and had a good deal more room for the expanding family.

Among the extensive alterations required, Dad created a fold-up table. It was probably a good space-saving idea but it was never folded up. It didn’t realise its full potential but did what it did well enough (a bit like the contemporary Methodist Church, perhaps…).

Dad had hated doing market gardening work for his father in the mid 1920s. But having this enormous garden already laid out really brought out the best in him. His father should have lived to see it. We grew almost all of our own potatoes, onions were tied up in strings in the shed, runner beans were sliced, salted and stashed away in big glass jars, carrots were buried in sand. Leeks, lettuces and cabbages were always there in season and sometimes out of it. Broad beans grew best of all – but I wasn’t very appreciative about that.

There were fruit trees, large gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes which fruited in the middle of the summer holidays. It was a major family project to harvest these crops for jams and preserves. Each of us four children had our own patches in which we emulated to a greater or lesser degree the amazing horticultural achievements of our Dad.

* * *

Mostly Dad worked overtime or went straight to evening church meetings from work with perhaps a scratch meal on the way. Indeed, for most of the impressionable part of my childhood he was pretty much a Weekend Dad. So any time he was coming home for tea at the usual time it was a bit special. Now and then we played The Sleeping Princess. When we knew he was just about due at the door we would all take up positions around the house and freeze. Someone would be cutting bread at the table; another putting something into the oven; each of us would be frozen in an action and feigning sleep. And Mum, the Sleeping Princess herself, would be lying in bed counting the moments while the pots simmered anxiously on the stove and the mutton flap casserole started to crisp around the edges in the oven.

At the appointed moment, Dad would come in the door and encounter this frozen atmosphere. He would tiptoe round the house inspecting, but not waking, all the sleeping inhabitants. Then he’d go to Mum. Now, if you were the servant who was taking the roast out of the oven, you got pretty sore knees while the darn prince was trying to kiss his princess back to life. It was a huge relief to everyone when he went quickly round the house and kissed the rest of us into wakefulness. We thought it was our game but I imagined later there were some other forces at work.

If a Sunday afternoon was too wet for an outing we might have some family games. Acting out the story of the Good Samaritan was one of these. I think Dad was always the donkey and his role in the story always provided a degree of hilarity that was not strictly biblical. There were special Sunday night teas now and then, with toast and jam and whipped cream skimmed from the tops of the milk bottles.

Like many families, we had chooks. Many times I went off with Dad to Upper Hutt to collect young pullets and sometimes day-old chicks which we raised to a respectable level of egg-production. They were far too precious to kill for the table except at Christmas. That was always an entertainment. Dad lopped off their heads with a slasher and we kids all stepped back while their decapitated bodies flopped around all over the place. Then we were initiated into the mysteries of what was inside them and what you did with it. We shared the agony if an internal sequence of shell-less eggs of various sizes showed that we had killed a hen in prime lay rather than one of the oldies who wasn’t quite pulling her weight.

Charlie and Helen were my first two homing pigeons. After a lot of perseverance