24 1967 – 1971: New Forest Congregational Church.

24 <> 1967 – 1971: New Forest Congregational Church.

We arrived at New Forest a week before our furniture did, so we had to camp out in the house. I can’t remember how we managed sleeping on the floor but we did get through it. Andrew and Jenny probably coped all right because they were older, but we must have had something special for Suzanne to sleep on/in. The house was newly built and still undergoing snag-fixing but all amenities were working. What would normally have been the double garage at the end of the house had been fitted with doors and windows and furnished to serve as ‘meeting house’, or chapel. The garage was under the house at the ‘chapel’ end and was to serve as my study and as a Sunday School classroom so the car ended up being parked beside the wall of the garage. The house was to be an immediate problem for us because it was bigger than the average house in Woodlands where the majority of the congregation lived, which meant it was a constant source of envy on the part of some members, and an embarrassment for  DorothyAnne. From early on in our stay there  DorothyAnne and I tried hard to think up some way of getting ourselves accommodated in a small Woodlands house and leave the church’s building to be used entirely for church services, meetings and Sunday School purposes, but there was no way in which we could afford that.

Before we had even settled into the house, Sunday was upon us and I was to be inducted at the morning service by Frank Green together with John de Gruchy who was Minister of both the Sea View Church and the New Forest Church and under whom I was to serve as Student Pastor. I have no memory of how the ceremony went or what I or anyone else said, but it was done and I was then Student Pastor in charge of the New Forest Congregational Church. The testing times were about to begin.

Peter and Barbara Anderson were ministering at the nearby Bellair and Malvern Congregational Churches, and Nobby and Christine Noble were at the Umbilo Church. We became friends. I soon learnt that Nobby had experienced the baptism with the Holy Spirit that I had been reading about in the book “They Speak With Other Tongues”. That spurred me on to know more so I read widely on the subject and pursued it through the pages of the Bible and found surprisingly much about it both in the Old Testament and in the New. It was incomprehensible to me that the churches generally had so little to say on the subject even though the Holy Spirit is invoked at every service in all churches, and the name is used in many blessings and formularies. What was missing was the real impact of the Holy Spirit in the way the disciples experienced it on the day of Pentecost as reported in the New Testament. I wanted that and could settle for nothing less. I knew that the baptism was associated with prayer and the laying on of hands by Spirit-filled persons so I let Nobby and Christine pray for me on one occasion and another but nothing happened. I didn’t know, but I had some lessons to learn about faith in God.

I will telescope four years’ of interaction with the New Forest community into a few brief paragraphs revealing only those aspects that changed me personally (life is always a growth experience) and saying little about the people of the church. I was raw and inexperienced in the ways of a traditional Congregationalist Church member like those who had ‘grown up’ in the Church (although most of them there were formerly Presbyterian, not Congregationalist; the congregation started off as a branch of the central Presbyterian Church in Durban). I was (and still am) evangelical because of my own dramatic encounter with God. Then In October 1968, Peter, Nobby and I went together to the Annual General Meeting of the United Congregational Church Of South Africa (UCCSA), held that year in Port Elizabeth. There was, at the same time, in Port Elizabeth a special mission on at a local Full Gospel Church to which the three of us went one evening. The speaker preached on Christ the Saviour, Healer, Deliverer and Baptiser with the Holy Spirit. From that meeting I learnt the real meaning of ‘praying believing’ when I was freed from the habit of smoking which had been with me most of my life. That lesson in faith opened up the way for me to receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit, which took place two weeks later at a meeting of The Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International at the house of a businessman on the Bluff in Durban. That experience completely changed the ministry for me, making the presentation of the Gospel message much more effective — and creating more tension between me and the Deacons and some of the old-timers in the church.

The final straw was added to the camel’s back when in December 1970  DorothyAnne and I were baptised in water at the local Full Gospel Church. These things were simply not part of their culture at the New Forest Congregational Church, and the Charismatic Renewal was still at an early stage – it was about to cause a stir in many branches of the Greater Church but mainly in the Catholic and Anglican denominations. So it was all new to the older members. What seemed strange to us at the time was that the part that upset them most was the baptism in water, not the charismatic experience of the baptism with the Holy Spirit. I say it was strange because the UCCSA had only recently brought into union with them the South African Association of the American Disciples of Christ, a denomination that practised adult, or believer’s, baptism. That merger made baptism of believers by full immersion fully valid in the UCCSA. Our local congregation found it hard to accept and I was perhaps too forthright in my desire to get them all into a living and confident relationship with God. That worked well with some who readily accepted the message, but with most of the original members, and especially with the Deacons, it didn’t go down well at all.

