jQuery Slider

You are here

Faith in a very Christian journey

Faith in a very Christian journey

http://bunbury.yourguide.com.au/news/national/national/general/faith-in-a-very-christian-journey/1373473.aspx?storypage=0
December 2008

Phillip Heath has thin, sandy hair and a pink complexion. He dresses conservatively, usually in a dark grey suit, and speaks in a soft, deliberate voice.

When he encounters a group of year 7 students in the lift at St Andrew's Cathedral School in Sydney, where he is headmaster, and exchanges high-fives with them, he looks a little, well, nerdy, but in the endearing way of a fogey who is trying to be cool.

But, most of all, he is diplomatic - almost in the extreme. So when Heath, who recently announced he was quitting to accept the principal's job at Radford College in Canberra, referred in last Saturday's Herald to the famously conservative theology of the Sydney Anglican diocese, he intended to provoke but not offend, to dissent but not argue.

"I don't know how candid I should be," he said last week, "but Sydney Anglicanism goes through its ebbs and flows. It's a lot more precise and defined right now than it was in '80s."

Asked if this was a polite way of saying Sydney Anglicanism had become too rigid, he paused, laughed and added: "Yes, it probably is."

His critique, such as it was, was not well received by powerful interests in the diocese and the controversy threatened to overshadow his last few months in the job that he has held for the past 14 years and filled, by almost unanimous agreement, with great success.

Since he arrived, the school has more than doubled its enrolment, from 500 to 1250 students, and become co-educational. In 1999 girls began enrolling for years 10, 11 and 12; this year they began enrolling in kindergarten, completing Heath's plan for a fully integrated school.

He also set up Gawura, a school within a school for 31 Aboriginal students whose literacy and numeracy skills have shot up. Heath did not (and still does not) intend to leave with a passing shot at the diocese.

But, as he outlined in a recent two-hour interview with the Herald , he is eager to explain the challenge of running a Christian school - under the auspices of a diocese that is determinedly reformed, Protestant and evangelical - in which there are students from 40 different faith traditions. "Generation Y kids, and their families, I might add, would absolutely refuse an institutionalised belief, indoctrination, if you will," he says.

"They hate it. They reject it, utterly reject it." That poses an awesome challenge to a teacher who is Christian to his core and who has experienced his own sometimes fraught spiritual journey.

HEATH, a 49-year-old father of a son who is at university and a daughter in year 9 at the Cathedral School, was, in his words, "Homo religiosus". It is the term used to describe someone whose religiosity is so intense that it overwhelms every other part of his or her character.

He grew up in Bulli, just north of Wollongong, in a classic Irish Catholic, working-class family, the second of five children. (His sister died at birth and a younger brother died, aged 21, in a car crash.) "I was an altar boy," he recalled.

"I was very keen on it. I liked the ritual. I liked the liturgy. I took it terribly seriously, went to confession frequently. I was Homo religiosus, really. "I was seriously considering, I mean seriously considering, what in Catholic parlance was called a vocation [to the priesthood]."

Heath's father laboured in the local brickyard and was a pillar of the St Vincent de Paul Society; his mother was a stalwart of the Legion of Mary. He was captain of St Paul's College, Bellambi, and when he matriculated he went to the University of Wollongong to study English and history.

It was at university that Heath first encountered the Evangelical Union. "I needed [my Catholicism] to be challenged," he recalls. "It had slightly mystical, even slightly superstitious - which is the Irish Catholic way - elements to it." In fact, Heath became angry with his Catholicism.

"I felt I had no real education in the Scriptures or the basis of belief. I churned out the words [of the catechism] yet I seemed to know nothing. But I bumped into evangelical Anglicans who could trot out proof texts and doctrinal statements.

I was cross that I had no facility to defend my own position with anything like their alacrity." Three issues sealed his decision to abandon Catholicism and the possibility of the priesthood. He could not accept the church's celibacy requirement for clergy; he met his future wife in the Evangelical Union; and "there was a moment at university when I remember adopting a more biblio-centric view of faith".

