The Irreverent Mr Black
26th January 2009, 10:00 PM
http://rynosseros.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/gamaliel.jpg
Artist's totally incorrect impression
I like to arrive very early when I'm due to interview or meet in a place I don't know. It's not so much a tradecraft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradecraft) thing, (would you believe my mp3 randomiser just popped up the theme for Danger Man - "Secret Agent Man"?) as a means of setting myself at ease. If affairs go completely to custard, it's always handy to know where a good coffee or stronger can be found. Then, too, there's always the things which are best found out early, like whether there's a glue factory just upwind of your prospective office.
With this kind of reservation in mind, I drove into Coaltown. The printed matter advertising AOG Preacher School's Coaltown Extension Campus hadn't supplied any pictures of the building, and the street map was rather small and vague. I had it down to a few hundred yards... ah, here was a large stone church hall, the kind of thing you'd expect if the AOG had taken over an older, moribund church or a post-Uniting Church leftover Ex-Methodist.
http://rynosseros.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/typical_old_church_7.jpg
Like this old church, it was.
I found a park and walked into the huge hall. Bloody deserted. Looked here, looked there, did a few hollow "Hello-o-o-o" noises, all to no avail. This didn't appear to be the place. I sat in the car and checked the map more closely. The street number was not given, but this hall only bordered on the named street. A few doors down... was this grotty little Queenslander house anything to do with the college? There was no number on the letterbox, and the yard looked fairly nondescript, but then I noticed a large brick building around the corner, which was just tasteless enough to be an AOG church.
http://rynosseros.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/queenslander.jpg
Like this, only no garden or fence.
Oh yeah. It was the "college", all right. A little, tacky house, maybe in slightly worse order than my own place (and that's no palace). I had a couple of hours to kill, so I wandered a few hundred yards to a small shopping mall, where I found a second-hand bookstore (bliss!) and a coffee shop (even better!), and settled to wait.
***********
It was time for the "orientation night". Up the stairs of the little house we wandered, vague and out-of-place. The house was a three-bedroom place, and the rooms had been repurposed, so that the bathroom held a few dozen kiddie-chairs and kiddie-tables, stacked solidly in such a way only the handbasin could be used. There was a toilet below, in a small fibro-cement enclosure under the back stairs. The kitchen/dining room was small, and divided by a waist-height counter.
Through the door lay what would have once been the lounge, and six feet of verandah which had been annexed to make a classroom.
The classroom.
The two lesser bedrooms were set up as "library"-cum-computer-room (two computers!) and an office for two of the lecturers. The central (master) bedroom was the principal's office.
The one concession to western civilisation was a large, reverse-cycle air-conditioner, set up to deliver its blessing of hot or cold air principally for the benefit of the person lecturing.
I can't remember a lot of the intro speech. We were told we were god's future leaders, called to do his work, yadda yadda, and that the college's emphasis was on equipping the church with qualified pastors, with knowledge of the bible, church history and all that, and the empowerment of the holy spirit. (Let's just make a side-note that Blackie had not yet done the Tongues Thing at this stage.) There were a lot of things we weren't told on the first evening. Perhaps if I'd been told those things, I'd have driven home right then, and started my "Dear Church, yuck-foo" letter.
The only premonition I had was an incident during the meet-n-greet after the orientation talk. The Great Oz, principal of the college-in-a-closet, was loudly advocating his idea that drug users and alcoholics should be locked up in camps and forcibly, er, "corrected".
The Leftist Known As Blackie was a tad perturbed. e, the overriding principle of xtianity was its freedom from the legalistic constraints of judaism, sort of "Grace forgives, and you do the right thing of your own free will", rather than "This is what god says must be done, and we will ensure you do it (Implied: OR ELSE!)".
http://rynosseros.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nazi-jesus-christian-conservative.jpg
Some people view things differently...
I spoke to him. "So you would impose a theocracy, in which a person's desire to follow god was irrelevant?"
He didn't disagree.
***********
Our lecturers (whom we were yet to meet) would be:
The Great Oz (Principal, Doctorate in Something - details shifted under pressure);
The Grand Nagus (a pastor with some unknown tertiary qualification);
Pastor Pure'n'Simple (qualified electrical engineer); and
Pastor Malaprop (doddering old git with teaching degree).
This was not a team selected for excellence. It was the sum total of those available with the minimum qualifications needed to pass as teachers in the various modules that would equip us with the appropriate MacDiplomas (and, more importantly, qualify us to receive student allowance, and the school to get whatever government dollars it could).
The church clerical staff were used when possible. In addition, The Great Oz's helicopter wife interfered and micromanaged things, and Igor, the Unpaid Techie Volunteer, looked after computer things for the church and the college. Igor and I would become pretty good friends over time.
The second-year class numbered perhaps six, none of whom appeared to be in full-time study, and who would drift in and out as day-jobs and other stuff permitted.
First-year class was a core of Sad Red Girl, Tropic Girl, Token Pretty Girl, Survivor Girl, Officer's Wife, Minister's Wife, Lucky, Sleepy, Hungry, and me.
Settle in, you're going to learn a lot more about us before you're done.
Next Time: The Pastor Factory (Part 2)
Author's note: this brings us to the end of the episodes I had saved up.
I'll be doing my best to give you an episode a day from here on. There's this annoying thing called "life", which may get in the way now and then.
