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My call from God to Christian schools (Part 3)
After leaving Benalla Christian School, I taught Yr 6 at Heathdale Christian College (Werribee). At first I received a lot of necessary support from a caring administration after being effectively sacked from the previous school, sacked (along with the other teacher) because I (with the other teacher) wouldn’t let the Benalla school parents control the classroom for their own benefits. The actions of the Benalla Christian School board destroyed their school; they should have kept on the teachers God had called to teach there, instead of getting rid of them. The then Heathdale principal was very understanding of what had happened in Benalla; this was necessary as it took much of that 1997 year to regain my composure after the battles I had faced in Benalla. Then, in the following years (1998-2000) I carried out my duties well, also running a successful orienteering program for primary school students. But after a new principal was appointed (after the previous one resigned probably due to some unstated pressures from the school), the ethos changed and the school leaned very strongly toward a more calvinistic outlook on teaching. And I strongly felt like I was stagnating, not being used properly. I had this feeling that there was more to my calling than this. Then in 2000 I felt a strong desire (a “gut-feeling” as I termed it) to go into the outback to work with aboriginal education; I had learned to pay attention to gut feelings in the past and therefore chose to follow up on this one.
I looked at remote community schools such as Warburton on the Great Central Rd in central Western Australia (WA). I obtained a WA education department remote schools application form, filled it in and sent it. I also sent a similar application for remote community schools in South Australia (SA). I never received a reply to the SA application, and was told by someone that SA had a policy of giving jobs to SA teachers ahead of any interstate ones regardless of qualifications. But I did receive from WA education a request to interview me via phone linkup for a position at Warburton, WA. However, when the interview time came, nothing happened. I was told that somehow it had been cancelled without telling me. (Politics again?)
I then saw a position advertised for principal of a Christian school in Alice Springs. I applied and was interviewed by phone linkup. It seemed that I was favoured to get the position but one question got in the way. What would I do with a problem situation? But with no detail or explanation I could only give generalities. I asked what the problem was and they said they couldn’t tell me but how would I deal with it? They ended up giving the job to a local who taught at Yirara College, a boarding school for aboriginal students from remote communities. (And after a couple of years the Christian school was trying to offload him, it seems, probably due to not being able to deal with the problem that they wouldn’t tell me about in my interview.) I applied to Yirara College in Alice Springs, and ended up taking the position that the one chosen for the Christian school had vacated. It wasn’t exactly what I had anticipated but it turned out to be excellent for our contacts with aboriginal people, some of whom we continue to have contact with today. I resigned from Heathdale College and prepared to head for Alice Springs. I arranged to hire a truck (I have a truck licence) to take our main furniture items to Alice Springs, then planning to return to then drive up to Alice with my wife. I’d tow a trailer behind my Rodeo 4WD while she drove the small VW 1978 Golf.
In January 2001 I collected the rental truck and we stacked as much as we could into it. I would take my Engel freezer with supplies in it (this was mid-January summer) and hopefully would take six days to do the round trip to Alice. The Engel ran on 12V while the truck ran a 24V system; however I had been given a 24V to 12V step-down transformer to run my Engel. The problem was that once I got going, I found the step-down unit would only deliver around 10.5V at best. The Engel wasn’t going to work, and it was too late to get something to replace the step-down unit. My freezer was filled with cold stuff that would have to be eaten quickly or else go off. I headed off in the evening and then ate most of the food the next day. It was a hot day, around 45OC and driving north into the sun was even hotter. I had rented a truck without aircon because it was cheaper to rent and used less fuel (it was 4600km return trip); I now regretted this decision! I reached Alice the next morning after driving most of the night while it was cooler. The furniture was unloaded into a storage facility and I headed south again. Around Coober Pedy I had to stop for a while with kangaroos clustered on the road so thickly that it was hard to avoid them all. Warm moonlit nights tend to bring them to the roads where grass grows on the verges but little elsewhere.
Arriving home after being on the road for only 4 days there and back, I returned the truck and loaded up the cars and my trailer. My wife had little luggage; the animals took up the back seat and their feed and water took up much of the boot. The VW had roof bars with some bits and pieces but it was only a small car and couldn’t be loaded up with much. My Rodeo and trailer carried a lot including fuel and water.
