Candid conversations for the church. Host is Ardin Beech of Windsor District Baptist Church, Sydney, Australia. Co-hosted by Jonathan Hoffman.
Coming at you once again this week at Windsor, Arden Beech with doctor Jay.
Jonathan:Great to be with you.
Ardin:Indeed. Indeed. We are smashing it this month.
Jonathan:We are. Thanks for listening.
Ardin:May mission month?
Jonathan:Yeah. May mission month. It's here. We're loving it. Got to yeah.
Jonathan:Just we're just drowning in the updates, which is fantastic. Got to do an interview last time with Joey Millard out in Japan. We're watching videos and things coming in from around the world. Yeah. But, yeah, we're loving May mission month, and, it's a it's a really good reminder as we head into June, because in June, we we're gonna be dealing with the financial business of the church.
Jonathan:So, we have a quarterly meeting, your favorite thing,
Jonathan:Ardin.
Ardin:I know. Live for it.
Jonathan:Live for it. Quarterly meeting on the June 8. It's a Sunday after church, after the morning service. That means you have to get up before ten. But, yeah, June 8, we're gonna be, voting on our annual budget for the next financial year.
Jonathan:So please, yeah, if you're part of this church, member of this church, be checking your inboxes, you'll get some details.
Ardin:Okay. That's it for news, and we are sticking local this week with our special guests, sort of. She comes along to our church in the mornings, but she wasn't from here originally. Gwen Parkhill, good morning.
Gwen:Good morning.
Ardin:It's not even really morning, but we'll stick with it. Yeah. People will be listening in the morning.
Jonathan:They will.
Ardin:Yeah. I think I'm just used to saying good morning to guests. That's right.
Gwen:Feel like it's rude to say good afternoon once you've said good morning.
Ardin:Probably. Probably. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Gwen:Yeah. So I was born in South Africa. My family is South African, and I lived there till I was six, and then we moved to Canada. Wow. And I grew up near Toronto, and I lived there until I was 16, and then I moved here.
Gwen:So I finished my schooling here. My whole family's here. My husband's Australian, and I've got two kiddos that I homeschool.
Ardin:What was the what was the reason for all the moving about? What?
Gwen:It was it no. Was so that wasn't the reason, although my dad did work for IBM, so he was able to go internationally. But South Africa, it was a really rough place to raise kids. So that definitely they wanted to get out. And so we went to Canada.
Gwen:We had family there. And I think the thought behind leaving Canada was just that it was very cold. And they were South African, and they were like, this is a lot of snow. This is for a lot of the year, and so they started looking around. We had more family here.
Jonathan:So Okay.
Gwen:Yeah. That's why we moved out here.
Ardin:Wow. Ended up in Windsor.
Gwen:Yeah. Well, my husband grew up here.
Jonathan:In the Hawkesbury?
Gwen:Yeah. He did.
Jonathan:Okay. There you go. So that's a lot of moving as as Arden said. Did you what did you find the bigger adjustment going from South Africa to Canada or Canada to Australia?
Gwen:Oh, definitely Canada to Australia.
Jonathan:Okay.
Gwen:Yeah. Well, because I was six years old when I went to Canada, and I just that was just kinda fun for me. But when you're 16 and you're leaving everything, like, that's intense. Yeah. There's a lot going on there.
Ardin:Some pretty deep friendships that are gone.
Gwen:Yeah. Yeah. And just coming in here, I came to so Canada doesn't have an HSE or anything like it. So I turned up, took a selective school test, didn't know what it was, got in, but I was told I have to do an HSE. I had no idea what that was, and I just kinda had to figure it out.
Gwen:And then ironically, I went into teaching, and then I went into private tutoring, and then I helped lots and lots of HSE students get through the HSE. So like every point of difficulty in my life has been used later on for something. You
Ardin:must have always thanked your parents that you got to go to Canada and not The United States. Thought a lot of people telling
Gwen:me I'm the fifty first stay. I'm getting so much of that right
Jonathan:now. Yeah. Yeah. When I first met you to be fair I couldn't tell. Was like, Canadian married.
Jonathan:Yeah.
