A PIONEER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

God never intended us to live the Christian life in our own strength. Rather, God gives us the Holy Spirit so that we can live the Christian life with divine grace and minister to others with supernatural effectiveness. In this tribute to Rev. Douglas Watt, influential minister of Greyfriars Presbyterian Church, Mt. Eden, Auckland (1953-1967), present minister Rob Yule honours his predecessor's pioneering role in restoring the healing ministry and work of the Holy Spirit to the church today. Rob gave this tribute at Greyfriars on 30 November 2003.

A fortnight ago, on 16 November 2003, the Rev Douglas Watt, an outstanding former minister of Greyfriars, died in Melbourne. He was 93. Douglas Watt served in Greyfriars for 14 years, from 1953 till 1967. His ministry was notable for its evangelical emphasis, openness to the Holy Spirit, the pioneering place he gave to divine healing, and his regular column in the New Zealand Herald.

His Legacy in Greyfriars Church

I want to honour Douglas Watt's ministry, because it saw many developments that we now take for granted in Greyfriars. When he came the Memorial Hall had just been opened - then the largest hall in Auckland after the Town Hall. During his time the church interior was renovated and extended, the present communion table and elders' chairs were installed, the pipe organ was enlarged and reconstructed, the Youth Centre on Windmill Road was built, and the distinctive Mt. Eden Road frontage was added - with its entrance porch, spire, cloister, and choir room.

Douglas Watt's ministry was a remarkable and creative period in Greyfriars. Aileen Kirkness remembers the church being filled Sunday after Sunday, and chairs having to be brought into the aisles and cross aisle to accommodate them.

Douglas Watt engaged the first employed staff in Greyfriars, including the first paid Parish Visitor, Irene Powley, and a deaconess, Catherine Gillanders (later Rev. Catherine Morley), who became Greyfriars' first overseas missionary - to the New Hebrides (Vanuatu).

During his ministry Mrs. Jean Eaton started the legendary Greyfriars' Play Group for pre-school children and their caregivers, still going strong after 35 years - which must be a record for any local church-based community ministry in New Zealand.

Even the name 'Greyfriars' dates from Douglas Watt's ministry. This church was originally known as the 'Mount Eden Presbyterian Church'. The name 'Greyfriars' was adopted after Greyfriars Church, Edinburgh, where the people of Scotland first signed the National Covenant on 1 March 1638, to preserve the Reformed faith and the freedom of the church from political interference during the reign of Charles I. The name expresses a determination to maintain the Christian faith from dilution by social pressure or political correctness.

His Ministry of Divine Healing

What I most want to honour about Douglas Watt is his pioneering role in restoring the healing ministry to its rightful place in church life in New Zealand. Long before it was fashionable, Douglas Watt held regular Sunday afternoon services for 'divine healing' - as it was then known. These were held both in Greyfriars church, and at Ellen Melville Hall in High Street, central Auckland.

In an article in Logos magazine (May 1967) just as he was leaving Greyfriars, Douglas Watt tells how he first became convinced of the validity of the healing ministry. As a twelve year old boy (that would have been in 1922) he heard an English woman minister, Dr. Maude Royden, preach on the subject of war being outside the will of God. She gave an illustration which stuck in his mind:

'Suppose a child brought home a model that he had made, say from matchboxes. His mother admires it and puts it on the mantelpiece in a place of honour for all to see. Next morning the model is discovered crushed and broken on the hearth tiles. Would not that mother question every child in the house except the little creator of the thing about the destruction it had undergone ? She would know beyond any shadow of doubt that the maker was not to blame for its present condition. '

'The preacher said nothing about spiritual or divine healing,' Douglas Watt writes, 'but God used that illustration to show me even then what was his attitude to disease and desolation in the human situation. That was a momentous evening in my life. Thereafter I had no doubts whatever that God was on the side of health and everything constructive and beneficial. When I came to study the Scriptures more closely I found every justification there for the feelings that I held. '

In the nineteen fifties it was common to accept illness as a visitation from God. It was something God sent, or at least permitted, so it had to be bourn with resignation and acceptance - though it was OK to visit a doctor to get better! Illness was seen as something laid on us by a wise and loving God. Douglas Watt tells that when he became a minister it was 'no easy task' to counteract 'this still persistent sense of resignation in people', almost amounting to fatalism, which robs people of any faith they can be healed.

