DAY FOURTEEN: SATURDAY APRIL 1ST TOWNSVILLE

Matthew drove me over to Mount Louisa a little after 7:00 am so that I could speak at a Men’s Breakfast that had been organized by a guy called Joel. He runs the men’s ministry at Mount Louisa House of Praise. Anne Harley is the pastor there. It is a Uniting Church with quite a history. Jack Frewin-Lord was the pastor of West End Uniting and began to grow significantly, especially through some hundreds of young people coming to Christ. They initially looked around for a warehouse in that part of town but were not able to gain the approval of council. They ended up building the facility at Mount Louisa and the church grew to around 700 people. Jack finally moved on and Mike Smith came. Mike and the leaders decided to leave the Uniting Church and had to walk away from the buildings of course. Only a small number of people remained. The sad thing was that Praise Chapel (the name of the church at the time) soon started to splinter because of some rather poor leadership decisions and because of a few strong ambitions on the part of certain individuals (no so much Mike himself, but others). Many of the people who used to belong to Praise Chapel ended up down the road at Calvary AOG (the largest Pentecostal church in town).

There were about fifty blokes at the breakfast. Joel, the guy who leads the group is a businessman in town who owns a number of stores called Overflow. These are like Warehouse and other similar stores. Everyone who comes to the group called MUGS (Men Under God’s S….?) [can’t remember what the S word stands for] gets an inscribed travel mug. They had blue or red to choose from so I naturally chose blue and thanked them for thinking of the State of Origin football games (NSW = blue) and pointed to all the other blokes who obviously supported the Blues because of their choice of mug. It always draws a reaction and offered the same opportunity on this occasion.

I spoke on the verse from Joshua: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” And there was a very significant response. I was able to lay hands on many of the guys at the end of the time as they responded to God’s challenge to fight for the purposes of God to be established in their households.

David Frewin-Lord was at the breakfast and I was going to spend the morning with him and Robyn, his wife. He is the son of the Jack I referred to and is the pastor of one of the Crosslink churches in town. He and Robyn have done a great job building a predominantly young church that meets in Annandale. He was not able to be at the meetings we were holding during the week so I was grateful for the chance to hang out with them. They have four boys from age twenty one down. He is a guy who services all the imaging equipment at hospitals and similar places. It is a high tech job and there are not many with the qualifications he has to work on the machines he works on. He has been doing contract work under his own company to this point and while it has worked well and given him the chance to work for the church on the average of three to four days a week, he has now been offered a full time job with Seimens, but will only be required to work about one day a week. The reason is that Seimens wants to expand their share of the marked in North Queensland and want to be able to say they have a full time support person here. So he is really a kind of advertising component. The down side is that because he is now full time, he has to go to training when they say. Still, it is a great provision and will allow them to do more for God. They contribute hugely to the church in the city and have a great heart for young people.

I came back to Matthew and Kathy’s after lunch and went for a walk. I just wanted to relax a bit and I am becoming better acquainted with Jeremiah at the moment, so walking enables me to listen to Jerry on my MP3 player. Matthew said that in the north of Queensland only “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” but the heat wasn’t all that bad. I walked along a beautiful bike path right beside the river and there was often shade from the large trees there.
This evening I had dinner with Chris Ireland who is one of the other Crosslink Pastors in town. He is a great bloke and we went down to the Strand and ate at this café built out over the water looking across to Magnetic Island. Chris has been through some really hard times of late. Family breakdown stuff filled with all the usual tragic pain that can be avoided by some simple application of Christian principles and a little bit of faith. He has three (or maybe four) kids from age twenty four down who are still impacted by what has happened. Chris is a very accomplished musician and plays guitar, banjo and steel guitar (yes, country music thrives in this part of the world). He is into some alternative forms of music and plays in a band with an aboriginal guy. His church is small and he needs to do this to put bread on the table. He lives in a little house in the mountains south of here. It is truly an idyllic spot. I stayed with him last time I was here and we walked 18 k. up into the mountains the last day I was here. I was glad to have the chance to spend time with Chris. He is such a great bloke. He is a deep thinking person and very sensitive. He has worn this break up with great sadness and pain. After the meal we walked up along the Strand to where there was a rock concert with a whole lot of bands performing. There were a few thousand kids wandering around and one of the bands included one of his sons so we saw him playing. Chris went up to the front while they were playing to say “Hi” to his son. One of the beautiful things that happened was that when the band thanked the crowd of young people for supporting them, Chis’s son yelled into the microphone, “And I want to thank my dad for showing up.” Not every rock band member would have been free enough to say something like that.