This narrative of Chris Mayor’s life-calling and work with MRA/IofC was written by him several years before he died in Bendigo, Australia, in 2024. It was read at his funeral:
My mother’s grandfather, James Desbrowe Annear, arrived in Bendigo in February 1852, and became a successful quartz miner in Happy Valley. One of his daughters was my grandmother. One of his sons was the well-known architect Harold Desbrowe Annear.
Curiously, it was only a year later that my paternal grandparents, Johann Meyer and Emma Schaefer arrived in Melbourne as children with their German parents. They met and were married in the Lutheran Church in East Melbourne. My father, Albert Meyer, was born a few years later.
Dad left home in his late teens and ended up enlisting in the British Light Horse in Capetown during the Boer War where he was wounded. It seems he was estranged in some way from his family and some years later he quietly changed his name to the more anglicised Mayor, probably because of anti-German sentiment on the eve of World War I.
My mother was a professional stage and film actress with the J C Williamson company before marrying Dad. When Dad lost his thriving business in the great depression the Rolls Royce was sold and our lovely Vaucluse home was mortgaged to the hilt. Our privileged life was shattered and my parents’ marriage put at risk.
To keep us going, mother turned to teaching dramatic art and, with the help of her retired actor father George Bryant, established Bryants’ Playhouse in Sydney. Patrick White’s mother became a patron of Bryants’ and my mother produced the young Patrick’s first plays in her theatre.
It was in this crisis that my mother, through her theatrical links, met Ivan Menzies, the Gilbert & Sullivan star of the visiting D’Oyley Carte Opera Company. Ivan’s own life and marriage had been transformed through meeting the Oxford Group, later known as Moral Re-Armament and since 2001 known as Initiatives of Change. Its simple message was that God had a plan for the world and you had a part if you were prepared to face honestly where you had been wrong, put it right and thereafter seek His direction and wisdom in daily meditation, or quiet times. Mother’s brave response saved the marriage and Mother returned to her Anglican faith.
So, at the age of seven, with my older brother and younger sister I was baptised at St Michael’s Church in Vaucluse, Sydney. I was duly stamped “Anglican” but my life and behaviour did not quite match the label, …….…
In 1942, my second year at Sydney Boys High School, I ended up in hospital for several weeks with rheumatic fever. In those days before the arrival of miraculous drugs and antibiotics one was “nursed back to health”. Weeks of total, boring, demoralising, flat-on-your-back rest was the cure. The specialist told my mother that my heart would be permanently damaged and I would not be able to live a normal life. A wheel-chair life loomed as a real prospect.
During this stressful and long-drawn-out recuperation I turned idly to a little book called “Daily Light” that a pious and well-meaning friend had given me. I wondered what daily Bible Reading was offered on my birthday: 19 August.
And I read: “A new heart ….. will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes. Thus saith the Lord God.”
How extraordinary! A new heart! Could it mean me? Could these words of Ezekiel be prophetic?
I thought to myself, “Well, I certainly need a new heart. If I decide to walk in God’s ways will He honour such a promise?”
Without any theological wonderings, with a strangely trusting spirit and without debate I decided there and then, aged 15, to let God run my life. Nothing spooky or ethereal, just a matter-of-fact choice.
And for the next 68 years of adventurous, faith-filled living, God kept his promise, though in times of doubt I needed reminding of His promise and the “bargain” I had made. But last year the old heart spluttered a bit and the wizardry of modern surgery gave me a renovated heart and a new lease on life.
Janet and I will celebrate 55 fulfilling years of marriage in October beside our two dear daughters and their families who also live in Bendigo. For all that time and for ten years before our marriage we have worked without salary with Initiatives of Change, previously known as Moral Re-Armament. To describe these experiences would take too long, but those who are interested can check out www.iofc.org. to get a picture of some of the events we were part of.
