Terrence Lennon Wingfield, an indigenous man, struggled through school on the West Coast of SA, but came to Adelaide and found Jesus at the age of 21. He went to TAFE to learn to read and now is an enthusiastic student at Youthworks College in Sydney. He described his journey to The Other Cheek.
I became a Christian through one of [my] cousins who was already a Christian, and he invited me to go to a church that was in Adelaide in the west area of Adelaide. And I didn’t go up in the beginning, but he kind of asked me, and because I respect him very well, I went to the church and went to just to go visit this church.
It was the Aboriginal Berean Community Church, part of the Baptist Church, and also part of the Aboriginal Evangelical Fellowship.
I just come [to] the church and learned about Jesus. But I come from Ceduna, so I have, my family has, a Lutheran background in the communities of Ceduna and also in Koonibba.
I just moved away from my hometown. I just left my job. I was doing labouring work, and I just had a little bit of money left. I had a car at the time, and I had just travelled to Adelaide.
I didn’t become a Christian in Adelaide, but I came back to Ceduna to have Easter with my grandmother. I always have Easter with my grandmother and these people that I went to church with there, Aboriginal community church, and there were a few other Islanders, Pacific Islanders that came down and they did an Easter convention down there in Ceduna.
And yeah, I became a Christian at the Easter Convention on a Sunday when the guys came through, and I just felt led by the spirit of God because at that time I was feeling really deeply convicted, not understanding what that word meant at the time, but I felt it, and I just felt the urge – not just the urge, but there was a fear to it because I knew when people talked about Jesus and the gospel, I knew what they were referring to.
There’s only two ways in this life that where you can go when you leave your physical body, and that is that if you go to the, it’s either you go into the darkness or you go to the light, there’s no in between.
And so that was a bit of the fear, understanding that there’s a heaven and there’s a hell. So yeah, from at the age of 21 at the Lutheran Hall, since we have a Lutheran school in my hometown, I gave my heart the Lord at the age of 26, 1 of the guys that were preaching were talking about Jesus. I don’t know what scripture he was preaching from, but the word Jesus is what caught my attention, and I became a Christian at the age of 21.
The Other Cheek asked who was preaching that day.
Yeah, he was Basil Coleman. He was basically one of my uncles. I found out I was related to him and he was my uncle. He was like my mom’s cousin.
He asked who I was, and then he looked at me because he knows my family, and he said, I look like somebody, he said and then he found out, oh, this person’s grandchild. And then he got very happy. He said, I’m your uncle.
I’ve been told that when at 21, you were illiterate, unable to read. Is that true?
Yeah, Ever since I went to school, I struggled with reading, writing because I grew up in hospitals. I had septic arthritis on my hip as a kid. So I’ve always been in the Adelaide Women’s and childremn’s Hospital, flying from Ceduna all the way to to Adelaide. I’ve always travelled up and down. I’ve missed a lot of primary schools and even kindergarten.
I can’t remember much of my primary school in kindergarten, but when I was a teenager, I really struggled in school. And what made it worse is that my mother, she passed away when I was just 14 years old, just came out of surgery. I had to have surgery on my knee because both one of my legs was shorter than the other, and they had to do the surgery to stop the left leg to stop growing so the right one could catch up.
And I just got out of hospital. And then a couple weeks after that, my mum passed away and there was an incident, I won’t go deep into it, but she just went to town and an incident happened and she passed away. And so because of that, my mum passed away. That really affected me.
So when I went to school, I became real hatred and hated, and I didn’t talk to much people. I was the one as a quiet kid because I didn’t want to talk to anyone. What’s the point of talking to anyone is they don’t really understand. So I rather, I just kept it to myself. So when I went to school, I really struggled. They tried to give me books to read and that if you didn’t have a picture, I would chuck it away, give me a book that doesn’t have a picture because I ain’t going to read those words.
And then at the age of 21, I became a Christian. They gave me the King James Bibles and I was reading the Bible and I was like, how do you expect a person that doesn’t know how to read to understand the Bible? And I struggled and I was like, I can’t even read it. But because of the heart and the desire and what God did in my life at that time, I really wanted to read it. And I didn’t know how to read it, but I found out there’s audio {available].
In order to learn the Bible, you need to know how to read English and how to read, how to understand a sentence. No point in trying to read it if you don’t. And that’s what happens for me. But by the age of 21, I was reading the New King James at the time because I used to that translation. I still read it to this day and the NIV and other translations, and I just read it and I got frustrated with one sentence, I can’t remember what book I was reading, I just couldn’t pronounce it. And I was like, was so angry with God, and I said, God, why can I not read?
