nothing is written

This Cassette in My Hands

Outside the rain comes down like iron bars. Inside I wait, sweating gently as only an Englishman can, trying not to move and wondering whether the trail I’ve been following for the last few weeks really has led me to the front steps of something as remarkable and as unusual as everyone says it is. Perhaps it’s just led me here, to the cheapest hotel I’ve ever stayed in, to a room that smells the way I imagine that new prison cells smell when old inmates move out. Perhaps I never should have come at all.

It’s not hard to work out why I’m thinking about prison cells. This bleached-white room with its six beds wedged in bears more than a passing resemblance to the kind of place you’d be held in against your will. Not that’s it’s got a maximum security feel to it, more like an open jail, the sort where kindly old men whose misdemeanours have long since been forgotten serve out their remaining years.

I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t do this. I knew that this trip was going to be a challenge, and so I told myself repeatedly not to get all funny about the beds. But I’ve done it. I’ve let myself imagine what the room was like six hours ago, how strong were the odours and how personal was the dirt before the cleaners came in and nuked all evidence of life with their industrial strength fluids and sprays. It’s self-defeating, I know, but I can’t seem to help myself getting all obsessive about cleanliness whenever I’m in a hotel. Must have been the trauma of the live cockroaches and stained sheets back in Louisiana.

But this trip is different. This is not about site seeing or relaxing or leaving for home slightly more entertained or more effectively distracted. This is about something bigger, something better, something stronger and far harder to capture on film. I’m here because I’ve heard that there’s a place not far away that has been the backdrop to some truly remarkable things. There’s a church that has grown over the years beyond what’s normally considered possible. Listen carefully enough and you can hear the whisper: these are the front steps of a genuine God-soaked, Holy Spirit empowered, life-changing revival.

That’s why I’m here.

An hour ago I arrived at Cairns airport and waited in the drop-off zone for my lift and host. I’d been to the northern tip of Australia a couple of months before, so the humidity didn’t phase me as much this time as it did the last. But I still felt awkward and uncomfortable. Why was I here? Was it to pick off the best cuts of meat, process them into a book and make my way to the nearest sunset? And what if all this was a rabbit hole anyway? What if the rumours I’d heard about all this revival stuff were little more than well-intentioned over-exaggeration? What if this was a pointless exercise?
I’m not sure that the car journey helped. My first meeting with Mick – the brother of the vicar of St Alban church, Yarrabah – was a business-like affair.

The briefest of greetings and then, straight into it:

“So you want to write a book about us?”

I mumbled something about wanting to spend some time with them and see what came of it all. Keep it vague, I told myself, that way nobody gets too hung up on the details. Still, Mick’s next line of questioning led me to reconsider my tactics:

“Are you a Christian? I don’t think we could work with someone who wanted to make this story into something that it isn’t.”

I’d thought that I’d done a pretty good job over the handful of phone calls that had gone into setting this little trip up. Seems like I was wrong.

But Mick has a point. Am I trying to make this into something it isn’t? I’ve come because of the hunch I have that this is where God has been at work, but is my intuition correct? And even if all this is genuine and worth all the travel and the time, even if there is a story here, does it necessarily follow that it is one that has to be told?

This all started ten weeks ago. I was having a drink with a new-found friend, telling him about past experiences and forthcoming plans. I explained how in a couple of days my family and I were due off up the coast, leaving our temporary Sydney base and heading for the tropical intrigue of the Great Barrier Reef as seen from northern Queensland. I told him about all the things we were looking forward to doing, how so many friends had been there and come back with an extensive list of recommendations.