Initiatives of Change (IofC) is a movement of people active in nearly 100 countries working to build trust across the world’s divides. Better known previously as Moral Re-Armament (or MRA) this movement was launched by Frank Buchman, an American Lutheran minister, who yearned to share his Christian experience to others in a way that related God to practical life. From 1908 until his death in 1961 Buchman built extraordinary teams of people who felt called to change society by first letting God change themselves: their pride, their bitterness, their dishonesty, their impurity of motive and habit.
In 1949 I resigned my last paid job at Australian United Press to join this force of people. I travelled to an assembly at Caux in Switzerland which has become the global headquarters of IofC. It was here that French and Germans first met after the war and resolved their lingering hates. Both Chancellor Adenauer of Germany and Prime Minister Robert Schuman of France came to Caux. Their governments formally decorated Buchman for the contribution his teams had made in laying sure foundations for a post-war peaceful Europe. The first Japanese delegation given permission by General Macarthur to travel abroad came to Caux in 1950 in a chartered plane. Apologies they made melted many bitter hearts.
I wrote an article following my interview of the Mayors of Hiroshima and Japan Nagasaki who were part of that delegation and who returned with their countrymen to try and build in Japan a democratic society that their Asian neighbours could trust. Bridges were built between Japan and Korea, with the Philippines and with Australia. General Ho Yin-ching of pre-Communist China presented to Buchman the sword of war-time surrender that he had received from the Japanese as a token of the new spirit being developed between Japan and China.
Between us Janet and I have spent several years in Asia, including Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan and India.
The most significant years were probably those spent in India from 1961 to 1970. We were invited by Rajmohan Gandhi, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. He believed that Initiatives of Change had a pertinent message for his country and decided to mobilise a “march across the nation” aimed at helping to build “a strong, clean and united India”. Just as his grandfather had focussed India’s freedom struggle in his historic salt march in 1930, Rajmohan wanted to rouse a public cry to end corruption and regional divisions.
Such was the response in village after village, town after town, that Rajmohan believed it was important to link people together and to give them a voice. As a result he launched the weekly newsmagazine HIMMAT in 1964 and asked me to be joint editor. [And we are delighted to know that Rajmohan and his wife Usha will be in Bendigo where Professor Gandhi will deliver this year’s Sir John Quick lecture at La Trobe University.]
A highlight of this time was Janet’s and my journey to Dharamsahla in the hills of North India where the Indian Government had granted asylum to the Dalai Lama and his government in exile. The Dalai Lama had not long before made his escape from China and my task was to interview him for HIMMAT and give him a voice to the outside world. We were to meet again 30 years later at an international congress of Initiatives of Change at Caux, in Switzerland.
During our years in India we took part in the establishment of Asia Plateau, a wonderful conference centre in the hills at Panchgani, 150 kilometres south east of Mumbai. An Australian architect donated his professional services and time and many other Australians helped with finance and personnel. This has since become a renowned centre for reconciliation and character-training for young people as well as men and women from industry, police, defence and other government officials. Again, an idea of this project can be found at www.in.iofc.org/AP
During our years in India we were blessed with the birth of our two daughters, Sarah and Ali. And in 1970 as they neared school age we returned to Australia and based in Melbourne at Armagh the Australia-Pacific centre for Initiatives of change. For 16 years I was Secretary and a Director of IofC’s incorporated body.
St John’s Toorak was our home church for those 33 years and both daughters were confirmed and married there. We moved to Bendigo in 2003 and have been enthusiastic members of the St Paul’s family ever since.
A recent example of IofC’s work was featured in the ABC’s 7:30 session this week describing the move by young Sudanese-Australians in Melbourne who have found healing to their bitter tribal antagonisms. They are returning to South Sudan this month to help heal the rifts in the country of their birth. This Initiative of Change is a response to the invitation of the Vice-President and government of South Sudan to run a series of seminars, conferences and training sessions aiming at reconciliation and communal unity.
And so this important bridge-building and reconciling work goes on.
Janet and I shall each be 85 this year and, looking back, we are grateful for God’s leading in our lives and for having a purpose greater than ourselves.
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