The Two-Day Course
At a recent Men’s Breakfast our guest speaker was a bush poet who shared with us some of his poetry. Some poems were quite humorous, some were thought-provoking, and still other poems were poignant as he touched on the effects of the current drought on our community. However one particular poem really got me thinking. It was called “The Two-Day Course”. Regrettably I don’t have the words of that poem but let me share with you the story-line.
There’s a farmer who has been working his land for decades but recently he went to buy some supplies for treating his sheep only to be told he could now only purchase those products on condition that he first did a two-day course to qualify him for using them. Soon after he got a letter from a government department informing him that if he wanted to keep marketing his products they would require him to attend a two-day course. The poem went on to relate that this farmer had used rifle and shotgun for years to control vermin on his land but now his gun licence was about to be revoked unless he did a two-day course on gun safety. Another issue was that of handling chemicals – such as weed-killer – for which he now needed to attend yet another two-day course. The bottom line of the poem was that the farm was now going to ‘rack and ruin’ because the farmer was too buy attending two-day courses to properly care for the business of the farm.
Some tradies and small-business owners will relate to that poem. I recall the utter frustration of a concrete-tank builder as some government department tried to impose workplace-health-and-safety measures that almost made it impossible for him to do his work. He too knew all about two-day courses.
Teachers at our Christian Schools will be able to relate to that poem too. The issue is not just the “two-day-course”. The issue is government red-tape and bureaucracy. Right through the 1970s and 1980s I was involved with the Christian-Parent Controlled School movement. I returned to it after 2009 with my second family and it struck me immediately how much more red-tape our schools now have to process.
I could mention other examples. When I first retired as a Pastor I found myself living around the corner from a Hostel and Nursing Home for elderly people. Some folk there did their afternoon exercise by walking around the block and I got to know some of them. It seemed to me that there was room for some pastoral visitation to the residents so I went to the office and volunteered, telling them that in my forty years of Ministry I had done a lot of visiting with elderly folk. The lady in charge seemed genuinely pleased at my offer to volunteer. She introduced me to their social worker and program manager who gave me a huge pile of paperwork to read with lots of forms to sign off on and seeking approval for their institution to run a police-check on me. I never did go back.
Why is there this dramatic increase in “two-day courses”? Why are so many organisations being buried under loads of government red-tape? Part of the answer is in the first letter of that Calvinist acrostic: TULIP! It is the Total Depravity of the human heart that makes all this necessary. Our culture flouts God’s laws and His standards and so society becomes increasingly dysfunctional. The only solution is for our governments to enforce codes that were once adhered to voluntarily as part of our Judaeo-Christian ethic.
Let me give you a very cringe-worthy example of how that works itself out. The Royal Commission into institutional child sexual abuse has shown that institutions in Australia (including the Christian church) by and large, do not have a good record when it comes to caring for kids. Too many leaders bent God’s moral law to suit themselves. The upshot is that now most churches have to run their own “two-day course” on child-safety. It has meant a lot of “red tape” for those who lead children’s ministries, as forms have to be filled in and notices given that thirty years ago were unheard of. As someone recently said to me, “This is killing voluntary work in the churches!”
It seems to me that the only answer is a revival of true faith and an awakening in our nation through the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s worth praying for.
John Westendorp