As I look back on my life I must have been a very idealistic adolescent. While I devoured the usual boy’s comic books such as Eagle, Rover, Classics Illustrated and many others, I also haunted the local public library housed in a Carnegie building and read voraciously. I was a real bookworm. My mind was fed on the heroic stories of British history and literature. I devoured The Children’s Encyclopedia that my parents gave me one Christmas. It was a ten-volume set that presented an exciting view of life, history and knowledge. The editor, Arthur Mee, wrote in its introduction,

Through all the things that are written here breathes a spirit which no dark days can conquer. This book is written from beginning to end in the faith that all is well. It believes in God and man and our race. It believes in loving our country as the noblest country that has ever been, and in loving mankind no less. It believes that character is the greatest thing in the world, and that by teaching our children to do right, to love truth, and to cherish fine things, we can save mankind from all its troubles and build up the Kingdom of Heaven.

While today these sentiments seem rather antiquated, sentimental and too nationalistic, they reflected the spirit of the age in which I was raised. Atheism was for communists and materialists. Christianity was the only option for faith. Cynicism and agnosticism was not attractive. In the aftermath of World War Two Winston Churchill’s six-volume history of the war and his History of the English Speaking Peoples were published. My parents bought and shelved them where I could read them. Churchill’s patriotism and pugnacious courage in the face of Hitler, amid the defeatism of others, inspired me to want to make a difference in the world.

I attended the youth group led by Erol Stoop and confirmation class led by our Vicar, Harvey Teulon. By that time, when I was thirteen, I was starting to question the reality of the Christian faith for my life. The Ten Commandments, which were recited every Sunday in the Holy Communion service from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the teaching of Jesus in the Scripture readings and sermons, were very compelling and demanding. However, they seemed to me to be unattainable counsels of perfection, and I felt very imperfect and incapable of living up to their standards. I was experiencing the guilt of the moral law that was meant to lead or drive me to seek the salvation and forgiveness offered by Christ, but instead led me to self-justification and criticism of the church. If I couldn’t live up to the moral law, then there must be something wrong with it, rather than with me. I began to think that Christianity didn’t work. So I challenged God to prove himself by doing something in my life through confirmation. If I were to receive the Holy Spirit when the bishop laid hands on me then I wanted to experience it. If Christianity was real, then there must be something more to it than trying to be a good person and failing all the time. I was looking for something more than morality. I was convicted of my sins, but at the same time resisting the blame for them. I was trying to be a good person, but I found myself falling short of the ideals I heard from the pulpit and read in the Scriptures.

Revival Mission and Corrie ten Boom

In 1956, All Saints’ Church hosted a revival mission team led by Dr J. Edwin Orr, an international speaker and author from the USA. A Dutch woman, Corrie ten Boom, an American Episcopalian, Robert B. Doing, and an American Presbyterian minister, William Dunlap, accompanied him. All the churches in town supported the meetings which were held every night for a week. At fourteen-years-of age I was curious and attended many of the meetings. Little was I to know that my life was about to be changed.

Corrie ten Boom was a short, motherly looking lady. She fascinated me. She showed slides in the church and talked about her travels, going from place to place, sharing with all sorts of people that God loved them. But it was her experiences during the Second World War that interested me. With her father and sister, she had been imprisoned in a concentration camp by the Nazis, for trying to hide Jewish people, while they could arrange to escape from Holland. Many years later a movie was made about their attempts called, The Hiding Place. That was when Corrie ten Boom became famous.

Like all boys who grew up in the 1940s, I was raised on a diet of war stories. My first conscious remembrance of life was at age four, when my mother put the Central Hotel dining room gong in my hands and told me to go outside and ring it in Fitzherbert Street. I happily banged away, making a glorious sound, as we celebrated the surrender of Japan. Shortly after VJ Day there was a victory parade in town. My sister dressed up as Britannia, with a Roman-type helmet and a trident, while I was dressed in a cloak and cap which was supposed to represent something I have forgotten. We were going to march with my aunts in the parade, but I chickened out as the bagpipe band scared me!

Cereal boxes always contained cards depicting the heroes of battles, and the ships, airplanes and tanks they commanded. I can remember cards of Americans, British and even Russians. The cards were collected in albums, and proudly displayed. Movies portrayed war themes, and we were shocked at the brutality of the other side. How could civilized people be so cruel? It was hard for us to understand. We were such a non-violent culture.

As the facts about the Holocaust became known, we were horrified. Concentration camps, crematoria, Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbruck, Belsen, Gestapo, torture, the final solution, became part of our vocabulary. But we were a long way from the front line in New Zealand. The Japanese only came as far as New Guinea and bombed Darwin. Then again, there were very few Jews in our area. A very distant relative of mine, Arthur Benjamin, a proprietor of the newspaper, was a Jew, but he was the only one left in town – there had been a synagogue early in the town’s history. He used to bicycle around town with a parrot perched on his handlebars – quite a unique sight that a child would remember. When he died I went to his funeral. A rabbi came from Christchurch to bury him in a plain pine casket. It was hard for me to envisage people like Arthur Benjamin being treated so cruelly by Hitler and his henchmen. It all seemed so outrageous. My sense of the injustice of it all welled up when Corrie ten Boom came and spoke about her efforts to help the Jews, and what happened to her as a result.