Gwen:Yeah. It's hard. And I was only there nine years which I've been here twenty years. So people doing masks can kind of figure out how old I am now. And despite that, I don't think there's much Australian in my accent.
Ardin:Not a bit.
Gwen:I don't know what that is. Not a bit. No. But if you put me next to a Canadian, you'd be like, okay. There is a difference here.
Jonathan:So tell us how faith came into this picture. Like, when did you when did you come to faith? When did Christ become real to you? What was what was that part of your journey like?
Gwen:University. So my family is not Christian at all, but very intellectual family. So my mom's a university professor in biological sciences. But, yeah, university, I really started pondering things. And I was kind of so okay.
Gwen:Full background was in Canada, I went to a Catholic school. So I had a vague understanding of who Jesus was there.
Jonathan:Mhmm.
Gwen:And then nothing really and searching very much. And then the university just hit a real low point. And I remember because a lot of my faith journey at that point was when I go for walks, I ponder these things at. And I was going for a walk and praying, where are you? Like, where are you, God?
Gwen:Like, I'm feeling horrible. Where are you? And the answer that I felt was, I'm not the one that moved away. You are. Wow.
Gwen:And I very much knew that was Jesus. Mhmm. And so that was when I started going, k. Well, I'm gonna look into this. And then for me, because of the fact that my family's background is very intellectual and academic, and so a major stumbling block for me was that this is a fairy tale that has no intellectual basis.
Gwen:Apologetics was really important. And so a large portion of my uni time was just reading apologetics, listening to debates, really thinking through the intellectual reasons for belief.
Ardin:Can you remember, like, one particular tipping point or one particular intellectual argument that kinda got you across the line?
Gwen:There were a lot. I read C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, and that was the first really well written, well reasoned Christian that I had read, and that was something where I thought that is powerful. Listen to a lot of scientific debates as well, like that there are good reasons to look at this world and say there is intelligence behind it.
Gwen:Mhmm. That was big for me. But part of my journey was that I like, I couldn't point to a point where I became a Christian because there was a time there I went, okay. Intellectually, yes, I believe this. So I guess that makes me a Christian.
Gwen:So I guess I'll go to church. So I had that experience, and then I started reading my Bible and just underlining everything I'm supposed to do, which sounds like it's a good thing. I've had people be like, oh, that's so good. That's a horrible thing to do because what I did was I was entirely law based in my understanding of Christianity. And that will break you, and it did break me at a point there after I was married and had been calling myself a Christian for a long time.
Gwen:And I remember and that's a big part of my story is then praying, well, you told me there'd be joy, and there is no joy in this. There would be peace, and there is no peace in this. I have I'm broken. I feel so broken. I feel so incapable of doing all these things I'm supposed to do.
Gwen:Where are you? My prayer again. Where are you? And I was cleaning the toilet. I don't know if you remember this part of my story.
Gwen:And I just had this, again, a very short clean sentence that I knew was God talking to me. That second time and really the only other time in my life I felt that, and it was, you're a Christian without Christ. Wow. And it was like I had seen the cross. If you had asked me, would have said, oh, of course, you're saved by grace.
Gwen:Like, I knew all the right answers. I had read this a thousand times, but it had never gone from my head to my heart. Where I was like, oh, right. Like, I cannot do this, and that is the point. And I am so broken trying, and that is actually the entire story of the Bible.
Jonathan:That's amazing. And I love the way you put that very clearly for us. A lot of people I find struggle to accept that they could be loved in a way like that. And you talk about the journey from the head to the heart. Yeah.
Jonathan:Like, was there yeah. How did you get how did you get a concept that God was gracious like this? Like, how was your heart kind of softened or warm to that idea?
Gwen:Well, I don't know. I mean, Chris, it was something where I had been going to church and I had been reading the Bible, and I knew that these were the answers. But honestly, in that moment where I felt like you are a Christian without Christ, it was like this crashing. It wasn't a crashing because it was actually a lifting. It was a lifting of the burden.
Gwen:But as though cascading into my heart was this truth that you cannot do this and he already has.
Ardin:Wow.
Gwen:You know, that this it's not just that your sins are forgiven, but it's also that this perfect life that was lived is is yours. You get to be covered by that and you don't have to spend forever burdened under every little piece of what I say is good that you're never gonna be able to achieve. And that was unbelievable for you.
