23rd December, 2015
Rev Dr Keith V Garner
Samuel Leigh: The first Methodist missionary to Australia and New Zealand
Wesley Mission, Sydney, 2015
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"We owe pioneers like Leigh much and Garner’s clear and concise 80 page booklet is a great way to connect with this story as well as those of other significant early Christians in Australia." |
It’s easy, sitting in the comfort of today’s churches, to forget how tough it was for the Christian missionary pioneers who first came to Australia. Released earlier this year to mark the 200th anniversary of Samuel Leigh’s arrival in Australia, this booklet, written by Rev Dr Keith Garner, the superintendant and CEO of The Wesley Mission, about the life of the country’s first Methodist missionary is a good reminder.
There’s no doubt that, like his contemporaries, Leigh did it hard when he arrived in Sydney in mid-1815, less than a year after he was ordained. Charged with establishing a Methodist presence while negotiating strained relations with some in the Anglican Church (out of which Methodism had been born), Leigh spent hours in the saddle travelling between Sydney and various outlying communities like Parramatta and Castlereagh, working with minimal resources and support, as he held services for all who sought them.
Progress in reaching people with the Word of God was initially slow, but then, as Garner writes, Leigh was not a man to think himself too important for the small tasks. He recalls Leigh’s response to a letter from a friend in England urging him to return so he could “preach to thousands”. “But I should not have my twelves and twenties all in tears, waiting to receive the Word.”
Leigh’s efforts – which could see him preaching three times a day with a ride of five or six miles between each sermon – were to take a significant toll on his health but that didn’t prevent him from pressing on and even, following a return to England where he married childhood friend Catherine Clewes, heading to New Zealand where, as well as enduring further hardships and finding himself in a battle against cannibalism, in 1823 he established New Zealand’s first Methodist mission station at Whangaroa.
We owe pioneers like Leigh much and Garner’s clear and concise 80 page booklet is a great way to connect with this story as well as those of other significant early Christians in Australia. These include everyone from Rev Samuel Marsden, the chief Anglican chaplain who was dubbed the “flogging parson” by some but who Garner says was a staunch ally of Leigh, the somewhat tragic John Lees, a former member of the New South Wales Corps who built the first Methodist chapel in Australia, and Edward Eagar, a transported forger who played a key role in the early days of the Methodist church in Australia.
But it’s easy to forget that, while we owe pioneers like Leigh much when considering the broader establishment of Christianity in Australia, it was the lives of those around him at the time who he was most invested in. And its the details of how Leigh did just that which bring this story to life.
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