My
interview with Rev Dr David Seccombe (formerly of St Matthew’s Anglican Church,
Shenton Park, Western Australia and Perth Centre for Applied Christian
Studies).
Date:
Tuesday, 23 July 2019.
Time:
1.30-3.00 p.m.
Place:
Foam Coffee Bar, Oxford Street, Leederville.
Kieran James: Please tell us
how the Perth Centre for Applied Christian Studies (PCACS) began.
David Seccombe: The name was chosen by Allan
Chapple; his inspiration, the idea. He and I were both students of Moore College,
he was senior to me. Intellectually, he was way in front of me, he is bordering
on the genius in my opinion. He is a heavyweight intellectually. If I remember
correctly, he was an AFES staff-worker, in those days we called it EU, Evangelical
Union. I think he was a staff-worker; he came to Armidale when I was a science
student there. I think that is when we first met. They used to come to the
[university] for a few weeks and do a few meetings. There was a bit of a
charismatic movement among some of the evangelical movement. The staff-workers
got a bit tough and wouldn’t allow it. That was about the time I left or just
after. That would have been, let me think, around about 1966-67. He graduated
from Moore College and then he wanted to come back to WA to join the Methodist
Church which became the Uniting Church. They wouldn’t ordain him until he had
spent some time in their college in Melbourne. So he did some study there,
Trinity College, a liberal institution, as I understand it. Allan made such an
impression they offered him a job as tutor or assistant-lecturer. He had a
sense of calling in the Methodist crowd in WA so he came back here. I think
they sent him as a junior minister to Wagin. He and I caught up from time to
time. I’m not sure of the timescale. When he and I met to talk about PCACS, was
he still in Wagin, or was he now in Perth? I can’t remember, he will tell you
that.
Both
of us believed in the importance of theological education and the power and
potency of a good theological education to inspire zeal for God and for His
Kingdom.
Kieran:
So what year would that have been?
David: Nineteen-ninety was the first year;
1989 was the year he sent studying and research. It would have been 1988 when
we had those discussions.
I started at St Matt’s in
1979. I had a vision for not just pastoring a congregation but also training
leaders. For me, that meant teaching the Bible, teaching them the foundations
of the Christian faith in depth so they could answer difficult questions. I
don’t think I had a clue about what they call ‘practical training’. To me,
theology was intensely practical. We picked that up, in large part, from Moore College,
D.B. Knox. His outlook was that you go to college to learn theology and you
learn ministry on-the-job. He dodged the ministry side of things. I don’t agree
with him on that. We were very much influenced by that.
I don’t know when it was but
I started St Matthew’s School of Christian Ministry. I had a group - we were
just using the ACT course, Australian College of Theology – THL (abbreviation
of the college name in Latin).
I can’t remember that I did
any moore than one class, one year’s course. We did the Systematic Theology
course which shows how stupid I am. I didn’t know how difficult it would be for
ordinary people. I was jumping into the deep-end; it was my first experience of
tertiary teaching. The whole group failed except one, Cynthia Dixon [laughs].
She studied it, she did very well.
One of the problems that
year was that people weren’t consistent in their attendance. The reason for that
I saw was that they had priorities – their job, their family. The study thing
came a long way down their list of priorities. I started to think that, to get
anywhere, it needed to be full-time study; it had to be the priority, so it didn’t keep losing out. Cynthia did it because
she was so bright, she was very good at studying; for the others it was too big
an ask; that made me think of the benefits of full-time study. Correspondence
study is very difficult for most people. That was one factor. The second factor
was it came out of the School of Christian Ministry.
We started (Allan and me)
our first co-operative venture called the Spring Forum of Contemporary
Christianity. It was a week in the Spring holidays at UWA [University of
Western Australia], it had nothing to do with them but we used their
facilities. We invited a keynote speaker to teach the Bible and relate it to
contemporary life. We had lots of workshops which people could go to. That
lasted for a week. It lasted for quite a few years. The first speaker we
invited was Chandapillay. They were great years.
I kept having ideas and
people around who got inspired and made them happen. So, over the years, we had
Chandapillay, Neville Sandon; we had Leon Morris one year, it was very
memorable. That’s at least four years. I was tremendously helped by a woman in
those years called Muriel Devadason. Allan was super-efficient, very
businesslike, good at ministry, good decision-maker, and able to keep things
moving. He was there to push things along and Muriel was there to get things
done.
They were formative years.