Towards the end of four years, the situation had reached a point where several of the Deacons were wanting to leave en bloc. At the final decisive meeting with the Deacons, I said “No. I’ll go. You stay; this is your church and you have nowhere else to go. I’ll fit in somewhere else.” DorothyAnne and I had been introduced to that Assembly Of God church that was near the flat in Moore Road where we had previously lived in Durban: the church with the sign “Assembly of God” and, beneath it, “Owner builder”. What we saw there was much more in line with New Testament practice and we did have the fleeting thought of joining them there in Durban.

My involvement with the Church (by that I mean the total Church, not just any particular denomination) starting with New Forest, was hard on  DorothyAnne: I was doing what I wanted to do but for  DorothyAnne it was a different life than what she had set out for when she married me. That truth sank in deep one day many years later when she said to me: “You know, I didn’t marry a minister!” Indeed she hadn’t. Our situation was quite unlike when a person marries a spouse who is already a minister or missionary, or when a couple enters into Christian service with one accord. That was not the case with us.  DorothyAnne would have been happy to continue as the Anglican she had been before I came into her life, but she loves me and has stuck with me through what have been for her very difficult times — not only during the time at New Forest, but through many years when my time was totally absorbed in two fields — that in part-time Christian ministry and in a full-time career with Woolworths. In respect of the Church, I was doing what is known as a ‘tent-making ministry’ in which one works in a secular job to support self and family financially and provides service in the Gospel free of charge. So, at New Forest it was easier for me than for  DorothyAnne who, apart from being the minister’s ‘unpaid assistant’ (the lot of any minister’s wife!), had the daily battle of making our small income stretch to keep us all fed and clothed.

While at New Forest we had four years of living and developing as a family in a completely new environment. Andrew started school at the beginning of 1968 at Woodlands Infants’ School, and Jenny started in 1969. Then our family grew by one: Timothy was born in April 1969 when Suzanne was two-and-a-half. Andrew joined the Cubs (Boy Scouts) in a group run by Donald and Lily Henderson who were members of our church. Jenny became a Brownie not long after. They seemed to enjoy that experience but there was sadness in the camp when Beryl, Andrew’s Akela in the pack, died in September 1970. She and her husband Jim were members in our church. She was cremated and her ashes scattered in a Garden of Remembrance we created in the grounds of the church.

John de Gruchy booked me to go for a week at a Group Dynamics course. There it was that I experienced a never-to-be-forgotten T-Group session which gave me a new perspective on relationships and leadership attributes which did help me quite a lot in later life. The experience itself is like a baptism, something which happens only once never to be repeated, and never to be forgotten.

We had our little family adventures, like this one with Andrew and Jenny: One day Jenny came running down from the street to the house saying in a scared voice, “Daddy, the man wants to talk to you!” This was before the days when we thought every man might be a pedophile after our children. I went with her to the road where I was confronted by an irate man who had got out of his car and was standing on the sidewalk. “These two threw stones at my car!” he shouted at me. “They need a good hiding!” I apologized profoundly and he drove off. The sidewalk was dressed in pebbles of crushed blue-stone and the two of them had been throwing handfulls at passing cars. In case the two of them have forgotten, I gave them a talking to but not a hiding. After that the grounds were fenced and they were forbidden to play near the street.

One adventure none of us will forget was when we nearly got stuck on a country road in the middle of nowhere on a stormy night. I used to take Mondays off to get over the stresses of the Sunday services (one Deacon accused me of being a ‘six-day Minister’!). On one Monday when Andrew and Jenny came home from school, I decided that it would be nice to take a long drive in the country. The route I chose was down the South Coast main road, then inland across to Richmond on a dirt road and then back to Durban along the main Pietermaritzburg-Durban road. It had been raining all day and the road was wet, muddy and slippery. At one point the road became even worse as it sloped from the one side down to the the other and into a gully. I couldn’t turn back at that point because the road wasn’t wide enough to reverse and make the turn. There was no alternative but to keep on going, which I did with the steering wheel turned to the right away from the gully and steady pressure on the accelerator to avoid any sudden spins that would send us into the ditch. It was raining and night was coming on. If we landed in the ditch there was no way we could be rescued until morning. Suzanne was very young and Timothy was just a baby. It was a desperate situation. I said to  DorothyAnne and the children “Just pray!” And we all prayed until we eventually got past the very bad stretch when we could relax. But we still had a long way home with rain falling and night coming on fast. We got to Richmond with our petrol tank perilously near empty. We filled up and pushed on homeward greatly slowed down by the heavy mist that occurs in that region. The lights from the six-volt battery of the Beetle were not very bright but fortunately there were the cats’ eyes down the centre of the main road to guide us. I don’t know what the time was when we arrived safely back home.

