Biography

I grew up in Sydney’s north and was educated in the public school system. My mother gave me a Bible for my eighth birthday and I spent the next six years trying to work out what was true and what was not. When I was in year nine our minister, Alan Begbie, ran a class to teach a group of us the gospel. He then interviewed each of us and answered my questions. I committed to Christ that year.

I was awarded a Teachers’ College scholarship and was appointed in my first year to Broken Hill High School to teach Indonesian. Teaching in the only high school (2,300 students) in an outback mining town in the far west of NSW was a wonderful and exciting experience. The town had not had a trained evangelical minister for thirty years. I was up to my neck in youth ministry.

Then a colleague sat on my bed and told me he thought he should commit suicide. He was a Pakistani Muslim and a good friend. We talked. He is still alive. But I realised that I had spent four years of university training to teach my subject but had undergone no equivalent training to answer his questions about eternity.

I sought the wisdom of my pastor back in Sydney and wrote to Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. I hoped they offered a correspondence course. Professor Ray Dillard wrote back, “David, the word of God is worthy of three years of your undivided attention. Come.” My pastor told me that I could spend forty years doing what I was doing or invest four years at college and use that training for the rest of my life. I left Broken Hill in tears and flew with a friend to begin studies at Westminster Seminary.

In those three and a half years I studied under some of the sharpest and most godly theological minds of the twentieth century, including Cornelius Van Til, John Frame, Ed Clowney, Harvey Conn (mentors of the likes of Tim Keller), Vern Poythress, Leon Morris, and Philip Edgcumbe-Hughes, as well as Ray Dillard. I studied and lived with students who brought amazing stories of God’s grace. Among them, I met and married Pat Schroeder, a Canadian Mennonite, and the love of my life. We were blessed by the ministries of Ted Boyce at an inner city church (Tenth Presbyterian) and Glenn Blossom (Cheltern Baptist Church) in the outer suburbs.

Returning to Australia I thought that serving Christ full time meant pastoral ministry in a local church. I served a year in Melbourne as an assistant minister and was then sent to plant an independent church in Sydney’s outer west. They were difficult but wonderful days. For financial reasons, I returned to casual teaching in the state system. This included a stint on a specialist class for students with behaviour disorders. From there I retrained as a special education teacher. I was posted to start a unit for emotionally disturbed children at a state special school. All of my students were in foster care and all had been abused.

After three years I was told that if I continued to answer the students’ questions about “religion” I would be dismissed. I told the principal to tell the District Inspector to go ahead. Three weeks later I was offered the opportunity to set up a special education unit in a Christian school in Sydney’s southwest. After a lifetime of commitment to state schools, I discovered the freedom and the impact of teaching in a Christian school.

The school was planted by parents. They raised money to pay the teacher’s salary by means of garage sales and sausage sizzles. They lived in the lowest socio-economic section of greater Sydney. “Why,” they asked, “is a Christian education only possible for the more affluent?”

When the community heard that there was a Christian school that would accept children who were not coping at school, we were flooded with applications for enrolment. The school had open enrolment; all employees had to be evangelical believers; and every student had to complete the course in Biblical Studies.

After two years in that role I was asked to set up and teach a Biblical Studies programme for our emerging senior classes. My wife set up the programme for years seven to ten. Five years later she became deputy and I was asked to take over as head of Biblical Studies in the high school. I held that role for the next nineteen years.

We welcomed students from every religious background and none. Over seventy language groups were represented in our school community. Fewer than thirty percent of our students had any contact with an evangelical church on entry. By year nine sixty percent of our students were attending an evangelical church. Many brought their parents with them.

Most of our families came as refugees or recent migrants. There were some terrible stories and some amazing transformations of lives affected by the good news about Jesus. On entry, most of our families did not own a Bible. Many had never seen one. Some didn’t know that the Bible existed. It was a whole new experience.

We discovered that families would read the set readings with their children. They came to parent-teacher nights looking to know more. One student confessed that he took his Biblical Studies assignment to the local Islamic Youth Centre. The imam led his youth group through the readings and they all contributed to his assessment task. We were interacting with their responses to the readings.

About once a year I would get a call from a teacher at another school. The conversation would go something like this: “I have been asked to teach Biblical/ Christian studies next year. There is no programme or curriculum. I have no training in the Bible or theology. The boss told me to do whatever I like. Can you help?” I received another such call the year after I retired.

As we opened the Bible with our students we saw the depth and rigour with which the whole counsel of God engages the wisdom of this world. It addresses the whole person and all of life. It engaged conversations across all subjects and extracurricular experiences. I overheard my students discussing our recent Bible lesson with our school gardener.

In our Christian and church schools we spend thirty-plus hours per week for forty weeks of the year teaching across the whole range of life’s issues to students who are at the most formative stage of their lives. Paul was able to tell the Ephesian elders, “I did not hold back from declaring to you the whole plan of God” (Acts 20:27). I wonder then how we shall give an account (James 3:3).