AMEN Australia 2019 Conference: Witnesses Unto Me

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Glen Hughes

Bi-Vocational Ministry

I'm a dentist by profession and a pastor by passion.

I'm very, very fortunate that I have been given the privilege of trialing in the North New South Wales Conference what we would call bivocational ministry.

Bivocational ministry, for those of you who are unaware, is where somebody tries to do 2 jobs badly.

So I work as a dentist Monday through Thursday, and then I take Fridays off, and then I give everything that I have in pastoral ministry over the weekend in tandem with another young guy called Josh Newbigin who is finishing his theology degree this year and is paid a 50% budget by the conference.

For those of you who know briefly the map of Australia, Byron Bay is its most easterly point.

It's a beautiful village that has approximately 2 million bed nights of accommodation every year.

There are, it's estimated about 1.2 million international travellers will come through Byron Bay every year.

And Byron Bay Church is a $5 million piece of real estate strategically located directly opposite Woolworths, which is the best place to shop.

And I would say that it's almost inevitable that every single 1 of those 1.2 million tourists that come to Byron Bay will walk past our church.

At the moment, we've got a gate and a fence there, which I'm not that excited about.

And hopefully, at some stage, we'll meet a generous philanthropist who will give us enough money to tear down the fence and bring our church right out to the front.

We run in association with our church a small cafe called Manor Haven.

I know that some of you have visited Manorhaven.

And Manorhaven is ranked number 1 out of 53 cafes and I think number 1 out of 118 restaurants in Byron Bay.

So this little vegan cafe is punching above its weight in terms of its popularity and its patronage.

And there are people in church today as a result of visiting the cafe and making connection with some people who were bold enough to introduce them to some Christian literature and talk to them about their stories and inspire them to think about the direction their life was going and move towards a friendship with Jesus.

But our church has some really unique challenges.

The average age of our membership, give or take 5 or 6 years, is probably about 65.

Most of our key members are pensioners, retired, have been living in Byron Bay from before it became more expensive than Sydney to buy real estate, and So our congregation is an eclectic mix of locals who have lived there long enough to be able to afford to, and the other saints who can't afford, but for some reason choose to come from areas outside of Byron Bay to fellowship at the church that is there.

And for those of you who know anything about churches, they can be expensive to run, particularly if you have an evangelistic heart.

And our total budget for the year is somewhere in the order of $8, 000.

So it's quite a small church with a small budget, but with a huge potential for ministry.

And so luckily enough for me, the conference came to me knowing that I was very actively involved in preaching and in talking.

I think in 2017 I preached 42 times in the year as well as being a full-time dentist.

We had a bit of a discussion and I said, look, rather than me just being an itinerant preacher filling gaps in people's preaching plans, can we try and experiment where we actually take a bold move and take someone from a lay position and give them a position in a church and help it grow.

And because Byron Bay is such a tiny church and such a small budget and I'm free, they figured that it was a risk that they would take to appoint me to be a volunteer associate lay pastor at this small church.

And I've been working with Justin, who as I said, is finishing his theology degree, and sorry, Joshua, and he's finishing his theology degree.

So together, Josh and I, he's barefoot, long hair, looks like Jesus, and I'm old, gray, and want to be like Jesus.

And we've been together in pastoral ministry this year.

Last year, we had a baptism, and somebody that has come back to Christ because of the call of God on their heart was baptized.

At the moment, I'm 50 and a bit and going to the bank and wanting to borrow large sums of money to put a dental clinic right where you see that red arrow on the banks of the Richmond River in Ballina.

My son is just about ready to graduate from dentistry and I'm hoping that when he gets out, I'll be able to trick him into working so hard that I can do dentistry and he can pay off my debts.

I kind of feel a little bit like a fish out of water.

I don't know whether I'm a bad dentist because I'm trying to be a pastor or a bad pastor because I'm trying to be a dentist.

But I thought that it would be worth sharing with you a little bit of, I guess, my story, some of my frustrations, some of my challenges, because for me, I actually think that bivocational ministry is going to become something of a trend within our church as we see our resources dwindling and we see people passionate about ministry reaching their 50s and 60s where they've kind of got to the point financially in their own journey where they can choose between being useful or going on more world trips.

And I think that all of us will get to that stage in our lives where if we've been faithful and we've worked hard that God will have blessed us and we've probably got somewhere comfortable to live that we mostly own and the bank stopped annoying us or being upset about late mortgage payments.

And we've got decades of our lives that we can give back to God in some form of ministry.

So my story was I started off as a young dentist.

I was invited before I graduated from dentistry to be a missionary by the church and I went over to a place called Dhaka in Bangladesh and I began my dental career as a missionary.

I came back to Australia for a couple of years to increase my surgical skills, and then my wife and I found ourselves again in Pakistan, working at the Karachi Adventist Hospital as missionaries.