While we were in Cape Town, my mother had left the Nest Hotel in the Drakensberg and was employed as Housekeeper at a residential hotel in Durban at the bottom of Smith Street near South Beach so we were able to see her, which we did regularly, either at the hotel or we would fetch her to spend time with us at the church/house. It was nice being reconciled to her after so many years. She had aged a lot and suffered greatly from varicose ulcers but, with no real prospects of ever retiring, she just had to keep on working. Fortunately she had an understanding employer in the owner of the hotel which made the job easier for her.

In another encounter with someone from the past, Mrs. Sander, the mother of my friend Errol from the Seven Oaks days, had landed up in hospital in Durban and I was able to visit her there. She had a terminal illness and died soon afterward, from lung cancer, if I remember correctly — she had been a heavy smoker.

Talking of which, I had the unfortunate task of ministering at the funerals of several people who died of lung cancer. Smoking is definitely not something to indulge oneself in.

In the final year of my studies for the ministry — 1969 — the denomination wanted me to spend ‘six weeks of concentrated study’ at Adams United College at Alice in the Eastern Cape. Adams College was the joint seminary of the Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches. It was far from convenient for us all to go as a family: Timothy was just a baby at the time, and it would have meant taking Andrew out of school for the period. It was equally undesirable for me to leave  DorothyAnne and the children alone in Durban. The whole exercise seemed completely unnecessary.  DorothyAnne and I realised that the intention was to ‘change my theology’, something which was confirmed later in those very words by Arthur Stops when he was on a visit to Durban. I had a long exchange of letters with the Secretary of the UCCSA who took my objections back to the relevant Ministerial Committee but they were adamant — virtually “I must go or else , , , , ,”. I had to give in and we compromised on one month at the college instead of six weeks, and I would go on my own. I went amidst much unhappiness about  DorothyAnne and the children being left alone for so long. My theology, such as it was, did not change.

I wrote the final exam, and failed by one percentage point in one subject, then I was allowed to write the subject again in January 1970 and I passed by one percentage point! With reluctance, I think, the powers in the denomination authorised my ordination to the Ministry of The United Congregational Church Of South Africa. I was ordained on 17th June, 1970, without the blessing of the moderator of the Natal region who had distanced himself from me altogether.

I had informed the church at the time I ‘accepted the call’ to be their minister — something that was necessary before being ordained and installed there — that having been ordained I would be open to a call from any other congregation. Such an approach did come from the North End church in Port Elizabeth, so  DorothyAnne and I went there one weekend to meet them to see if we would want to go there, and for them to see if they wanted us. But it didn’t work out — it was just a very awkward weekend. We had left Andrew, Jenny and Suzanne with our friends Gwen and Brian. We took Timothy with us because he was just a baby still. We stayed with a family of the church, something which was very difficult for us — we are never comfortable staying in anyone’s home. It was raining all the time we were there and we had to visit different members of the congregation, carting Timothy around through the wet weather, and then I had to preach on the Sunday morning. It was possibly the worst weekend we have ever spent anywhere. Nothing came of it. I was totally incompatible with the congregation — the situation was just like at the New Forest church.

Soon after my ordination, John left the Sea View church to pursue his Christian career with a position in the South African Council Of Churches. I then assumed temporary responsibility for the Sea View congregation in addition to New Forest pending their call of a new minister. Needless to say, the relationship with them as a church was no different than the situation at New Forest — complete acceptance by individuals, but nervousness on the part of the corporate-whole in the face of my evangelistic and charismatic stance.

The once-a-month Church business meetings were stressful for both  DorothyAnne and me, but for me the Deacons meetings were particularly so. It was in an evening before a Deacon’s meeting that I had what some would call a ‘light-bulb moment’. I went out into the grounds to think and pray before the meeting. It was a clear night and the stars were bright. I have always loved the stars. When I was still very young, I would stand outside with Dad on a starry night and he would point out some of the constellations while I gazed in wonder. On this night I was affected in a new way. How vast the whole system was! How small I was! Peace settled in my heart as the truth sank in — How big is God compared to our individual problems down here on earth. I could surely entrust all to Him, whatever the outcome may be. That really was the final truth I needed to absorb in order to complete my relationship with the God of the Universe. My confidence now lay in the assurance of His perfect understanding of who and what we are. In other words, I learnt finally to entrust all I was, all I am and all I ever will be into His care. I went to the meeting with a new confidence that I could handle anything that came.