That moment came in his third year of university. He immersed himself in the history of the Protestant reformation, ultimately receiving a first-class honours degree for his thesis on a dispute between two puritan theologians about redemption and what was happening on the cross at the time of the crucifixion.

Heath took to Protestantism with the fervour of the convert. "I think it's fair to say that I had that kind of stridency that you get after you have adopted a different theological position," he admits.

He was also beginning a broader cultural transformation, especially when he got his first teaching job at Trinity Grammar School in Summer Hill, an institution at the heart of the old Church of England establishment.

"I moved worlds to Trinity, where they practised cricket on a turf wicket," he recalls. "I had never seen anything like that, let alone imagine I could teach there." Trinity's headmaster, the patrician traditionalist Roderick West, had marked Heath out as a future school leader, if not at Trinity then somewhere within the Anglican establishment.

If anyone in the Sydney diocese were questioning Heath's commitment to the church after his comments last Saturday, they would do well to note the personal cost of his conversion. "My parents were devastated," he says. "It took a long time for that to be healed. My brothers didn't care.

They said, 'That's fine. Whatever you like, mate. It's all good.' "But mum and dad were pretty wounded by it and there was a bit of a personal price to pay. They were hurt because mum, particularly, was wistful about the possibility of a priest in the family."

For the past 25 years, Heath has also wrestled with the question of whether he should have become an Anglican minister. "You've touched on one of the great personal tensions of my life," he says. But he now sees a larger, more practical purpose to his personal religious narrative of change and diversity.

THE Cathedral School sits in the centre of Sydney's downtown. As the city, with the country, has transformed itself over the past 25 years, so too has the school. It now has one of the most diverse student populations in Australia, with children from 40 different religious traditions, including Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, most Christian denominations and a host of indigenous spiritualities.

Just metres from the school, however, is St Andrew's Cathedral, where, as in most churches around the world, the message from the pulpit suggests a particular, even singular, path to salvation and enlightenment. It is at this intersection of faith and learning that Heath experiences a creative tension.

"I think the birth of postmodernism and the thriving nature of liberal theology around the world has forced people to be a lot more strident and emphatic and claim turf with more vigour," he says, with characteristic caution.

"It has elicited that response from the church leadership. I respect that, I respect what it's on about, don't get me wrong. But as a head of school where there are 40 different faith traditions, sometimes those views expressed so strongly are unhelpful for me."

He has tried, in two ways, to balance an unambiguously Christian education with the pastoral care of students from different faiths and sometimes of no faith.

"The first relates to values," Heath explains. "There is a universality in values and Judeo-Christian values were almost formed in us by a creation ordinance, if you will.

"They are the universal values of justice, integrity, grace, forgiveness and compassion. In a Christian school we put a theology around that and we refer to the great accomplishments of those things in the Cross.

"That latter bit is a matter of private pursuit. If people want to pursue that themselves, the school will talk about that. The first bit is not negotiable."

Second, he believes the character of Christ and his teachings have a relevance that transcends the boundaries of other faiths.

"Over time I have grown more and more persuaded of this - that a Christian view presents the character of Jesus, and the way he worked with people, at the heart of it," he says. "If it is not forced on people, then you allow the winsomeness of Jesus to be the persuasive message."

Heath's fear is not that children will misunderstand a more subtle Christian message but that they will actively rebel against dogmatic, insistent preaching.

"One of the things I was nervous about, coming into Anglican schools, was that we would inoculate the kids, as I found growing up in a Catholic school."

A couple of years ago, Heath attended a Confirmation service for his god-daughter at Moore College, the incubator of Sydney Anglican theology.

Two rows in front of him, he noticed a young woman who had been among the first group of girls to graduate from the Cathedral School in 1999 sitting in the pew. "She was the last person I would have expected to see," he says.

"I said I was glad to see her there but surprised. She said something that the chaplain at school had said had never left her mind, and that she had had a tough time, so she went to a church.

And I thought, 'That's what it's about.' "It's not about hauling them over the line. There's a long life to be lived."

Subscribe
Get a bi-weekly summary of Anglican news from around the world.
comments powered by Disqus
Trinity School for Ministry
Go To Top