One of the striking things about doing denominational history in Australia is the degree to which Presbyterian federation discussions followed political discussions moving towards Australian Federation. These discussions in fact began before the political version, and took advantage of inter-colonial and other meetings to press ahead, before the project hit the twin rocks of Depression and the rivalry between NSW and Victoria. Even so, it is evident that all Christians in Australia kept a weather eye on political federation debates, including those elements which proposed the inclusion of New Zealand in the Australian commonwealth. What interests me, for our purposes today, is the construction of a joint religious consciousness which underpins the exchange of ideas and staff between the two countries in a way which was to become, by the end of the twentieth century, so natural as to remain largely unremarked. I was most interested, for instance, to hear about Brett Knowles’ history of the New Life movement, knowing the Trans-Tasman links that existed with people such as Peter Morrow, and David and Ray Jackson among others. If we throw Phil Pringle, Frank and Brian Houston, and others into the bargain, there we have Australia’s largest and fastest growing churches being run by New Zealanders. And yet when I came to Brett’s book, there were hints but little explicit exploration of these links. This is the norm for regional religious historiography, except, perhaps in those works of a more biographical bent, such as Sandy Yarwood’s classic biography of Samuel Marsden. It is clear that our historical craft has been very closely slaved to the twentieth century nationalist project, and has led us to overlook the dynamism of Trans-Tasman religious life. This paper aims at pointing to some of the themes and edges of the Trans-Tasman religious world. I will largely use examples from areas of my own expertise – Pentecostalism and Presbyterianism – though other areas also spring to mind.
In early June 1928, Pastor W. Chatterton and Elder H. Bruce, Vice Chair and chairman respectively of the Assemblies of God in New Zealand, came to Australia to the annual conference of the Pentecostal Church of Australia. This was part of the PCA’s attempt to join in ‘fellowship’ with Pentecostal churches throughout the world, and to avoid the restraints which denominational rejection and slow initial growth placed on them. Considering they were a small movement in a vast continent, the international emphasis is indicative of the sources and outlook of Australian Pentecostalism.1 The results of their visit, reported Bruce, were practical and emotional – a sense of joy, love and unity at the Conference, and a shared itinerary for British teaching evangelist, Donald Gee. Gee’s message was critical for the two fledgling national movements:
We believe that Pastor Gee is the right man in the right place and at the right time, his message being to the Saints that they may press on into their inheritance and possess the land.
Gee was the right man, in the sense that he was British – the founding evangelist for the PCA was an American, A.C. Valdez Sr., but his influence did not follow the still Anglo-oriented cultural lines in the way that Smith Wigglesworth, Howard Carter and Donald Gee did. Locally, perhaps North Americans (such as Valdez, Aimee Semple McPherson, or Kelso Glover) were among the more important influences – between dominions, however, the British traveled more easily. Bruce left hoping there would be further exchanges between the countries – that of C L Greenwood was already on the drawing board, and Bruce himself was to return in April 1930 to speak at the PCA Sydney Convention. This too had been prepared for: Bruce and Chatterton did not go straight home in 1928, but traveled north to Sydney, where they preached for Archibald Brown’s small congregation. Bruce chose the theme that Gee had so impressed on him:
On Sunday morning Brother Bruce spoke on "Pressing into our Inheritance. " In the afternoon Brother Chatterton spoke in the power and liberty of the Holy Ghost. At the close of this address we made an appeal for consecration and as the Lord had moved upon their hearts they came out one by one until the altar was filled with saints seeking a closer walk with Jesus. Such an impact did they have that:
On Tuesday afternoon a party of the saints were on the 'wharf to see our brethren off by the "Tahiti" back again to the land we love so well, New Zealand. One outstanding feature of the visit of these Brethren to Australia is that it has emphasised the desire of all for closer co-operation and unity in methods of working, between Australia and New Zealand. This same spirit of fellowship they experienced in Melbourne was again in evidence here in Sydney.
He then noted that Sydney was looking forward to the forthcoming visit of Donald Gee. History leaves no trace as to whether Gee was pleased or disheartened on finding that Bruce had preached one of his sermons in Sydney before he got there to preach it himself! But the important thing was the establishment of links: four months later, another British evangelist, the powerful signs and wonders preacher Stephen Jeffreys, came the other way across the Tasman, as did Smith Wigglesworth on a return trip in 1929, and his daughter and son in law, the Congo missionaries James and Alice Salter. Meanwhile, the Australian Evangel had already run a front page bearing the words: ‘Australia United in Co-Operative Fellowship with the Assemblies of God in New Zealand.’2 J.M. Roberts, the New Zealand lawyer who acted as Secretary of the PCA’s grandly-titled Commonwealth Board, as well as its Missions Fund Treasurer, and who had invited Bruce to Australia, soon had an invitation to go back as pastor in Christchurch. As was the wont in those days, they offered him the grand tenure of three months – and he still went. He was followed by others, such as Archibald Brown, who was absent from his Adelaide pulpit in New Zealand in June 1929. He was clearly looking forward to the event, praying in January ‘that 1929 will be the greatest and most wonderful year in the history of the Pentecostal movement in Australia and New Zealand. "A mighty revival is coming this way." Let us keep on believing.’ It is not to be wondered at, then, that quotations from the New Zealand Evangel begin to be rerun in the Australian Evangel, and the exploits of people such as Maori healer, Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana, covered in detail.
