The Rev W G Gillings was a great Bible Scholar and preacher. He was the first minister of the church in St Kilda that became the Pakington St church. (Not the earlier Baptist church in Crimea St.) By the time he left in 1887 to take up missionary service in Bangalore his church had a congregation of 117 and a Sunday school of 250 scholars.

He was an interesting man for it is clear that he liked smart women.

Although the Rev Gillings lived in India from 1887 until his death in 1915 we know that his first wife was an outstanding woman because she was a Biblical scholar who had two articles published in the Victorian Baptist in 1892.

These were very well written and closely argued from the texts. She explored the topic of ‘Women’s Ministry: its Legitimacy and Power’ and in her articles reveals a high level of biblical scholarship.

The articles are too long to reproduce here but the following paragraph will illustrate the point.

‘Priscilla “expounded the way of God” more perfectly to Apollos, who was an ‘eloquent man’ and mighty in the scriptures”. Phebe was a ‘deaconess’ at Cenchrea and Paul’s helper. Trepehena and Tryphosa were ‘labourers in the Lord’, (Acts xviii and Romans xvi)’. Etc.

She concludes her first essay with:

‘The Corinthians seemed to value specially the ‘gift of tongues’. Perhaps it was outwardly most attractive; but they are taught that all the gifts are necessary, and to profit: for though the body is one, it has many members and all are necessary. The subject (being discussed in 1 Corinthians) is the body of Christ, and not meetings of the church, and the term everyman is the same as everyone, as shown in the above Scriptures’.

These articles were published after her death and in March 1892 The Victorian Baptist published an editorial in response, even though they had a plethora of articles dealing with the death of C H Spurgeon.

It reads as follows:

We published in our January and February editions two short articles from the pen of the late Mrs. Gillings, upon a woman’s position in the Church of God. Mrs. Gillings was a devout and diligent student of the Scriptures and her words will have a great weight for those that remember her. For our own part, we think she has made out a very good case for the right of her sex to minister the word orally and publically when called to do so. We confess that we have come very slowly to concede this point. We have been disposed to look upon such efforts as exceptionally warranted and always needing some apology. We think so no longer, and would be glad to see a general enfranchisement of woman (sic) within the church.

The Rev Gillings married again and his second wife had the sad task of writing a funeral notice for the Bangalore papers.

She was also a woman of letters for the notice is beautifully crafted.

It reads:

       ‘Mrs. G W Gillings respectfully informs her friends of the passing of her beloved and esteemed husband on July 16th 1915, in the 95th year of his natural life, the 75th year of his spiritual life and the 60th year of happy service for his Divine Master, the Lord Jesus Christ.  He is not dead but sleeping ‘through Jesus’ ‘until the day break’.  

I would like to have met these women and wonder where they had been educated?

JS 

It all started with a friendship—with a Syrian woman I met in Shepparton in December 2017. When I asked her how I could help her and other Syrians recently arrived in Shepparton, she said they needed help practicing conversational English.

From that I began to teach classes, creating a program called Thrive Shepparton, with a plan for a creative expansion called Shepparton Story House. When students began to ask for writing and grammar alongside conversation, I knew it was time for Story House to begin.

Only it didn’t begin right away. Unable to secure a new working visa, I went home to the U.S. for nearly a year, during which time Rev Richard Horton at Shepparton Baptist Church contacted me. He’d read my plans for the Story House program and he wanted me to return to Shepparton to begin this program at his church.

In the year and a half since he contacted me, Shepparton Baptist Church has become home to two Congolese fellowships, an Indonesian fellowship, and continues to have an English service each Sunday and a Chinese service fortnightly. In mid-2018, Thrive Friendship Café launched at Shepparton Baptist Church, and friendships began to form between volunteers and close to a dozen Syrian families in our neighbourhood.