It seems that I’d missed something out. According to my friend the real must-see around Cairns was not the reef or the rainforest or any of the many restaurants where President Clinton ate on a recent trip. Although, I have to admit that I was pretty keen to follow in the big man’s footsteps, to see the world through his eyes and figure out what those who had met him thought of Clinton. But what was really worth the effort, said my friend, was a little church at the heart of an Aboriginal community. They had a history that my friend was not too sure about, but he knew enough to get my attention. It was only a handful of headlines, but he hooked me in from the moment the breath left his lips in that half-decipherable flow…

“…there’s this WHITE CROSS in the middle of the lawn outside the church that got planted way back when this old white guy saved a whole bunch of Aboriginals from being shot or hunted or taken off and placed somewhere they could be conveniently forgotten about and since then the whole place has had something special about it and it’s because of this: they understand fire, they know the Holy Spirit…”

It was that last line that kidnapped my imagination. I didn’t know what it meant to ‘understand fire’, but the idea of it was intriguing. I still don’t feel like I’m any closer to a definition, but as I waved goodbye to my friend I knew I’d just had a creative seed planted within me. I needed time to fertilize the idea, so put on my running shoes and headed off round the streets and parks of Sydney’s inner west suburbs.

I saw a whole story develop. The narrator, out of time, observes the action on the beach that one day becomes Yarrabah Aboriginal Community. He sees the dreamtime – the birth of life as told by Australia’s indigenous people – watches the Aboriginal tribes come and go for thousands of years until their equilibrium is destroyed by the arrival of colonists from Europe. He sees the bloodshed and genocide, knows the cries of the victims for he has seen their beginnings and their endings for generations. But what intrigues him is the arrival of the white clergyman. Controversial – a bad man according to some – yet with a clear agenda to protect the innocents being displaced and slaughtered without so much as a hint of guilt.

Of course, it’s a terrible way to tell the story. So I shelved that particular treatment of the tale along with all the other half-baked ideas I’ve had over the years, yet the essence of the thing remained: here was a group of people, who, by all accounts, were at the wrong end of almost any spectrum you care to use – education, social standing, religious heritage, race, wealth, even geography – but something remarkable was happening to and around them. God, so it seemed, had chosen to make himself known to them. It might just have been a fraction of all the supernatural power at His disposal, but whatever it was, I was intrigued.

So, a few days later, having tracked the vicar down, we arrived. We were made up of myself, my wife, two kids and two parents-in-law. We had a couple of hours to pass before we needed to be back at the airport, and we agreed that this little detour was one worth making. What were six or seven miles by boat across the bay turned out to be forty or fifty by road in an enormous loop. Driving through roads that dissected fields of head-high crops gave the journey a slightly timeless quality, as did the lack of advertising billboards. Where Cairns was littered with the things, the road to Yarrabah bore no signs of the drive to sell, sell, sell. Maybe there was no enough money to do enough buying round here. Maybe they were immune to their fake promises of success and satisfaction.

Either way, the drive in got even more interesting when we passed an elaborate road sign detailing the laws regarding alcohol in the settlement. Drinking in public was banned and bringing big quantities of the stuff in was similarly out of order. Opinion in the car was divided: was this a sign of the authorities and leaders getting hold of an infamous problem for Australia’s Aboriginals or was it more accurately an indication of quite how bad things had got? Were we about to enter a model of triumph over adversity or another example of government spin whitewashing the truth?

I suppose we were nervous. My wife, kids and I had been in Australia for nearly three months and this was to be the first time in an Aboriginal community. For the six of us in the car this was the final leg in a five-day tourist trip. We’d agreed to keep the cameras in our bags for this visit, but the feelings remained: we were here to press our noses to the window for an hour, to feel what we could of the poverty and sniff the work of God and then fly home.

None of my preconceptions were right about Yarrabah. It was poor, but not the slum I had wondered about a couple of nights previously. It was larger than I’d guessed, but with a parochial, village-like feel to it that was undeniable. The inevitable hunt to find our host was everything it should have been: a respectful greeting of random people outside the community store, an enquiry as to where we could find Father Wayne, and a detailed response that gave us the precise nature of his movements over the previous 24 hours.

We met and talked. He showed us the outside of the church and told us why there was an abandoned WWII frigate banked a few meters out in front of the beach. He told us about the poverty and the pain of seeing a generation of young people get drawn to drink and drugs in Cairns. Moths to a naked light bulb. They never stood a chance.