Do your best to be understanding, and I'll do my best to be regular with the posts, and not to bore your socks off.
Artist's totally incorrect impression
I like to arrive very early when I'm due to interview or meet in a place I don't know. It's not so much a tradecraft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradecraft) thing, (would you believe my mp3 randomiser just popped up the theme for Danger Man - "Secret Agent Man"?) as a means of setting myself at ease. If affairs go completely to custard, it's always handy to know where a good coffee or stronger can be found. Then, too, there's always the things which are best found out early, like whether there's a glue factory just upwind of your prospective office.
With this kind of reservation in mind, I drove into Coaltown. The printed matter advertising AOG Preacher School's Coaltown Extension Campus hadn't supplied any pictures of the building, and the street map was rather small and vague. I had it down to a few hundred yards... ah, here was a large stone church hall, the kind of thing you'd expect if the AOG had taken over an older, moribund church or a post-Uniting Church leftover Ex-Methodist.
http://rynosseros.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/typical_old_church_7.jpg
Like this old church, it was.
I found a park and walked into the huge hall. Bloody deserted. Looked here, looked there, did a few hollow "Hello-o-o-o" noises, all to no avail. This didn't appear to be the place. I sat in the car and checked the map more closely. The street number was not given, but this hall only bordered on the named street. A few doors down... was this grotty little Queenslander house anything to do with the college? There was no number on the letterbox, and the yard looked fairly nondescript, but then I noticed a large brick building around the corner, which was just tasteless enough to be an AOG church.
http://rynosseros.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/queenslander.jpg
Like this, only no garden or fence.
Oh yeah. It was the "college", all right. A little, tacky house, maybe in slightly worse order than my own place (and that's no palace). I had a couple of hours to kill, so I wandered a few hundred yards to a small shopping mall, where I found a second-hand bookstore (bliss!) and a coffee shop (even better!), and settled to wait.
***********
It was time for the "orientation night". Up the stairs of the little house we wandered, vague and out-of-place. The house was a three-bedroom place, and the rooms had been repurposed, so that the bathroom held a few dozen kiddie-chairs and kiddie-tables, stacked solidly in such a way only the handbasin could be used. There was a toilet below, in a small fibro-cement enclosure under the back stairs. The kitchen/dining room was small, and divided by a waist-height counter.
Through the door lay what would have once been the lounge, and six feet of verandah which had been annexed to make a classroom.
The classroom.
The two lesser bedrooms were set up as "library"-cum-computer-room (two computers!) and an office for two of the lecturers. The central (master) bedroom was the principal's office.
The one concession to western civilisation was a large, reverse-cycle air-conditioner, set up to deliver its blessing of hot or cold air principally for the benefit of the person lecturing.
I can't remember a lot of the intro speech. We were told we were god's future leaders, called to do his work, yadda yadda, and that the college's emphasis was on equipping the church with qualified pastors, with knowledge of the bible, church history and all that, and the empowerment of the holy spirit. (Let's just make a side-note that Blackie had not yet done the Tongues Thing at this stage.) There were a lot of things we weren't told on the first evening. Perhaps if I'd been told those things, I'd have driven home right then, and started my "Dear Church, yuck-foo" letter.
The only premonition I had was an incident during the meet-n-greet after the orientation talk. The Great Oz, principal of the college-in-a-closet, was loudly advocating his idea that drug users and alcoholics should be locked up in camps and forcibly, er, "corrected".
The Leftist Known As Blackie was a tad perturbed. e, the overriding principle of xtianity was its freedom from the legalistic constraints of judaism, sort of "Grace forgives, and you do the right thing of your own free will", rather than "This is what god says must be done, and we will ensure you do it (Implied: OR ELSE!)".
http://rynosseros.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nazi-jesus-christian-conservative.jpg
Some people view things differently...
I spoke to him. "So you would impose a theocracy, in which a person's desire to follow god was irrelevant?"
He didn't disagree.
***********
Our lecturers (whom we were yet to meet) would be:
The Great Oz (Principal, Doctorate in Something - details shifted under pressure);
The Grand Nagus (a pastor with some unknown tertiary qualification);
Pastor Pure'n'Simple (qualified electrical engineer); and
Pastor Malaprop (doddering old git with teaching degree).
This was not a team selected for excellence. It was the sum total of those available with the minimum qualifications needed to pass as teachers in the various modules that would equip us with the appropriate MacDiplomas (and, more importantly, qualify us to receive student allowance, and the school to get whatever government dollars it could).
The church clerical staff were used when possible. In addition, The Great Oz's helicopter wife interfered and micromanaged things, and Igor, the Unpaid Techie Volunteer, looked after computer things for the church and the college. Igor and I would become pretty good friends over time.
The second-year class numbered perhaps six, none of whom appeared to be in full-time study, and who would drift in and out as day-jobs and other stuff permitted.
First-year class was a core of Sad Red Girl, Tropic Girl, Token Pretty Girl, Survivor Girl, Officer's Wife, Minister's Wife, Lucky, Sleepy, Hungry, and me.
Settle in, you're going to learn a lot more about us before you're done.
Next Time: The Pastor Factory (Part 2)
Author's note: this brings us to the end of the episodes I had saved up.
I'll be doing my best to give you an episode a day from here on. There's this annoying thing called "life", which may get in the way now and then.
Do your best to be understanding, and I'll do my best to be regular with the posts, and not to bore your socks off.