Jonathan:So you said that hit you mid marriage? Yeah. Did your marriage change after No.
Gwen:Well, so my husband knew that I was a Christian, and he had become a Christian alongside me. But I think he came home and thought I'd lost my mind because I was like, oh, yeah. So Jesus, like, he did this for us. He's like, yeah. You told me that you would have told me that yesterday.
Gwen:You would have told me that a week ago. What's going on? And I was incredibly elated, I think he was like, well, she's lost her mind in a new way. That's interesting. So yeah.
Ardin:You talk about brokenness and stuff. Were you in, like, a particularly dark space or anything?
Gwen:I yeah. Emotionally, I was. But it was a brokenness that was coming purely out of trying to be perfect. And isn't that interesting? Because that's so much of if you had asked me, say, ten, fifteen years earlier, I would have said, I am so good.
Gwen:I'm so good. Like, here I am, and I'm the oldest child, and I get the good marks, and I don't go drinking, like, ever. I wasn't even a Christian. I just don't feel like doing it. So to go from, like, compare me to the world, gosh, I just feel so great, to compare me to what the Bible is telling me is good, and I am crushed by the inability to do this.
Gwen:That was huge.
Jonathan:I hear that kind of isolation that that yeah. Just that emotional Yeah. Kinda void and vacuum of Yeah.
Gwen:I I would have said I felt like I couldn't crush myself any smaller. Like, as though the only way to be good enough is if I just almost do nothing. Like, if I just crush myself into this tiny corner then I can perhaps at least not do all the wrong which is amazing because it's not like I a drug dealer. It wasn't I wasn't living this wild life but I think when you look at the standard of scripture and you look at like it's not even just what you do or it's what you say, It's what you think. And it's what you think about what you think, and you suddenly realize that this standard is absurdly high.
Ardin:So once things became relational then from then on, how how was how was life then? How did things change?
Gwen:It was a honeymoon period of peace, followed by the next thing God teaches me, which is like a new kind of breaking. Because I very much like that happened and it was very peaceful, and then I was hit with panic attacks. Seemingly out of the blue, and they were incredibly necessary for me because the thing is that there are all these other patterns in my life that still needed to be broken and changed and remade. And so it was like, gives me a little rest, and then there's the next place that I learn and I grow.
Jonathan:God's obviously given you away with words. Tell us a bit about, yeah, your your kinda learning background when you said you do some editing and some writing and things like that. Tell us a bit about that kinda passion for, yeah, for for speaking and sharing in
Ardin:in that way.
Gwen:Words, that's just been the gift that God gave me. And that was the thing that came very easily and so that's like I've been riding that pony my whole life. Like that's kind of what's got me through school and it just comes easily. And nobody taught me how to do it and it's just purely a gift of God.
Jonathan:Tell us a bit about your neighborhood. Because I understand from conversations that we've had that that God has put you in a very interesting spot. So tell us a bit about, like, what it means like, what home life means and what it means to be in a community, your literal community.
Gwen:Yeah. It's a really interesting one actually because the things that make it hard for me to connect at church, so I've got two kiddos, one is neurodivergent, I would say the other probably is as well. We just really realize it, make it hard for me to be in church all the time connecting with people. Have also led me to choose to homeschool, which means I'm home all the time, and we're out the front of the house, and the kids are playing, and I'm chatty. And so people walk past, and I say hi day after day after day, and I've gotten to know a lot of people, And we have amazing conversations.
Gwen:I don't know what's going on in the world, especially in the last year or so, where people and it's not as if I'm going after them in faith conversations, but they come to me. They know I'm a Christian, and I'm very open about that, and we talk about all sorts of things. There are people who are Christians in the neighborhood that we talk with. There are people who maybe came from a bit of a Christian background, but have a lot of questions that we've been talking for years over things. There are people that are Muslim, We discuss God.
Gwen:We discuss the Trinity. And we just do this in my front lawn. And it happens almost every day. Wow. It's been amazing.