It was when we went in the church that it hit us. The heat was predictable, but the atmosphere was not. It could have been any small village’s Anglican church: the green and white embroidered cloth on the altar, the hymn books and bibles stuffed into the backs of the simple pews, the notice boards at the back crammed with rotas and stories and lists of who to contact, when and why. While all this was predictably normal, the walls told a different story. They narrated the life of Christ and the key points of the Bible through an Aboriginal lens. It was all dots and bold lines, earthy tones and muted colours, body art for a divine king. It was clear that there was something unusual about their expression, but it was more than the fact that these were images that reversed the Aryan Jesus stereotype. The difference was this: it was all real. Just listening to the vicar was enough to prove it:

Father Wayne told us about the pain of seeing lives destroyed by poverty. He told us about his family being torn apart – literally – as his father and uncle were forcibly removed from their family home, their mother’s arms prized away from their child-sized frames. He told us how these two boys came to Yarrabah where the church had so much to answer for – both good and bad. He told us about the fact that it was only ten years ago, just ten years that the Australian government revoked the ruling of terra nulla, officially ending the lie that had preached that Australia’s Aboriginals had no claim to the land, that the first white settlers found a blank earth, an unclaimed and unused expanse of land. He told us about the Stolen Generation, about the importance of an official apology to the thousands whose lives had been controlled by the state. He told us about drugs and alcohol abuse, about his own past with all its demons and pain. And he told us about the ways in which God had been at the heart of the action here in Yarrabah. He told us about miracles and full churches and lives transformed and hard work.

We prayed together in the doorway on our way out. My father in law choked on the emotion of the moment. I’d never seen him close to tears before, but he was caught up in it all: the injustice, the grace, the pain and the forgiveness. It had taken just five minutes, but the brief sketch of suffering that was threaded through the generations as well as the hope for the future was enough. More than enough. The story had me hooked.
That was when I decided that I needed to write this book.

Six weeks later and I’m here, in this bleached-out room waiting to spend a couple of days finding out as much as I can about the story. Who are these Aboriginal Christians? How do I tell their story right? I could flowchart the facts for you, compress the history into an easily digested essay and hope that you filled in the blanks for yourself, but that wouldn’t be good enough. They deserve better than that, better than being treated as some kind of curious specimen to be preserved and observed.

In my hands is a cassette. I’ve not been given one of these for years, but it came with the room and a clunky old tape player. Mick pointed it out when he showed me in, nodding to it.

“It’s Wayne’s story,” he explained. “He recorded it for you when he knew he couldn’t be here.”

I’m nervous about playing the tape. What if it’s no good? What if the condensed highlights can’t even keep me interested for two sides of thirty minutes each? What if the story runs out before the end of the first half?
But I have to listen to it. And I have to tell you what happens. I’m already wandering off into this story and there’s no going back. It might be shorter than I hoped, but I’m going to tell it the way it happens. I’m going to tell it as I see it, as it happens to me. That’s the best I can do.

Why is this book even necessary? I’ve been wondering about it, asking myself if it’s just another way of prolonging some superior holiday memories; whether it’s just a bit of therapy for a frustrated church goer. It could be both of those things, and, knowing me, it probably is. But there’s something else, a nagging whisper that can only be heard if I’m very, very still and very, very quiet. Only if I stop can I hear it.

It tells me that a book like this needs to be written. It tells me that a book like this needs to be read. It tells me that… and then it’s gone. The whisper turns to smoke and the smoke turns to air and I never get to note down what the third thing about it all. I’m left with the twin look at the single idea that it’s needed, that it’s necessary, that somehow, in some way, there’s a purpose to these words that goes beyond spiritual voyeurism and low-grade eternally minded entertainment.

I don’t really know when I became a Christian. I always knew God was real, always went to church, always knew that in my village there were some truly remarkable people who God was using. And then I left. I turned my back on it all, fingers, arms and much of the rest of my torso burned. I’d got faith all wrong, wired it up entirely incorrectly only to find that, inevitably, the whole thing exploded right in my very hands.