His Experience of the Holy Spirit

The critical turning point for Douglas Watt was his growing awareness in the mid nineteen-sixties of the power of the Holy Spirit. He met a number of world leaders in the healing ministry, including Agnes Sanford, the well-known writer and lecturer. Agnes Sanford (1897-1982) had a Presbyterian background though she was married to an Episcopalian minister. Her healing ministry developed after study of the Scriptures and being healed of long-standing depression. Her book The Healing Light (1947) became a best seller. After experiencing a definite empowering of the Holy Spirit, she and her husband launched a School of Pastoral Care and were instrumental in taking the Pentecostal experience of the Spirit into many of the historic churches. Douglas Watt was prayed for by Agnes Sanford that he would have a greater infilling of the Holy Spirit.

At the time, like so many ministers and Christians when challenged about the Holy Spirit, Douglas Watt thought this was a bit presumptuous. 'I was of the opinion that I had a fair measure of the Holy Spirit's strengthening and power.' But then he went to Holland to give some lectures in a School of Pastoral Care, and met David du Plessis. David du Plessis (1905-87) was an early South African Pentecostal who gained the nickname 'Mr. Pentecost' because he was instrumental in taking the ministry of the Holy Spirit to the World Council of Churches and the Vatican. In Holland, David du Plessis prayed for Douglas Watt.

Returning to New Zealand, Watt recognised that something was different. 'I had not been in the Dominion for very long before the full Pentecostal experience was mine. Then I knew the difference! The power was there, the authority was there, the joy was there in a way that was not possible before. I could now demonstrate in a new way altogether and against the background of relaxation of mind and spirit that was truly helpful to my own soul and to other folk as well!'

This situation was just like that of Jesus following his baptism, as described in the Gospels (Luke 4: 14-43). Before his baptism, Jesus lived a life of obscurity and anonymity, the son of a carpenter in a provincial Galilean village. After the Holy Spirit came on him at his baptism, something was different. The power was on. News about Jesus spread spontaneously. The sick were healed, evil spirits ceased tormenting and oppressing people, people came from near and far to hear his authoritative teaching.

His Endorsement of Charismatic Renewal

Shortly after this experience of the Holy Spirit, Douglas Watt wrote about it in his column in the New Zealand Herald:

'I have to take my stand beside my fellow townsman Edward Irving (I was born in Annan, Dumfriesshire) and state my belief that the use of tongues in the form of ecstatic utterance or as an expression of communion with God is perfectly Scriptural. Nor should it be looked upon as an emotional extravagance. '

Edward Irving (1792-1834) was minister of the Church of Scotland parish in London where in the 1831 people began prophesying and speaking in tongues. Irving was censured by the Presbytery of London in 1832 for allowing men and women not properly ordained to speak in the services. Expelled from his pulpit in 1832, and removed from the Church of Scotland ministry in 1833, Irving founded the Catholic Apostolic Church, a forerunner of the modern Pentecostal movement.

Perhaps because of this controversial background, Douglas Watt held that speaking in tongues 'should be used only in private devotion and not in public meetings. 'But he also stated that the widespread manifestation of tongues today 'cannot be dismissed as mass hysteria'.

Douglas Watt's ministry in Greyfriars came to an end just as what we now know as the charismatic movement was beginning. He was a pioneer, and had no models of how to apply this 'neo-Pentecostal movement' (as it was then called) in a mainstream church. So he was wise to be discreet in the way he introduced these things.

However, there was one thing Douglas Watt was firm about. He saw this new awareness of the Holy Spirit as 'God's answer to this wretched secular Christianity' which was then just beginning to cloud people's hearts and minds. 1967, when his ministry in Greyfriars came to an end, was the year when Lloyd Geering, Principal of the Presbyterian Church's Theological Hall in Dunedin, was tried for heresy for denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Douglas Watt ensured that Greyfriars became known as a church that holds to the historic Christian faith and to supernatural Christianity. 'To have experienced the power of the Holy Spirit', he writes, 'is to know with a conviction that nothing can shake, that there is indeed a realm of the supernatural, that God is a person, that it is his delight to talk freely with us as his friend, and to empower us to do the work of his Kingdom.'

Rob Yule, 30 November 2003

© 2003, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church