Gwen:And then I've got a bible study with just a few women from a local community. And that came about in December. I decided just before December I had this feeling like I wonder if there is a gospel that's got 24 chapters and do you know off the top of your head which
Ardin:was yeah. So
Gwen:it's like I was just looking through it and I'm like oh Luke does that's so convenient I could do this as an advent thing And so I invited a bunch of people. I invited people that I knew believed in God in some way. And so there were some that were Christians. There are I've got a lot of Mormon friends, so I invited them as well. And then I've got another friend who she was just on my heart.
Gwen:And she had a bit of a Christian background, went off into new age y stuff, and I just felt like I should invite her and I almost didn't because I really don't like putting people on the spot and I decided to invite her and she said yes. Mhmm. And so we started reading it for December. We did a chapter a day. We had a little Facebook messenger group and we would all write about it and God was speaking to her.
Gwen:We could just tell. Like she was just she was there. She was there 10 messages, 20 messages, 70 messages sometimes of thoughts about what was going on in these chapters and we got to the end of Luke and she said, well, can we do another? Yeah. Of course, we could do another.
Gwen:Like, let's go. So we did Proverbs in January '30 '1 days. That was really convenient. And by the end of that, she was like, well, let's do another. So we just kept going and we have not stopped.
Gwen:Awesome. And like just as I was coming and I was reading all her messages about today's reading, which is Genesis.
Jonathan:Wow. That's that's amazing. Yeah. How does that like, how do you do the invite? I I I think it's kind of a lost skill.
Jonathan:A lot of people are just interacting in message boards or common threads, and they don't really, you know, they're not comfortable putting themselves out there. So, like, walk us through an invite. What's going through your mind when you're from the from, like, concept to execution? Like, I I I have this person in mind, and I have an idea that I'd love to bring them into this god conversation. Like, where do you go from that thought?
Gwen:Yeah. Immediately into words. Because this is the thing. Right? So I just mess I just wrote it out.
Gwen:It just came to me at the way that I wanted to phrase it in a very non confrontational, it's not your obligation to do this. If it doesn't feel comfortable, you don't have to. And prayed about it as well and I just sent it off and hoped for the best. And I gave her a thousand outs as well. It's like, you know, it's not a good time.
Gwen:If it doesn't work for you, you know, that's completely fine.
Jonathan:Yep. So kinda de taking off the relational pressure saying, hey, this is not
Gwen:Well, because I don't wanna do that to a person either. I don't want a person coming to Christ because they're doing me a favor.
Ardin:Mhmm.
Gwen:You know? I don't want a person feeling bullied into this. I want this to be like, this is a person I genuinely believe in, and I think he is amazing and transformative. Would you like to walk beside me and we can, like, listen to him together? Let's do that.
Gwen:Also, it's not out of the blue. Like, I had talked to her. She knew me for years. And I've listened to her, and I've listened to her thoughts on things, and there's a whole relationship of respect before I go into it.
Ardin:Yeah. I think that's gonna be the big question for folks listening. I really wanna do that, but how do I do that?
Gwen:How do you do that? Yeah. And I think it has to be natural. Like, it's literally come out of I love Jesus, first and foremost. And I live my faith very imperfectly with a very imperfect family and they see that.
Gwen:But it is genuine and I genuinely care about people and I genuinely care what they think about. And so I've built a whole relationship with people before I ever invite them to something like this. I'm not a door to door salesperson. I'm I'm I wanna be friends with people and I want them to know that I'm there for them even if they don't believe what I believe.
Jonathan:So it sounds like you're interacting with a lot of people who maybe are not familiar with the Bible or they have a different view in the Bible than than you do, which is which is a unique kind of study that I think perhaps a lot of church people are familiar with. A lot of church people, you know, they come from the same perspective. They're just more of reminding one another. How does it go for you as you're both inputting and receiving input from people who may be not starting on the same space? I mean, have you heard have you heard some wild thoughts and like
Gwen:I hear so many wild thoughts. Oh. Yeah. I need, like, a paper bag to breathe into sometimes. Like, it's okay.
Gwen:Yes. Yes. I hear a lot. And I think so there is a verse in I I wanna say it's first Peter three fifteen where it starts by saying sanctify Christ in your heart. Be ready always to give an answer to everyone who asks of you the reason for the hope that is in you.