That was in 1989. The year the Berlin wall came down. The year the unknown rebel faced down the tanks in Tiananmen Square. The year the Exxon Valdez opened up and the World Wide Web blinked into life. And where was I while so much change was taking place? Staring at my hands wondering what on earth had happened to my faith.

The point of this rabbit trail is simple. For a little less than two decades I worked under the assumption that Christianity was a matter of making things work for me. I saw faith as a pretty comprehensive insurance policy, the sort that would never let me down. That is to say, that I believed it right up until the point when my faith did what it was always going to do and let me down.
We have a talent for selfishness. We have a gift for greed and a well-trained tendency to make the story of faith – a story so vast and timeless and supernatural – about something as narrowly focussed and small-scale as the shape of our own wants and desires. We’re not alone and this is not some quirky twenty-first century thing. We’ve been at it for centuries, millennia even, as the writers of the oldest scriptures pointed out. Look at the tower of Babel, the moral decay before the flood, the dreams form a boy in a brightly coloured coat… the list goes on, with each entry getting drawn together by a common theme: the way in which we make ourselves the main attraction and everything else the supporting cast.

In Australia I saw something different. There among the ‘wrong’ people, the ones at the glamourless end of the social spectrum, I saw something remarkable. Here was a theology that was unlike mine, a way of being that challenged so much of what had become ingrained within me. They serve others, care little for status and are on the receiving end of God’s Spirit, even though they’ve not attempted to bring in the TV cameras and the networkers. There’s no attempt to roll out the Yarrabah Model, no six-week discipleship plan or range of inspirational merchandise. There are just a handful of people getting on with the business of being Christians, nothing more, nothing less.
And that’s why I need to write this book. I like to think that I got over myself many years ago, that I stopped acting as if God were my own genie in a bottle when I returned to church after my 24 months of rebellion at the end of my teenage years. But the truth is less black and white. I still struggle. I still stumble. I still need to be reconfigured and rewired so that I get it into my head who I’m here for. I need to get over my cynicism about revival and overcome my aversion to people whose theology differs from mine. I need to leave behind the desire to be remarkable and walk on into a future marked by pursuit of God rather than passive acceptance of God’s grace.

And perhaps, just perhaps, that’s why you need this book too. Perhaps you’ve had your fingers burned by, what does Yancey call it… toxic church? Perhaps you’ve had enough of all the predictions of when revivals will break out and the deafening silence that follows as the date passes and nothing happens. Perhaps you’ve had enough of accepting power players call themselves priests and preachers as they push their latest book from the platform. Perhaps you’ve had enough of churches that chase down the numbers at the same time as leaving a silent line of disappointed one-time believers as they file discreetly out of the church. Perhaps you’ve had it with the idea that if we just sign up to the Next Big Thing then we’ll all end up with overflowing churches and famous faces gracing our doors. Perhaps you’ve had enough of people failing to ask questions of apologise for errors, perhaps you’re done with a one-size fits all approach to Christianity, the sort that pays little attention to culture and community and individuality, the sort that tries to ram people into a prescribed format no matter what the contortions of character involved.
Look around you and ask yourself this; are we Christians really doing the best we can? Are we even good enough, let alone worth being escorted to the altar as the very bride of Christ? Are we doing what we are supposed to be doing, living and loving and reaching out above and beyond with the energy and passion and commitment that our God and our neighbours deserve?

I don’t think we are. I think there’s more than we can give of ourselves, that there’s less we can pollute and more we can improve. We can’t give up on the church, we can’t leave it like this. We need to not need a book like this… that’s the third whisper I’ve been missing all this time. We need to not need it, to not be in a place where genuine service and sacrifice are strange situations. We need to be part of a global community where selfless love of others is so common that it fails to intrigue but rather gives a warm glow of familiarity.

That’s why we need this book. We need it to not need it. We need it to learn from. All of us.