14th December, 2006

DAVID ADAMS

It was Mal Garvin’s days as a schoolboy in Sydney’s inner western suburbs that helped to create in him a passion for helping Australia’s youth to know Christ. And it’s a passion that has never gone away.

“I was on my knees praying, over a period of time, and saying ‘God whatever it takes to reach Australia and its young people, I’m prepared to pay the price’ and I’d actually see in my mind, a cheque that I’d signed and God had to only put the price in,” says Mal Garvin, founding president of Fusion.

“The great yearning in my life (even) back then was for kids like me to have a chance to know Jesus,” he says, describing that yearning as a pivotal factor in determining how his life would subsequently unfold.

The 65-year-old - who many people know for his 35 years of radio work and in particular his Sunday night show Conversation of the Nation - has recently stepped down as the international director of Fusion, a youth and community organisation he founded that now works not only throughout Australia but in a growing number of countries around the world.

Looking back on his adolescence in working class Sydney, Garvin says that “right there you can see some of the factors of my life which have shaped the direction of the movement”.

He jokes now that during his school years he got the feeling his name was “Garvin, up the back” because everytime a teacher walked into the classroom of the junior tech he went to - in his estimation he was in “one of the lowest classes in one of the lowest schools” - it seemed that’s what they were saying.

Until a teacher named Bill Hagley entered his life.

“I can still remember that as he walked in the room, I felt differently about this fellow...” he says. “I found out later that he was well known in the teaching service and it was said of him that he didn’t teach subjects, he’d teach kids...I had a teacher who, for the first time, just didn’t see what was wrong with me but something that was right with me.”

That encouragement - coupled with the love of his Christian grandmother - would have a major impact on Garvin’s life and within 12 months of leaving school to do a jewellery apprenticeship at the age of 16, Garvin found himself asking Jesus into his heart at a Sydney city mission Easter camp.

“Being handled like this by this teacher, being loved by a grandmother and discovering Jesus...those factors would weave themselves together into the way I think Fusion would eventually develop.”

Garvin says that he really started Fusion as an 18-year-old and recalls spending an intense few weeks around that age praying the same prayer to God about how he could help reach the young people of Australia.

“I was on my knees praying, over a period of time, and saying ‘God whatever it takes to reach Australia and its young people, I’m prepared to pay the price’ and I’d actually see in my mind, a cheque that I’d signed and God had to only put the price in,” he says.

It was only after three weeks, he says, that “the fire fell and consumed the sacrifice”.

“I just had it confirmed in my heart that was a single purpose man - my life’s direction was now established...and I praised God as I never had before.”

Fusion evolved out of that desire to reach young people, initially as a group of eight people who each took a friend on a picnic.

“I preached the sermon and I think only two of them had the courage not to get converted as I dangled them over the pit of hell by a single thread called life," Garvin recalls.

By the age of 21, he had completed his apprenticeship and opened a jewellery business in Hornsby, in Sydney's north. He had also started teaching religious education in schools and recalls some of the kids he taught coming to watch make jewellery after school.

“I have a fabulous time in the schools because they’d give me the hardest classes which were the classes I’d belonged to,” he says. “I was right at home with the kids and the kids could hardly wait to come to Scripture and we had kids running away from other classes to come in.”

'OPEN CROWD': Australian Fusion worker Peter Bradbury (centre, seated) and friends entertaining children as part of the celebrations held during the recent World Cup in Germany.   “We’re one of the best kept secrets of the Christian church in Australia,” Garvin says of Fusion. “Many people know my name because of radio but they don’t know how all pervading the networks are.”

The picnic idea, meanwhile, continued to grow and with many of the kids he taught RE to in schools now wanting to join in, they soon found themselves taking hundreds on day trips to Ourimbah, north of Gosford.

“We’d have fun with the kids all day and we’d share our faith with them and have a straight message at night and music and regularly dozens and dozens would come to faith,” Garvin recalls.

Eventually, around 1960, Garvin hired some rooms in Hornsby, which was to be used by the kids much in the same way a “drop-in centre” now would be.

“Over the years we refined what we were doing and understood why it was working,” he says. “There was a lot of prayer involved and a lot of personal discipline and holding each other accountable as well as building inclusive cultures rather that exclusive relationships.”

The organisation, which has since evolved from solely a youth mission organisation into a youth and community organisation, now employs more than 250 fulltime field workers and thousands of volunteers and works in every state of Australia.

Fusion provides as many as 40,000 “bed nights” every year for homeless people and runs employment, youth, and aged care programs.

In addition, as many as one in five Australians have now been involved with one of Fusion’s “open crowd festivals” at some level - which started out as a way of reaching people at agricultural festivals in Tasmania.

“We’re one of the best kept secrets of the Christian church in Australia,” says Garvin. “Many people know my name because of radio but they don’t know how all pervading the networks are.”

In 1995, Fusion purchased the former hydro-electric town of Poatina in Tasmania which it now uses as its headquarters and where it conducts youth and community work and other vocational training programs (attracting students from across the world), manages tourism facilities including a conference centre and a range of accommodation options, and even runs a radio station - Heart FM - covering central Tasmania (Garvin also uses the facilities to broadcast his weekly national radio show Conversation of the Nation, heard on more than 65 radio stations).

Fusion has also expanded to reach across oceans and now has a presence in Canada, United Kingdom, Jamaica, India, Indonesia and Greece where following the success of its involvement at the Athens Olympics it now has three fulltime workers. It’s also in the early stages of working in Albania, Ghana and Nigeria and Germany.

“We’re very interested in people who love their communities and can have a faith vision of what they’re community can become and will want to work with their young people to see the community become that faith vision,” Garvin says.

He says that while there’s nothing wrong with the seed - the Word of God, “we need to take time to understand the soil into which that seed goes”.

“Once we know what the soil looks like - it’s he who hears and understands - as that understanding takes root, it produces its own life-changing dynamic.”

Garvi, author of the book Us Aussies, says the organisation would rather work as a network than “beat a big drum and have thousands of Christians spectators come.”

“We love training those who come to faith to lead others to faith to lead others to faith,” he says.

Asked what he thinks the greatest challenge for the Australian church is, he says there is a “crisis of confidence” in many parts of the Australian church.

“The church is not confident of it’s place any more,” he says.

Garvin says that while there are “pockets” where churches are growing and identifying with the local community, very often they focus on tomorrow without reference to the past which can result in the vision getting undermined by a lack of understanding and leadership skills.

“But some hang on and learn and there are some places where churches are growing,” he adds. “I’m really interested in helping the churches not steal congregation members from each other but to penetrate itself into its local community.”

Garvin says Fusion's vision does not involve the organisation becoming or replacing the church but is about working with the church.

"We are not a church, we will never become a church, we are a mission agency," he says. "Just as Paul went out with Silas to see the growth of churches, we similarly want to go and, where there are no churches, see a church born and born in such a way that it transforms the heart of the community."

~ www.fusion.org.au