We left early morning and drove. My wife was not used to long-distance driving so we had frequent breaks, including for the needs of the cat and dog. The first day hit 48OC as we passed through Renmark on the Murray River at sunset. We stopped briefly there but had to keep moving at night while it was cooler. After a stop near Burra SA we drove on into what would be over 50OC. It was too hot to stop even in the shade, so we just kept on driving. (The VW overheated most of this day but we couldn’t stop for long so just had to put up with the damage it did to the small engine.) At Pimba Roadhouse we stopped for cold drinks and bags of ice to scatter all around the VW especially with the cat and dog. The next day was just as hot, and we were relieved when it was only 45OC when we reached Alice the 3rd morning. We never experienced such heat again even while living in Alice. It could often get into high 40s on the road south from Alice in summer, but not like the 51 or 52 we had when first driving there. When we were about halfway there my wife said we should never have come; it was too hot; but it was too late to turn back by then!
Alice Springs is a fairly green place where our rental required that we keep the lawns watered with water from deep wells just south of the town. We rented a house with an aboriginal family on one side and another 2 houses away on the other side. We were to get to know them very well, and even today we still keep in regular contact with some of them. Their children would come into our yard to play under my wife’s supervision. She would also take our neighbours shopping and to hospital emergency when required (which did happen at times), and to church on many Sundays. I was given a class at Yirara College with teenage students from remote communities around the outback. My class was the lowest level, with very few having attended school before they came into my room. Violence was a daily affair, especially among the males, and my class was probably the most violent. Some teachers called it the feral class! Many were petrol sniffers or on other substance abuse. Every term I’d start off with mostly a new group of students; most never made it past a single term. I’d have maybe 25 to start each term, but by the end of term this would halve with many running away as soon as they became bored with learning. I had a teacher-aide for the mornings but the afternoons (when they were more likely to misbehave) I had them on my own.
I had to take the class to a local dentist in my first term there. I was supposed to have an aide to assist but she wasn’t able to make it this day, so I had to watch 25 wild students on my own in the waiting room. They were impossible! The cold-water dispenser soon ran out as they emptied it onto the floor, and the receptionist was in despair while they messed around the place. I vowed never to take them to the dentist again without extra help! Many of them spoke little or even no English, and I spoke none of their languages (there were around 5 or more local languages in Alice alone). Every term I had a mostly new lot of unschooled teenagers to break in! I lasted almost three years before deciding I had to have a break from this to regain my sanity. Because I was renting a house, it was hard to take a break and keep on paying the rent. So near the end of my 3rd year I resigned and took up a position as principal at a Christian school in Moonee Ponds, Melbourne. But that’s another part of my story.
The aboriginal families we lived next to mostly came from the Warlpiri tribal people of the Tanami Desert area. We got to know them well, helping them with all sorts of things including medical needs, shopping needs, transport needs, looking after their children, assisting with legal problems (family violence, especially alcohol-fueled violence, was a way of life for many of them), helping them with the social and welfare personnel, in fact, just being alongside them when they needed help. Aboriginal people have some difficulty fitting in with our type of society and what they often need is simply someone alongside them to help them. Aboriginal society is different in some ways. They find it difficult to say no to family (where family can be any one of dozens of relations where relations are defined by their societal code, with “skin names” referring to their position in their society). So anyone who claims to be “family” can come and take what they want from another who isn’t using it at that time. If one has food in the fridge, another can come and take it as their right. The same with a car; your car is only yours if you need it now, otherwise someone else who is “family” can take it and use it. If one gets a job, and therefore gets wages, then others will come and demand it be shared with “family”. If one tries to get off the grog (alcohol), they often get hooked on grog again because “family” comes in and uses their house for drinking. It’s so hard to say no to family. If “family” drink in your house and start a fight, it’s hard to tell them to go away because they are “family”.
Because of our involvement with aboriginal people, we have been accepted into their society; we are family to some of them. Their society says there is no relationship outside kin, so we must be made kin in order to be accepted as helpers. We have been given aboriginal “skin names” to connect us to them as “family”. We have aboriginal people calling us mum and dad, and so on. We have a “daughter” in Adelaide whom we regularly help with advice on legal, dietary and financial issues. She used to be an alcoholic but is now (as far as we know) no longer addicted. She eats well, looks after herself much better than she did in Alice, and her children (who were taken off her a few times in the past due to drunken violence) have mostly returned to her. Unfortunately this still leads to conflict which we do try to sort out.
So what did we gain by going to Alice Springs? It’s a long and difficult process to help the people there but that was our ministry which we are still involved with today. It was more than just education ministry, more of a missionary ministry. What they need is not more money thrown at them, nor land nor possessions; what they need is mostly people to get alongside them to help them better understand our society. Their tribal rules might work in remote areas, but so many in urban situations need help in living away from their remote communities with such different societal roles.
We did do a lot of travelling while living in Central Australia, including down to Victoria and return four times a year. We would travel south to keep in touch with family, doing the return trip in a week, around 35-40 hours each way, travelling day and night. Watching for wildlife at night, especially kangaroos, did slow us down a bit though, and good driving lights on the car were essential.