Gwen:Do so with gentleness and respect. And I love the sandwiching of that, that it begins with the faith in Christ. It ends with gentleness and respect. And then you bring the answers to them, and it can be slow and gentle. And I think also if someone brings you something strange, and they do often, and often it's just a verse out of context, that's a big one, let's go read the verse together.
Gwen:Like, I don't have the whole bible input into my head, but you're telling me this verse is saying something that I for sure know it's not saying. Like, the bible's not saying this. So let's go and read it together. Like, let's read it in context. Let's take a look at the whole chapter maybe, and it will solve itself usually.
Gwen:And you can do that in a very gentle and kind way because I've had all sorts of things bored to me.
Ardin:Because it like, if you're talking with Muslims, say, and I and I've got some Muslim friends at work and we've had some amazing discussions. But you can kind of just give the broad strokes of Christianity and they give the broad strokes of Islam. And you can see it's quite easy to see the differences. Yes. But then with like with Mormons, say, if you if you do that broad stroke, yeah, like, they're in there.
Ardin:Like, they they fit in the box. No worries. But then you you kinda dig a little deeper and, you know, you missed it by that much.
Gwen:It's a whole different story, isn't it? Yeah. And I love love love my Mormon friends, and we are very very similar in a lot of way. And we certainly use the same language. And I think they are as confused by me as I am confused by them sometimes.
Gwen:So we will discuss things until we hurt each other's brains. And it is very much a case of also just saying, well, this is what we believe in a very gentle way and being willing to hear what they believe and we can discuss it. And maybe it sounds the same on the surface and let's just we can dig a little deeper and maybe we're actually meaning very different things. Yeah. I'm also not a very confrontational person.
Gwen:So none of this is coming from like I'm checkmating a person into my beliefs. I'm not fighting with them. I hate fighting with people. It's just a, okay. That's interesting.
Gwen:Like, let's hear your thoughts on that.
Jonathan:Mhmm.
Gwen:I've got some questions. Here's what I think. Like, let's have a discussion.
Jonathan:Before we let you go, I wonder what encouragement you would give to somebody who, you know, maybe it's a young person or maybe someone who's had this their whole life, but, they've been really caught in that perfectionist trap that that you described. And it was just beautiful to hear how freely you said, you know, I'm an imperfect person with an imperfect family, as we all as we all are. Right? But just the way you said that showed me, wow. This is someone who's been just freed of that.
Jonathan:But what would you say to someone who is finding themselves caught in that? They don't they have no peace if if there isn't that that affirmation that they've hit the mark or they've done it right or or they're they're they're within the lane. Like, what would you say to someone who keeps finding themselves confined to that space?
Gwen:I think I would ask them how they feel in that space first of all. Like, is that actually doing to them? What does that actually feel like? Because I would venture to guess that it's breaking them actually and they're falling apart. And then I would say to them that this is actually this is the heart of the Bible.
Gwen:Like this is it. This is the story. If you miss this, nothing else is gonna make sense to you. It's not good news until you understand that it's been done for you. And until you think that you until you understand that and for as long as you think that you need to somehow earn God's love, it's gonna be really awful news because you're never gonna be able to do it, and you're gonna feel really horrible in that.
Gwen:And I think that would be my biggest encouragement is to let it go and to kneel down and to realize that that is the gift. It you're covered in it. You're already free. And then I understand that the other part of that is everybody realizes yet there's still work to be done, but you're gonna do that with the knowledge that you're not gonna be perfect at it, and that it's gonna be a process. And that when fruit comes out in your life, and it will, it will come organically, and it will come out of faith and out of the holy spirit.
Gwen:And you don't need to squeeze that fruit out and fake it because people can tell, and it's gonna hurt you and them.
Ardin:Awesome. I like how we pretend to have a podcast just so we can get people coming and talk to us.
Gwen:I could talk for a very long time.
Ardin:I can't come away feeling blessed every day. We don't even need to record. Oh,
Jonathan:we forgot to hit the button again. Oh, no. It's great.
Gwen:I do actually have one other thing that I thought I should mention in the faith discussions, which is that let the holy spirit guide you because sometimes people are gonna bring things to you that are you don't even know where to begin. It sometimes it can feel like someone has just handed me, like, tangled Christmas lights. And I'm sitting here, I'm like, I don't know how we're gonna begin to untangle this mess. There's a lot going on here. I genuinely feel like God will lead you to say the thing.
