Tim Costello turned up at my big sister Sylvia’s funeral with a story.
My wife Merridie and I were studying in Rüschlikon, just out of Zurich, in 1983 and early 1984. We were looking to come back home after four years of study, and Athol Gill, who had studied at Rüschlikon and his best friend, Thorwald Lorenzen, who was my systematics professor.
When I told Thorwald we were receiving calls from eastern suburban churches to go and become a pastor, they said to me and to Merridie, “Well, we know the gospel works in the eastern suburbs. They’re all big churches there. You don’t actually have to do much to grow a church, just run a youth group, but the gospel clearly works there.”
They said “In the inner city, it’s not people that have left the inner city, it’s Christians that have left inner inner city, and they’ve gone east.” We had calls from an eastern suburban church and a southeastern suburban church.
So we took the initiative through the Baptist Union and wrote to St Kilda Baptist, which then had about ten elderly people. After some time, we got a letter, which I should have kept because it was obviously torn off a pad with jagged edges, and there was just one sentence, “Would you like to come and be our minister, at St Kilda Baptist? We can’t pay you anything, but we do have a flat next door, a two-bedroom flat that you can have, obviously rent-free.”
By then, we had two children and a third on the way.
I remember showing my colleagues in Switzerland who were in their fourth year, like us from Britain and Scotland and Germany, and they were getting calls from churches with brochures and pictures of the mans and salary packages. I said, oh, we’ve got a call. “Oh, great.” I said, “Yeah, here it is.” They said, “Wow, Australian Baptists do it differently, don’t they?”
When we turned up and started in St. Kilda, midwinter, July, I remember pulling up outside the church and beer bottles crunching under the wheels in the flat opposite the Queens Arms. Saturday night there would be brawls and people floating out of the pub.
And on Sunday mornings there’d be ten in a draft church without carpet, with holes in the boards, with very eclectic tastes.
The church secretary was an Anglo-Indian in his eighties, and I said to Henry, “Why do we actually have magazines from the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Scientologists at the welcome door?” He said, “No, they’re all Christians.” “Okay, Henry, right.”
Then at night, we inherited a church service where, literally, because you put on a cup of tea and a biscuit, out of the boarding houses, and the special accoms in St Kilda, homeless and people with mental health issues would actually come for the cup of tea and a biscuit.
I noticed very early on in my first service there that they hadn’t learned the rules, that the person at the front does the talking, not the person in front, and they would interrupt and they’d walk out for a smoke, and they’d come back, and I had commentary.
In the midst of all of that,I got to know Sylvia Sandman. She would literally appear on winter night out of nowhere. She was like Nicodemus, and she would be there loving and caring for street people, showing this extraordinary esteem, giving those people dignity.
The only question all humans really ask is, do I matter? Sylvia showed me, taught me, modelled to me that these people matter.
They weren’t in my head, having grown up in the Bible belt of Melbourne, Blackburn. They weren’t good material to build a church, but from Sylvia’s point of view, they were made in the image of God and they mattered. She kept coming for at least a year until the church started to grow. I’d started a legal practise in the church to pay my way.
Sylvia was incredibly important person for us, for St. Kilda Baptist, to still being open. It had no finances, it had no real programmes, but thanks to Sylvia, it had the gospel, the gospel that says these people matter. Thank you, Sylvia.
Image: Tim Costello at Sylvia Sandeman’s thanksgiving Service at Rosanna Baptist