My call from God to Christian schools (Part 2)
I wasn’t overly deterred by the negative effects of my foray into turning my teaching into a ministry at a Christian school. I admit that I’d had rosy-tinged views of how enjoyable it would be if I could actually use my teaching as a Christian ministry. (I think I had my rose-coloured glasses on at the time!) It didn’t take long to have those very positive views disappear like fog on a sunny day. By the time I’d finished my three years at Benalla Christian School, looking back, it was as if I had entered a spiritual battle-field. It was something I’d read about in various books by missionaries on overseas missions, but never expected to be hit with it in allegedly civilized Australia.
I had been well aware of spiritual warfare before I left for Benalla. In the early 90s at the rural school where I was headteacher, we had some serious demonic opposition. (And for those who claim that demonic attack is not common even for Christians, Paul wrote that it was more or less constant: “As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” (Romans 8:36) We were holding a sleep-in camp night at the school. Parents brought food supplies and some stayed to assist with the evening. After their evening meal, some older siblings who were attending went off on our church bus to the church youth group meeting, while the school children had various camp-style activities and games, including a large campfire. And then it all began, sudden sickness for some (but no symptoms for the others). Amidst ringing up some parents to come for their children, we also checked what had been eaten, but could find no food that had been eaten by the “sick” group and not by the “not sick” group. Whatever it was also affected some adults but not others. Everyone was either sick or not sick; there was no-one who was just a bit sick! It was all very mysterious indeed. To add to this, the church bus was late and we were wondering why; it had been due around the time the sickness began. (Mobile phones just weren’t around then.) The bus finally turned up maybe an hour late, with the driver saying sorry I’m late but we had to stop on our way home because three of the passengers had suddenly got sick. And at least one of them had not eaten food at, nor attended, our sleep-in evening.
It was weird just how it happened. All of the sickies got sick at the same time. One minute all were healthy; the next minute (or so it seemed) around a third suddenly were violently sick, while the rest showed no symptoms at any time. And they were all miraculously fully healthy the next morning. The meals at the sleep-in were spread out with food being eaten over a period of maybe an hour, bites in between activities. But it was the bus situation that really stood out. All three sickies had got sick at the very same time (the driver said they all started all at once). They were all away from each other, so it couldn’t have been a case of one sickie setting off the others. The driver was visibly shaken by the ordeal. The food at the sleep-in was not responsible for at least one of those on the bus. So, all we could come up with is that it was case of spiritual warfare. This was just one example of some of the weird things that occurred, events that I can only attribute to spiritual warfare. So when I settled in Benalla, I should not have been surprised when spiritual warfare hit hard right from the beginning.
Soon after we arrived in Benalla, and had finally bought an old house that had a sloping floor and old facilities (the recent floods had made housing scarce and what was available was costly), a group moved into the rental property next door. From then on, every Saturday night (for much of the night), plus many other times, very loud rock music disturbed my sleep. I’d wake up most Sunday mornings exhausted from lack of sleep, only to have the Ford dealer behind us pressure-cleaning cars from around 6am for a few hours. I don’t know exactly who our neighbours were, but it was clear that they had an agenda. They played their noise near a window facing us, mostly left open even on colder nights, and the stereo had a goat’s head glued to the plastic cover on it. Witchcraft was rampant in Benalla with at least three significant witch covens operating: the Benalla East coven; the Gaskin St coven, and the Benalla hospital area coven (sometimes referred to as the Calder St coven, where Calder St was the extension of our street. We suspected our neighbours belonged to the Calder St or hospital coven (the hospital was not far south of us).
I couldn’t stop the noise even with ear plugs because the sound could be felt more than heard. And every Saturday from late evening until at least 4am the house literally shook with the blast. On Saturday nights a group of them (maybe a dozen or more, noting that quite a few cars would park out front) would gather for the noise. They’d arrive around 10 or 11pm and the “party” would begin. And the noise ramped up to unbelievable levels! It got to the stage where I was seriously considering moving back home to the farm, with no job and no income, but at least I could have some peace and quiet. One night maybe around August 1994 I’d had enough. I prayed (in my thoughts, not aloud – I wouldn’t have heard myself much anyway!) for an answer. Or else I was out of there as soon as I could pack up.