Gwen:You don't need to fix another person. You don't need to reach into their life and make them a Christian. God will use you like a gardener, and sometimes you're pulling up a weed, and sometimes you're just watering a plant. And he might very well and usually does give you the thing to say to this person that they will go away with, and it will grow in its own time, or it will help pull the weeds out in its own way. So like I just as an example, I have a Muslim friend who came to me because they don't believe that Jesus died on the cross.
Gwen:He had this whole someone had told him that Barabbas took the place of Jesus on the cross. So there's a lot of places you can go with it. You could go in any direction you could be. There's a lot. And so I just paused and I said, well, do you know anything about Barabbas?
Gwen:I'll tell you what the Bible says about him and why it's such good news because we can see ourselves in him that he was actually set free and Jesus took the place. And then I sort of got this intuition that for him, he felt like he was giving me great news. Jesus didn't die. This is great news. Hurrah.
Gwen:Because what a crummy ending to the story. And so I had to say, this is actually the point of the story. And it's actually the expectation all the way through the Bible that there's gonna be a suffering savior, which he had no idea about. He had no idea about the prophecies or the foreshadowing the Old Testament. So we had this amazing discussion of how you can see this picture developed throughout the whole Old Testament and that this isn't this weird crummy terrible ending that really ruined the great story.
Gwen:This was actually the ending that we were looking for the whole time. And he was like, woah. And that was all he said, but he walked away and it was a woah moment. And I think that if I had come at that intellectually, I could have gone down a lot of different pathways and buried him. And it was very much I just felt like God gave me the thing to tell him that sort of changed how he saw the scripture.
Jonathan:Beautiful. And I love how that's a picture of what we see in scripture when the spirit fills somebody, when the spirit is leading somebody, often the next thing that is given is is utterance is the words. And so and we're commanded not to worry about what to say, you know, when when we put in these difficult situations, but the the words will be provided. So thanks for the encouragement to do that. Awesome.
Jonathan:Thank you so much, Gwen, for joining us. I would love to have you back and hear more how these conversations are going sometime, but thank you. It's fantastic.
Gwen:Thank you for having me, guys. That was a lot fun.
Ardin:Just making evangelism sound like the easiest thing ever.
Jonathan:Yeah. We'll see we'll see you around the traps.
Ardin:That was awesome catching up with Gwen and just such a a natural way of looking at evangelism.
Jonathan:Yeah. I thought it was great how she brought together some key ideas of the gospel, how Jesus has done it all, and how freeing that is when she finally grasp that, the need for the gospel to go from your head to your heart. And the way that she, yeah, was just so ready and able to talk about it and so willing to engage with other people. I feel like in our society sometimes we're conditioned to to really think that people who disagree with us are gonna be hostile or we're not allowed to be ourselves or express our viewpoints if if we know someone else is coming from a different place. And I love how she just doesn't seem to feel that and just, yeah, is ready to to go in and and open herself in the relationships and even inviting people to those bible studies.
Jonathan:Could you imagine what would happen in this area if, you know, half of our church took that approach?
Ardin:Yeah. Yeah. Because if I'm, you know, without kind of feeling guilty, if I'm honest with myself, I've had more converts for Apple than I than I have for Jesus. You know? Like, how easy is it to Yeah.
Ardin:To talk about Apple products to someone, you know, if that's something you're into? You know? What am I doing? Surely Jesus is my my first passion. Like, what?
Jonathan:That's right. That's right. And and I think it's good to be reminded that it's okay to push back against that because my sense with most Christians is not that they're not excited about Jesus, it's that they feel this immense pressure from the world that I'm not allowed to say that. I'm not allowed to go there. And, you know, they forget that actually Christ is the one who's who's reigning and and to trust that he's gonna he's gonna go before us when we when we apply ourselves to sharing his love with others.
Ardin:Well, I think Gwen had some more stories, so we probably need to get her back at some point.
Jonathan:Yeah. I would love to have her back.
Ardin:Thanks once again, doctor Jay.
Jonathan:Adios. Have a good week.