Allan must have been in Perth those years. He must have been in a Uniting
Church here. At one point he got sacked by the Uniting Church; they took his
ministry away from him, pushed him out, because he didn’t dot all the I’s in
baptism. They were hopeless, those guys, they were a lost cause. In Wembley
Downs, they ordained an atheist. Their reasoning was that his serious approach
to life was equivalent to faith in God [both laugh]. And they booted Allan out
due to his views on baptism; they strained out a gnat to swallow a camel [check
quotation].
Another thing about that
group doing the THL, I was organizing events, I would invite a teacher to come
over, spend a week with us, it was the precursor to the Spring Forum, this was
just a St Matt’s thing. We had Graeme Goldsworthy; we got him to do two open
lectures at the church during the week. We had a weekend away at a
conference-centre where he just taught. The first year must have been Paul
Barnett, ‘Goldy’ was the second year, and D.B. Knox was the third year. The
first year must have been 1980.
Up until then I believed
that I should remain single. Then I believed that, if I stayed single, it would
make the ministry extremely difficult. I took Paul Barnett to Cottesloe Beach
in 1981 and he told me that I needed to get married. Nineteen-eighty-two was
Graeme G., 1983 was D.B. Knox, and 1984 was Peter Jensen.
Those years [were] of
messing around with St Matt’s School of Christian Ministry and, out of that,
grew the Spring Forum of Contemporary Christianity. We were really introducing
Anglicans and Uniting Church people in Perth to tertiary-level thinking and
study. I guess, during that time, we were incubating the sense that Perth
needed a tertiary-level, full-time training program. The Baptists already had
their college and there was Perth Bible Institute. We didn’t identify with that
so strongly, I don’t know why. We were interested to do something new, in
particular, with our own church-folk in mind.
My memory is sitting on a
park-bench somewhere, Allan will tell you where, and talking about the sort of
thing we could do. He was moore critical of our own Moore College training than
I was. A lot of it was taught without a real context, without an obvious
application to Christian life and ministry. It was he who favored something
‘applied’, that idea of ‘applied’, ‘application’; that was him. I sort of
thought that if people knew the theology they would automatically know how to
apply it. He thought that wasn’t the case. He was right of course. He wanted to
do a course on prayer. Everything we learn in theology would have an
application in our prayer-life. He thought that, if theology was taught in that
way, it would be learnt much better. That was the inspiration. We wanted to do
something different; that was largely his genius. So we
called our first meeting, it probably was in 1988; you say your first year was
1990. The people I can remember being there were, of course, Allan, myself,
Graham Chipps, John Prince, probably Harvey Collins (put that one in brackets),
I don’t remember who else, there were others. The meeting was at the back-room
of our rectory at Henson Road. I think there was quite a degree of unanimity. I
don’t remember if the decision was made at that meeting or later. The proposal
was that we would raise funds to allow Allan to research and study in order to
found something for the following year. Alan Cole, I remember him saying: ‘It
won’t work, it’s a great idea. It won’t work and the reason it won’t work is
wherever you get a lecturer or a teacher he will end up teaching the things he
has been taught. It’s too difficult to come up with anything brand new.’ Allan
was determined that that wouldn’t be the case. That year, which I guess was
1988 or 1989, I went to Melbourne. I was doing Bible studies at an AFES
conference and I visited Leon Morris at Ridley College. I told him what we
wanted to do and got him reminiscing, doing what I’m doing now [smiles], about
the beginnings of Ridley College; that was quite fascinating. So that must have
been in 1989, the year that Allan was researching. He was researching full-time
and visiting certain places. That takes us up to the beginnings.
My
impressions of that first year were that I had bitten off more than I could
chew – to be preparing lectures and running a church. I was not doing it well;
I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been.
Kieran:
It didn’t seem that way to me.
David: It was a bit of a wake-up call for me
in that sense. It was the first step on the road to me ending up at Cape Town
(add initials of Bible college).
When we got together, to do
the planning, Allan was meticulous, Allan was organized. I found those meetings
tiring, the details; Allan handled the details very well.
The
other thing I remember is in line with the Applied Christian Studies idea. We
decided that each student had to be in a ministry placement. They needed a
supervisor or mentor and someone on the college-team they would report back to
and receive feedback from. That was a new experience, for me, a good
experience, but I found it difficult. That was a new ball-game for me, working
one-on-one with a student.
Kieran:
Where did the name come from?
David:
That came from Allan. We tried all possible combinations – school, centre. It
had to have the word ‘applied’ in it.
Kieran:
And the name had the acronym which was an easily pronounceable word.
*****THE
END*****