Corrie’s sister and her father died in the concentration camps. Corrie was spared through being released due to a clerical error. When the war was over she felt God calling her to share with people all over the world, the story of God’s love and forgiveness. That is how she came to be in my home-town on the opposite side of the world from her native country.

After the meeting was over, I felt drawn to talk with this remarkable woman. I wanted to know more about the Jews, and the newly founded nation of Israel. I purchased a copy of her book, A Prisoner and Yet and asked her to sign it for me. I don’t remember exactly what I asked her, but I can still see her in my mind’s eye standing outside the entrance to All Saints’ Church talking to me. She asked me, ‘Have you received Jesus as your Lord and Saviour?’ I stammered in reply, ‘Well, I have just been confirmed?’ I had approached confirmation with as much seriousness as could be mustered. Confirmation, to my precocious mind, was going to be God’s last chance to prove to me that this Christianity business was real, and not for the birds. I said to God, ‘Confirmation is your last chance to change me into the person you want me to be! If you don’t, I am going to throw in the towel!’ Needless to say I was an extremely opinionated fourteen-year-old. Confirmation had not changed me much, despite my efforts and those of a faithful pastor who instructed me.

Corrie did not seem much impressed by my answer, and I went away with her question burning in my ears. Had I asked Jesus Christ into my heart, my inner life, and had I pledged my will to follow him as my Master?

Decision and Commitment to Christ

The following Saturday night, I heard William Dunlap speak to a meeting of all the youth about Jesus’ gift of eternal life to all who believed in him and followed him. He quoted Revelation 3:20, ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door I will come in to him and eat with him and he with me.’ Years later, I would be ordained in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London where Holman Hunt’s famous painting, entitled The Light of the World, portraying Jesus knocking on the door of the human heart, hung on the wall. The Revd Dunlap asked us to invite Jesus into our hearts. That is exactly what I did in All Saints’ Hall that night.

The next day was Sunday and the last day of the week of meetings. All those who had made decisions to follow Jesus were asked to come forward to the communion rail to publicly confirm their decision. I wasn’t about to do so until I saw an older boy whom I admired get up and go forward. I thought that if he could do it then so could I. Something happened to me. Jesus called it being born again of the Spirit. For the first time I discovered that Christianity was not a question of my trying to become a better person in my own strength, but a question of letting Jesus live out his life through me in the power of his Spirit. In the words of the title of one of J. Edwin Orr’s books, it was ‘Full Surrender’. Or as Corrie ten Boom said, ‘Don’t wrestle, just nestle.’ I was given the gift of faith. As St. Paul wrote, ‘For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.’ (Ephesians 2:8,9)

Change

My spiritual life changed dramatically. I started reading my Bible and praying every day. I began rising early in the morning to meet with God. In the winter it was very cold and we did not have central heating. I would light the kerosene heater to take the nip out of the air in my bedroom, and try not to awaken the rest of my family. They must have thought that I was acting rather strangely. The Bible became an exciting book to me. I felt that God was speaking directly to me through it. I devoured it day after day. I became part of Crusaders, which met weekly for Bible study at school and conducted camps for high school students in the summer. I attended the tented camp at Titirangi Bay in the Marlborough Sounds all through high school, and then as a leader when I was at university. It was a rich experience of Christian fellowship and learning, in a beautiful setting on a remote sheep farm accessible only by boat.

Twenty years later I was Dean of Christian Life at Gordon College in Massachusetts. The Baccalaureate speaker in 1976 was to be Corrie ten Boom. We gave her an honorary doctorate at Graduation Commencement the next day. I had the privilege of introducing her to the audience. We had not met since 1956. The fourteen-year-old boy was now thirty-four-years-old, married with a daughter. Corrie’s question outside All Saints’ Church began a sequence of events that led me from New Zealand to England for my theological studies and ordination in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, and on to the United States. It was hard for me to remain composed as I recounted to her the impact she had on my life with her witness and visit to Hokitika so many years before.

After she received her doctoral degree, she thanked the college for the honour and said these words, so typical of her style: ‘I am only the donkey on which Jesus is pleased to ride.’

Jesus used her to reach me, as he used her to help the Jews. He used the war and my interest in the plight of the Jews, to draw me to Corrie. He can use any donkey to help him enter into the hearts of others. I am grateful that he used Corrie to enter into my heart and change my life. The clerical error that saved her life in the office of Ravensbruck concentration camp also saved my life.