I prayed for three things: for their party to break up, for them all to clear off from there, and for their music machine to blow up. What happened next sounds unbelievable but it really happened. Immediately they all started shouting at each other (I could hear bits of this above the “noise”). Then they ran and got into cars and drove off, so quickly in fact that as one car pulled away I heard one of them shouting, “Hey, wait for me!” But the noise machine kept on thumping its noise at me. I thought Well, 2 out of 3 isn’t too bad. Then, after maybe 15-30 minutes (I wasn’t counting time that much), the noise abruptly stopped (around midnight). At first I thought that maybe someone had turned it off because their “party” was over, while hoping that it had actually blown up! For the first time in months this Saturday night was quiet. In the morning I told my wife what I had prayed for and what had happened. She was sceptical; maybe it was just a coincidence. Most likely the noise machine had been turned off after their party ended early. But the peaceful evenings went on; even the following Saturday evening was peaceful! However, when she saw that noise machine being delivered to the house by the local electrics store repair van (after 10 days), she decided that what I had said was probably true.
It was clear now that the next-door disruptions were a matter of spiritual warfare, and that these Saturday night meetings were the local coven gathering for mayhem on the Christians in town. From that night on, while the noise machine continued to hammer us on Saturday nights, it was no longer threatening to make me leave Benalla. And then, one day, those neighbours just weren’t there anymore.
The local Baptist church used to hold open air street meetings in the Gaskin St area in East Benalla. And their local coven (the Gaskin St coven) used to attend, not to get saved, but to be as disruptive as they could. The Baptist pastor told me of one meeting they held on a nice sunny Sunday morning in the Gaskin St area. The coven turned up in force. As soon as the church meeting began, the rain poured down, and as soon as the church finished up and packed things away, the rain stopped and it became a nice sunny day again. Things like that used to happen in Benalla!
We were told at the school that the local covens prayed against local Christian ministries on a roster basis; and we used to cop it every 5 or 6 weeks. I remember being at the school one morning and feeling like I was trying to walk through deep water or even quicksand. Moving was a struggle, and thinking was difficult. I was to find out that it was our turn on the coven roster. Benalla seemed such a nice place but underneath it all there was a lot of evil running deep.
However, it wasn’t just the local covens that hit out at the two teachers at the Christian school. In my first two years there the school board chairpersons were reasonable, but in my third year the woman who took over seemed intent on destroying the Christianity of our school. She seemed to take delight in using the school board to create difficulties for the teachers, and was most likely the one who pushed for the staff hours (and wages) to be reduced and to have them both dismissed at the end of the year. It appeared to be a power game with control being her issue here. She had a full-time job in Benalla, but after interfering with our careers, I was informed that she lost her full-time job in Benalla and ended up with a part-time job in Wangaratta which meant less income and greater distances to cover to get to work. She made no effort to assist the teachers in their difficult task and seemed to want to punish the teachers who had given up much to teach at the Christian school.
I used to mostly attend the church she attended but in my third year, after she took over the school board chair, I had to go to the pastor and tell him that I had difficulty in attending with someone who seemed intent upon destroying me. He acknowledged that she was difficult but didn’t accept that she was deliberately opposing me. After that, when I attended other churches in Benalla, a rumour went around that I was no longer attending church; I was even questioned about this by people at the school. (I suspect the rumour may have begun with this woman, too.) Many years later, when talking to her pastor, he told me that she had left because of certain difficulties (unstated). In a way I think it could have been an admission that she might have been a problem when I was at Benalla. I certainly do not believe she was Christian in the way she treated the teaching staff while I was there.
There were many other issues that I would have to describe as spiritual warfare during my three years there. I found it hard to believe that there could be such anti-Christian attitudes in what seemed to be a civilised place like Benalla. By the time I left Benalla, though, I had learned a lot about spiritual warfare, an understanding that has been very useful since then in the discernment of spiritual opposition. I believe that once I decided to move into full-time ministry in schools, satan moved to try to dissuade me from succeeding. I think he would have preferred that I be convinced to move back to the farm, something that I almost ended up doing because of the pressure applied in Benalla. For those considering greater service for God, keep in mind that satan will do his best to oppose you. Christian school ministry was not easier in any way, nor comfortable at all.
I am glad that I made the move into ministry work, but at the time it was not easy to see where I was going with it. But over the years God has led me into different ministry areas. When I first decided in 1993 that I might resign and go into ministry in Christian schooling, I left it up to God to lead. Soon after I had decided to go ahead if something turned up, a call came from a long-time acquaintance (whom I hadn’t heard from for many years). He asked if I would be interested in teaching at the Benalla Christian School; and he had known nothing of my thoughts of resigning! Things like that do not just happen all too often, so I made the assumption that this was a call from God. And while it felt like hell had been set loose on me in Benalla, the enemy trying to oppose me also had to be a spiritual warfare response to what I saw as a calling. I have learned now that any calling from God will attract opposition from satan and his demons. And I have learned somewhat how it works now and that such opposition cannot succeed against any calling from God if God is trusted to be in charge and in control at all times.