DAVID ADAMS talks to Norfolk Island’s new Church of England chaplain, Rev David Fell…
It’s a challenging time on Norfolk Island, a hilly dot in the Pacific Ocean some 1,400 kilometres east of Brisbane. Home to slightly more than 2,000 people, it was hard hit by the global financial crisis and now its unique status as Australia’s only self-governing off-shore territory looks certain to be changed as a bill makes its way through Federal Parliament which will see the island’s parliament replaced by a council.
For Anglican minister Rev David Fell, it’s a good time to be on the island. He and his wife Crystal moved with their three young children to the island a few months ago, the first permanent Church of England (as the Anglican Church is called on the island) minister to be located there since 2010.
A NEW MISSION: Rev David Fell and his wife Crystal with their children (l to r): Marigold, two, Ernest, six months, and Wendell, four.
WHAT IS THE BUSH CHURCH AID SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA?
Founded in 1919, The Bush Church Aid Society of Australia provides support for people ministering in regional, rural and remote Australia.
Mark Short, the BCA’s national director, says the organisation, which works in partnership with various Anglican Church dioceses as well as people from “all Christian backgrounds and none”, is currently supporting 35 couples around Australia.
They’re located in places as far afield as the Kimberleys in Western Australia, Kangaroo Island off the southern coast of South Australia and, once again, Norfolk Island.
Rev Short says the BCA has long used modern technologies in bringing Christ to remote areas.
“So as long ago as the 1920s we were pioneering the use of airplanes in evangelism and pastoral work and also medical work. These days we continue to make use of modern communication technology to both support our workers on the ground…”
Rev Short says the BCA was also engaged in developing web-based resources to help Christians and small congregations in the bush “to learn and grow even if they don’t have fulltime pastors in their town”.
~ www.bushchurchaid.com.au
– DAVID ADAMS
“(W)e’re here at a really key time, I think, to do Christian ministry and I think this is a time when the Gospel will shine and speak loudly into people’s lives…” says Rev Fell, speaking to Sight by phone recently. “We don’t know the future, God knows (but) whatever happens…we’re happy to be here.”
While he’d never set foot there until earlier this year, Rev Fell, who previously served as an assistant minister at St Matthew’s Church in Manly, did have a connection to the island prior to his arrival – his parents-in-law had previously worked here as teachers and remembered their time on the island fondly.
So it perhaps wasn’t surprising when an article in the Anglican publication Southern Cross which mentioned that the Church of England hadn’t had a permanent minister on the island since 2010 attracted his interest.
A meeting with the Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Robert Forsyth, followed and out of that came the idea of him taking up the position of fulltime chaplain on the island.
Given there was no budget for such a position, however, Rev Fell said that even then he felt it was a “long shot” and handed the matter over to God. So when he received word that the church’s South Sydney Regional Council had approved funding for the position for five years, Rev Fell says he and his wife saw that as “a big yes from God, as much as anything else”.
Rev Fell was ordained as the island’s fulltime chaplain soon after arriving on there earlier this year in a ceremony attended by Bishop Forsyth and a number of the previous short-term ministers who had served on the island as well as members of his own family.
He said he chose to have the ceremony conducted on Norfolk as a deliberate statement of his and his family’s commitment to ministry there. “We could have had that in Sydney and packed Manly with friends and well-wishers but part of the reason for that…was that it was us saying a big yes to Norfolk Island.”
While his position is being funded by the Diocese of Sydney on a sliding scale for five years with the aim that it will be fully supported by the local church at the end of that time, he’s also receiving ministry support from The Bush Aid Society of Australia, an organisation that supports clergy working in remote areas.
“They’re the experts on remote ministry and they’ve been on Norfolk Island before,” says Rev Fell, referring to when the ministry supported the last fulltime Church of England on the island – Rev Captain Rod Oldfield, and his wife Christine. “So for them it’s a way of reconnecting with one of their mission locations.”
Rev Fell describes the BCA, who will send out a field worker to visit them on the island every 18 months, as being very “pro-active and caring and prayerful” in their support.
A NEW HOME: Top – The ordination of Rev Fell on Norfolk Island; and Bottom – the natural beauty of the remote isle.
The Church of England is one of only a handful of churches operating on the island and is one of the two largest – the Seventh Day Adventists being the other. It’s based at two locations: a chapel completed in 1880 for the Church of England’s Melanesian Mission, known as St Barnabas’, and a former schoolhouse in the World Heritage Area of Kingston, constructed as part of the second convict settlement and converted into a church, now known as All Saints’ or the Pitcairners’ Church, following the resettlement of former Pitcairn Islanders there in 1856.
The latter church is a reminder of how the history of the Church of England on Norfolk is intrinsically intertwined with the arrival of the Pitcairn Islanders. Their story is an amazing one. Having settled on even remoter Pitcairn Island following the infamous mutiny on the HMS Bounty in 1790, what was initially a society characterized by murderous violence, disease and drunkenness had, over time, transformed into something else.
With only the Bounty’s Bible and a Book of Common Prayer to read, what remained of the community established by the mutineers – led by the only surviving mutineers John Adams and Ned Young – had found a new purpose in God.
“And so when that little community were discovered by whalers, they were holding regular services and saying prayers before meals and kind of being schooled out of the Book of Common Prayer,” says Rev Fell. “It’s a great story, the power of the Bible and the power of the Gospel to change people and how these mutineers, just with the Books of Common Prayer and the Bible, had sort of formed a Christian society. And so they had all this support from London to have them resettled somewhere bigger.”
That place was Norfolk Island and to this day there are those living on Norfolk Island who very much consider themselves Pitcairners.
Rev Fell, meantime, says that the family has adjusted well to living on the island in the short time they’ve been there, noting that they had a taste of what living in such a remote location means soon after their arrival.
“(W)e got here during a fuel shortage, a petrol crisis. Bad weather meant the petrol tankers couldn’t get in with the petrol to the island…and the whole place was on fuel rationing. That was kind of ‘Hey, welcome, you live on an island’.”
Rev Fell says that while he can sometimes forget he’s on an island – the hilliness of the island, which only measures roughly five by eight kilometres, means you can’t always see the ocean – a trip to the top of its one mountain, Mt Pitt, soon changes that. “When you go up there, you get that sense of smallness, that hang on, you’re on a rock, in the middle of the ocean.”
~ www.norfolkislandchurchofengland.com