I said, why I got to grow up like this and struggle with reading. I’ve been teased with my reading and all this other stuff that came through it.
I remember a couple of years after people telling me, there’s courses right about you can learn how to read and write.
I found out that there was a course at the Tauondi Aboriginal College in Port Adelaide; that you can do a vocational pathway certificate one. And I went there, did an interview, inquired about it, and I got into it. From the beginning from the A, B, C, all the way to the five vowels – I just did that course and completed it. It helped me to understand how to read properly, understand what English is, because they literally teach you what English is and where does it come from around the world. And then I did a certificate three in community service the next year and after that I did other courses. I did a UPP University Preparatory Programme at the University of Adelaide. And then I end up where I’m today in the Youthworks College in Sydney.
Are you enjoying college?
Oh, definitely. I really enjoy it because of what it does for me; sometimes it’s easy, one minute, and then it’s hard, but one minute. And I’m not a person who likes to even that. I’m a bit older now, I still don’t like reading in front of other people, but I find it that being out of your comfort zone is the best way to learn.
Because, sometimes, as Christians, we kind of get caught up of being in your comfort zone or you don’t want to do this, you want to do that, but if you step out of faith, God, God would help you. Right? God will use your voice. And that’s what happened for me. And I’ve been in so many places and so many speeches that it was where out. I’ve been in places where I had a panic attack just by talking and people can’t see that, but it was inside me.
But I said to myself, I’m going to learn the trusting you, Lord. I’m going to give it to you in my frustration and even with me panicking inside me, but doing those things, coming to college and being around people that I come from a small community, a grew with my own people. And when you’re young aboriginal person [who] grew up in the country, you’re just so used to growing up around the people that you are growing up around. And so when you go to cities like Adelaide and come to Sydney, you learn to get along with other people and you look, oh, there’s more other Christians out there who come from different backgrounds.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
And for me, it was very hard because where I come from when I was growing up, it was just pretty much, there was pretty violence and there was pretty much drinkings and there was drugs and there were things that go on.
I come from a superstition culture background. We grew up with fear in our heart of the culture, ways of superstition. There’s a lot of that stuff that goes in what we believe in the spiritual realm and dark spirits and the forces. And I grew up and I grew up with that life not understanding what it really was.
So yeah, being here, it really helps me. It challenged me because it helps me to, even when I’m doing assignments and that it helps me, I’ve got to put a certain hour away to do this assignment. I got to make sure I’m reading the word of God because there’s no point doing an assignment, having my reading with the word of God, praying to God and make sure that my faith in my life is with Jesus.
So yeah, it’s a lot. That really teaches me a lot. Sometimes I come to class and I’m like, I don’t want come today because it’s so tiring. I just don’t want to go through it. The moments I don’t want to go to class or to Bible study is when I need to go. And that’s what I got taught from one of my brothers. He told me that when you don’t want to go, that’s the time you need to go. And I’ve been doing that ever since I was 21.
What do you think you might be doing after you leave college?
I’ll head back to Adelaide, to my home church, and then I’ll basically, well, I would work in my church.
I really want to teach the Aboriginal community in Adelaide, [and] even back in my hometown, because right now it’s just, it feels like everybody’s, we just lose our way and we get so caught up in our lives and there’s a lot of stuff that goes on, a lot of suicides, and there’s a lot of drugs, and [many] Aboriginal people just grow up thinking that you just go to prison and that’s pretty normal, but that’s not normal. You just go to prison. There’s more to life than going to prison and just dying at a young age because you feel the world, you feel like your life is worthless. And then the world, it doesn’t really encourage people to really seek God because it’s all about you when you go out into the world. And so, yeah, I just want to work in my community.
I’m a young aboriginal Christian, and my pastor told me he’s not many of you. I didn’t understand it at the time, but he told me there were not many young aboriginal Christians. I’ve met a few, but not a lot out there. And there’s a lot of people that became Christians and who kind of moved away. And I’ve seen a lot of that. And that really broke my heart to see my young Aboriginal brothers in Christ and sisters move away from God because the world just grabbed them and sucked them back into the world. And the enemy’s always working 24 hours a day to do that. He’s going through their minds and I got to pray for my young people. That’s one of my motives to do because I grew up seeing this so much. I’m tired of it. I’m sick of seeing the same thing over and over and over in my communities, the towns, the cities. I’m just praying that miracle for the Spirit of God that can help [me] to go out there and really show that Christ is the way, the truth of life as it says in the scripture. So yeah, that’s kind of my motive to really be reminded of why I came here, to be trained and to head back home and do work in my church.
Image: Terrence Lennon Wingfield. Image Credit: Adult Learning Australia