And that was going to be our life plan, to give our life to God in mission service.

And it was possible as a dentist to get into a Muslim country where it was a little bit more difficult for pastoral ministry to occur and to be involved in working with the Islamic community and ministering to the small minority Christian groups that were there.

But as a consequence of my arrogance and irritance, I was managed to be sacked by the church when I was in Pakistan for taking objection to the Chief Executive Officer of the hospital who wanted to give everybody a 10% pay rise on condition that everybody would tithe.

And I kind of pointed out that the great controversy made some rather strong references to religious organisations that attempted to enforce their opinions on others, and as a result I got a unanimous vote of the board against his direction.

So when I was back in Australia helping my wife have our first baby, he got the hospital board together and voted that I not come back to irritate him any longer.

So I was in Australia, sacked after giving up a career in facial surgery to give my life in mission service and feeling a tiny bit sorry for myself.

So I went like Moses out into the wilderness and for the next 20 years I spent my life in ministry and work in dentistry to the Indigenous Australians and that was going great guns.

I managed to write national policy for 1 of the major political parties.

I managed to sit on a Senate committee investigating the state of oral health with indigenous Australians.

I finished my Master's in International Health and I was in the process of doing a PhD at the University of Sydney in the oral health consequences of normalising poor oral health, because any of you who know, who have worked with Indigenous Australians, unfortunately, they often get to a position where what we would consider poor health, they consider normal.

And so I wanted to look at the oral health consequences of a health system that essentially only treated acute need and failed to address chronic unaddressed problems which is endemic in some of the indigenous population.

But as the political pendulum swing from left to right, I suddenly found myself in 2016, having my boss hand me a letter of termination with tears streaming down his face saying, "'Glenn, The politics has played out such that the government will no longer fund our service and they've changed the way they're providing oral health services.

And even though you've done a master's and you're doing a PhD and you've given 20 years of your life to working in this sector, This is your last day.

And that was a bit of a kick in the teeth for me.

And it's kind of like, I guess, the reality of many people living in Australia that often what we intend to happen doesn't necessarily end up the way that we think it will turn out.

And so I prayed really hard and I said, God, you know, this was my passion.

I was regularly presenting at international conferences on Indigenous oral health.

I knew all of the key players, the key stakeholders.

I think I was holding the flag for that Christian principle that wants to help the disadvantaged.

And then all of a sudden I find myself, as I said, borrowing large sums of money and entering the capitalist end of dentistry where, for the last 10 to 15 years of my life, I fully expect to look at people in the eye and ask for a week's wages for an hour of my time.

And that's a real, real challenge for me.

It's not something that I'm used to or that I enjoy.

So I do feel very much like a fish out of water.

But I think it's when we're at our most vulnerable that God can be the biggest in our stories.

And so my passion, and I guess I'm an experiment in progress.

I'm a data set that you guys can consider, is midway through I'm wanting to make this career shift and say, okay, if I can't be involved in direct ministry using my profession, then maybe I can use my profession to support me in ministry in another capacity.

And so bivocational ministry is the thing that I'm choosing.

When I was born in 1967, Australia was nominally 88% Christian.

Today I don't think we're anything near that, are we?

The 2016 census suggests that there were just over 53%, I think, of Australians that identify themselves as Christian.

But by identifying themselves as Christian, they've got some kind of cultural branding or affiliation with the church that they're likely to choose for their marriage or their christening or their funeral.

But active participation in the Christian faith in Australia is just rapidly falling away.

And we now, if we want to connect with people, are very unlikely to find that something that's branded Christian is going to be their first point of interest.

I think that we all know that statement so well that Christ's method alone will bring true success.

The first part of that statement is that Christ mingled with men.

And I think that it's the mingling, it's the connecting, it's establishing networks with people that is so critical.

And as I thought to myself in my own little existential crisis, now that I've been essentially sacked 3 times in my life, twice by the Aboriginal Medical Service and once by the church.

And pastoral ministry has always been something that's been a burden of mine.

Duty will know that from when I was a young kid.

It's always been a real passion of mine to be involved in ministry.

I thought I can leave a natural network that exists, patients that have been mine for 20 years, and go into pastoral ministry where it's going to be incredibly difficult for me to make connections with people in the community.

And I thought, No, we really have an opportunity as health professionals.

We've established a lot of the basics of that connection that's so necessary to plant the seeds of the gospel in that we have natural networks that exist outside the church.

And it is possible within the Adventist culture to become so totally immersed in the brand of Seventh-day Adventists that we go to a Seventh-day Adventist school, we marry a Seventh-day Adventist, we teach it or work in a Seventh-day Adventist institution, we're buried in a Seventh-day Adventist institution, and when they go and do a forensic analysis of us, we're just filled with marmite and nutmeat.

And I think that there's a real capacity for us to broaden our horizons, as Dr.

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Bi-Vocational Ministry

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