My working visa to begin Shepparton Story House at this already diverse church arrived the same week as COVID-19 restrictions. Not wanting to let down our expectant students, in term two we launched our three levels of English classes online, as well as our Bible Story & Chat program and Creative Writing Hub. With God’s grace, these programs have all continued through the past three months, growing despite launching online. Now we’ve also launched our program’s Story Platform with an online storytelling series: “Coming to Australia” which aims to show the diversity of migrants in our city and pave the way for our future story platform program at the church.

These programs aren’t just for our Syrian friends, but for those in our own church and all of those in the community around us who are learning English. So far our program participants have been from over a dozen countries.

It all started with a friendship— and as we hear and tell our own stories through our programs, we are blessed with many friendships across our beautifully diverse community.

Events around the world over the past couple of weeks have brought back memories to many of us.  Some very good memories about how we treasure our heritage, our sense of belonging to a community that values taking care of each other and standing up for each other.  However, it has also brought back some very difficult and painful ones.

For the past 36 years, I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked where I am from – the latest one being just before the lockdown due to COVID-19.  The question is no doubt because I have a “yellow” skin and thus, I am automatically someone not belonging here even though I have an Australian Passport and has been here for more than I have ever been in any other country.

Unfortunately, I have also not been immune from that question in Churches as well.  How about the situation where we started to attend a Church and for several months, no one was interested in us until we invited one of the Church leaders for lunch at our place and he saw my Theological books on my bookshelves.  He was interested in why I had those books and when I told him that I was studying at a Bible College, I was shortly afterwards placed on the preaching roster.

Sad to say, but often we are judged not according to what we can offer in our service to Christ, not according to the gifts, skills and talents that God has given to us.  It is simply assumed that we are inferior because of the colour of our skin.  Just look around the congregation in your Church.  Most will have a sizeable proportion of members who are from a non-Anglo background – yet, how many are part of the leadership team?  Does it mean we are not capable of leading God’s people or performing other leadership role within the Church?

For more than 20 years now, I have been involved in the role of supporting LOTE (Language Other Than English) Churches.  Over the years, the most common comment that has come across is along the line of: “why is it that LOTE Churches have more problems?”  Is that really the case?  Or, is it the assumption that because it is a LOTE Church and thus, it must have more problems.

I really feel for my brothers and sisters coming here to settle as refugees.  I have had more opportunities than them, I have been more privileged than them and I have had more possibilities to prove my worth than them.  What chance do they have to escape such constant bombarding of unnecessary comments?  How do they feel when they are asked questions indicating that they do not belong here? 

Yet, the word refuge has the meaning of shelter or protection from danger or distress.  That’s not just what the word refuge means in the Bible but is also how it is defined in secular dictionaries. Yet, as believers, we struggle to provide that shelter or protection to those in such great need after enduring so much hardship. 

Has it ever crossed our minds that many refugees in our LOTE Churches have come here through refugee camps where the most basic of necessities are inexistent – no certainty of fresh water or even food on the table every day, no means of getting a decent education, no possibility of having a job to provide for the needs of the family and definitely no possible dreams of a future.

How about the daily harassment of government soldiers heavily armed to intimidate you to provide information so that they can capture someone close to you?  How about them burning all sources of food around your village so that you either starve to death or give them what they want – even information that can cost lives – so that they will leave you alone for a couple of days?

How about when they finally see some light at the end of the tunnel – when they are given a visa to settle in this country – only to find that they are made to feel that they do not belong here?  They are constantly asked where they are from when their only wish is to be able to forget what happened in those refugee camps, the hardship and suffering they went through from where they came from.  How about being unable to get a job because they have not had the opportunity to learn English and thus, cannot express themselves properly in interviews? 

Perhaps, this plea from Paul writing to Philemon, the owner of Onesimus the slave, may help us to change our attitude and see each other not through the colour of our skin but as brothers and sisters in Christ:

¹⁵ Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever—¹⁶ no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord. (Philemon 15-16, NIV)

The words of Martin Luther King still inspire hope: “I have a dream”- that one day, we will be able to say what Paul is saying here – You are very dear to me both as a fellow human and as a brother or sister in the Lord. I have a dream.

Rev Marc Chan

Multicultural Consultant