As the fourth year of our tenure there progressed, we could see that it was going to be very difficult to spend much more time at the New Forest church, especially when we heard via the grapevine that the most influential Deacon had been to Cape Town on business and while there had asked Arthur Stops what could be done to terminate our ministry in New Forest! We would have to move on. At about that time, a Minister from the American Disciples of Christ asked me if I would consider going to one of their churches in Johannesburg, which could have been all right, because they believed in adult believer’s baptism in water, but I don’t know that they would have accepted any teaching on the charismatic experience — and I would not be able to keep silent about it because it is just so much a part of the whole Christian gospel.

By that time  DorothyAnne and I had decided to call it quits and move on. I handed in my formal notice to the Church Secretary and they ‘accepted with regret’ (some of the people, including the Secretary at that time, genuinely liked us and they didn’t want us to leave). We were scheduled to finish up on 31st October 1971.

It had happened not long before those final weeks that Gert Fitchet, who had been the manager of the Durban store when I first joined Woolworths, and had become Personnel Manger at Head Office in the time since I left to go into the ministry, was in Durban on a branch visit. I called in to say hello to him at the store. In the conversation, we talked about being a Christian and then he said to me out of the blue, “If ever you want to come back to Woolworths there will be a job for you”. I said “Thank you, Gert, but I don’t see the likelihood of that happening”, and we left it at that. It was not many weeks after that that I wrote to him asking if I could come back! He replied immediately to tell me that they wanted me back in the buying office. I would have to first spend a month in the Durban store to get familiar with the business again because things would have changed a bit in the four years I had been away. But that arrangement would have meant finding somewhere to live in Durban for that month because the Deacons wouldn’t allow us to continue in the church house once our month’s notice had been served, even if we paid them rent. We thought of all sorts of ways to spend that month in Durban but couldn’t come up with anything, so the Company agreed that we would move straight down to Cape Town and I would spend the month in a store there. In the initial arrangement with the Company, I would have been in their employ in Durban and they would then have paid for our ‘transfer’ to Cape Town but we now had to do the move at our own expense. We borrowed the money against an Endowment Policy we had with Colonial Mutual.

As the day approached for the move,  DorothyAnne landed up in bed with pneumonia! Fortunately for us, my mother was able, with the permission of her boss, to put her up for the day and night on the balcony of her room at the hotel while I packed up at the house with the children. The next morning, I saw the furniture loaded into the removal van and when it pulled away I loaded the suitcases containg our personal luggage onto the roof-rack of the Beetle, then we picked  DorothyAnne up at the hotel, said good-bye to Mum and set off on the long journey to Cape Town with  DorothyAnne still far from well. In the meantime, a friend in Cape Town had found us a flat in Harfield Village ready for when we arrived, but we would be there a couple of days before the furniture.

Let me say that the experience at New Forest wasn’t all bad. In fact, there were quite a few fruits for our labours there, with many new converts coming into the church by the time we left. This warranted a brief entry in ‘THE HARVEST AND THE HOPE’, the story of Congregationalism in South Africa’, which says ‘New Forest, . . . . under the dynamic leadership of a student pastor, H.J Sutton, has developed rapidly since 1967′. I like to think that wasn’t mere magnanimity! Do I resent the experience there, or hold any sort of grudge against the members of the New Forest Church? No, not at all. It was a valuable learning curve for me in the ministry, and provided a new and better experience of Christ for the many people who accepted the message. The explanation of the actual ways of the Church in New Testament times — even to persons who are already members of churches — is never without controversy anywhere at any time. That is one of the ‘risks’ of the ministry: people don’t like their ingrained belief-systems being challenged, particularly if the challenge involves a greater commitment to a greater truth.

There is one more event that had a significant bearing on my future in the ministry. I joined with the local Youth For Christ leadership in a committee formed to run an evangelistic campaign in Durban. A series of Gospel meetings was held nightly for a week in a tent erected in the grounds of our church. Other meetings were staged in venues elsewhere in Durban. Professor Louw Alberts was the main speaker at the larger venues, Cliff Richard came out from England to sing and tell of his faith in Christ, and Brian and Sandra O’donnell, billed as converted Hippies from Cape Town, would be there to tell about how their lives had changed after believing in Christ. Brian was to play a big part in my life in Cape Town not too long after that campaign.

This book is the story of my life, not of my faith, so I have written only of those events and episodes relevant to my history and my ‘formation’ as a person. The full story of my personal pilgrimage starting from the conversion experience that day after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, continuing to the charismatic experience of the baptism with the Holy Spirit, then baptism in water, and onward to the present day is material for another book which I hope to write one day.