by Bert Meinders

Created on: September 18, 2011

Nearly thirty years ago, I was helping to plan an Easter camp for a youth organisation of which I was president. We were at a weekend retreat to get ourselves suitably motivated and inspired, and two men of about my age (late twenties) had come along. They were recent converts, and the most irritating thing about them, even more annoying than their continual judgements on the rest of us, based on an impossible standard of Christian perfection, was their conversation. Instead of commas, semicolons and full stops, they punctuated every utterance, however mundane with "praise the Lord!" or "glory to God!". I tolerated this as the zeal of the New Christian, but some of the others, especially the schoolteachers, were beginning to walk around with murder in their eyes.

Fortunately, the two young men found us insufficiently pious and went elsewhere to exercise their gifts.

I don't want to judge them harshly, and I didn't want to reduce their intensity then, but they were not what I considered good evangelists. Subjecting seventy or eighty teenagers to them through Easter would, with the best of intentions on their part, have produced several dozen fervent atheists.

At that time, and for too many years afterwards, I wanted to please my father. It was only when I had stopped deliberately trying to please him, when I had become content just to be me, that I found myself pleasing him without effort. For me, not obviously called specifically to evangelism, this approach appears to be the most effective way of spreading God's message of love, hope and virtue. I make no attempt to conceal my Christianity, but neither do I push it in front of people. I simply Am a Christian. People who know me, know that I lead worship in an Anglican church, that I preach, and that I sometimes play the organ. I don't speak in Christian jargon, even among Christians, but I tend not to use slang either, and (profanity only under extreme provocation).

This did not happen overnight. I was just as insufferable as any other new arrival in God's family.

I think the turning point came in 1983 or 1984, at Manfeild (the local racing circuit). It was Mothers' Day, and the local motorcycle gang was called the Mothers. They had intended originally to use a longer, Oedipal name but the police and the City Council made it clear that that word would not be tolerated on their patches, so "Mothers" it was. They had hired the track for the day, and one of my flatmates knew several of their members (he's

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