Dear Inner Circle,
Gosh, it’s been a while since I started a note with those words!
Jon invited me to write this note while he’s away on the Larapinta Trail, and I want to use it as an opportunity to say ‘Happy 60th Birthday’ to Wayside Chapel. I arrived at Wayside just months before its 40th birthday, but I don’t recall that the occasion registered with anyone. There was a Winter Appeal conducted immediately upon my arrival and I remember the result was a net loss of $6,000 after postage. It was a tough start for me in 2004.
Wayside Chapel began in tough days too. In 1964 Ted Noffs was a Methodist minister and Kings Cross was not promising ground on which to grow a church. An old church in William Street was sold and a rather run down, residential building was bought in Kings Cross. Against all the odds, the place began to flourish because increasingly, the community felt heard, seen and accepted. One building eventually became three, side by side. Out the back of the middle building a theatre was constructed by a man named, coincidently, Jesus.
There were many good stories of Ted monitoring progress of the build by walking out the back, looking up and yelling out to the builder, “Jesus”!
After Ted’s death followed more difficult years. A new minister, Ray led the push to establish a safe injecting centre. Ray was a tough little nugget. The press never missed an opportunity to allege that Ray was “encouraging wrong behavior”. Time demonstrated the wisdom of our tough little minister. Deaths on the street were radically reduced. We used to count the number of needles picked up each morning around Wayside, and the count reduced from around 130 each morning to just one or two a day. No one disputes Ray’s wisdom and foresight today.
As I look back, I’m astonished how time and again, Wayside flourished in conditions that would have, perhaps should have, ushered in its end. I would think that for the hundreds of people who ever worked at Wayside and the thousands of people who ever volunteered at Wayside, they recall a time of struggle, but also a time when the call to life overcame all obstacles.
It’s the mission of providing a community in which everyone is included, of setting a table at which everyone has a place–such a mission constantly calls us to work for a better world. Such a mission constantly reforms Wayside itself. Surely, it’s this mission, living anew in good people like you that explains why there is a 60th anniversary.
My deepest and highest love to you all at this time of celebration.
I loved being part of this story. I’m now an older man, living at a slower pace. We’re living a long way from Sydney on the South Coast and I’m the minister of a little country church. It’s hard to imagine a life more different to my Wayside years. But Wayside’s mission still lives in my bones and I’m doing my best to make it live in this vastly different context.
Thank you for helping it live on at Wayside too. Here’s to another 60 years of love over hate and creating a community with no ‘us and them’.
Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle,
Graham
Rev. Graham Long
Former CEO & Pastor of Wayside Chapel