Ratana’s vision of all the world’s roads stretching towards him is, in retrospect, a nice model for the growth of global Pentecostalism, and a reminder of the tribal and indigenizing roots pentecostalism. Henry Proctor, reprinted in the Australian Evangel, saw people like Ratana and Elias Letwaba, as evidence of the global spread of the Latter Rain. The growth of such global religious networks in Pentecostalism, as Edith Blumhofer has shown, was heavily dependent on mobility, correspondence and printed popular journals. Indeed, there is a sense in which Pentecostalism was global before it was local. It arose in a Pacific facing global city, Los Angeles, at the beginning of the move of world power away from the north Atlantic to the Pacific Rim. Australian and New Zealand mission agencies, from which many early Pentecostals came or drew their inspiration, were heavily engaged around the Rim – so China, New Guinea, the Solomons, Vanuatu, Japan, etc were the every day points of reference for these holiness-sourced movements. Valdez himself was a Californian, and linked to the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel center at Angelus Temple, in Los Angeles. And being global, the communities it built relied heavily on mutual regard and reflexive intention. One of the effects of such links, for instance, was to establish the sort of mutual-admiration reflexivity which builds a sense of community around ‘known figures’. Exchanges between churches reinforced the position of particular churches as ‘important places’, and their pastors as ‘connected’ and important people. So, Kelso Glover, who was the first ‘teacher’ in the PCA’s bible school in Melbourne, and who succeeded Aimee Semple McPherson as pastor of Angelus Temple, reported in February 1929 that:
A very excellent young man and his wife, Brother and Sister Megna, went out to New Zealand, whom we recommend highly to Australia. This young man was baptized under the ministry of Brother Valdez, and we had the pleasure of knowing him and assisting him off, so it seems you should almost feel he is one of the Australian family even now. We know New Zealand will love him if they get to keep him. May God bless him.
I have not been able to track Philip Megna down (something I would like to do because of my interest in Italian Pentecostalism), but Glover’s combining of New Zealand and Australia in the same geographical category not doubt reflected and increased the growing sense of the Trans-Tasman as a unitary field of religious endeavour in such new religious movements. When internationals came, they came to both countries, as Glover noted in the same letter:
another brother, former missionary in Japan, has got as far as Egypt on his way to Australia by way of South Africa. He and his wife expect to preach in these two places and then help in Australia and New Zealand as the Lord leads.3
The casual globality of such reports is what immediately strikes those of us who (post-September 11, 2001) tremble on the dissolution of the jet aircraft link which has defined the global village for us. And yet these people all lived and traveled long before aircraft became a regular means of travel. (Of course, they were not total barbarians – on 27 September, 1931, W.R.G. Bain in New Plymouth, NZ, tuned into a live radio broadcast of William Booth-Clibborn’s evangelistic services in the Canvas Cathedral, in Brisbane). Richmond Temple, on the shipping lines between New Zealand and Asian mission outposts, became a regular missionary stop off: ‘We have enjoyed the sweet ministry of Brother and Sister Beruldsen, of China,’ wrote one correspondent in 1929, ‘who gave us their farewell message ere they left to visit the Northern States, also on the same night we had with us Brother and Sister Upham, of New Zealand, who were en route to take up mission work in India, giving their testimonies of their call.’ Likewise, they mourned when New Zealanders died on the mission field, as did E. Knauff of New Plymouth, New Zealand, while working for the Congo Evangelistic Mission.
New Zealand and Australia thus became exchangeable terms for Australian Pentecostal consciousness very early in its history. ‘Well do we remember’, wrote Nancy McKenzie of Richmond Temple meetings in 1929, ‘one Sunday night the Lord speaking in a like manner-"I will shake the earth and after that I will shake the heavens"-to know on the Monday that God had truly shaken New Zealand with a mighty earthquake, lives being lost, houses gone, and the place left desolate. Surely God is speaking to us of things which must shortly come to pass. He speaks with no uncertain sound.’ Apparently, shaking New Zealand was enough to qualify for fulfilling a prophecy in Australia. Shaking parts of rural Australia, in return, came the fiery young New Zealand evangelist Len Jones, who was to win his spurs in small Australian towns, and then go on to join the international circuit. His verdict? Queensland is hot: ‘what an experience this tropical North is to one whose home in New Zealand is within sight of a mountain that is snow-capped all the year round. The heat goes without saying-the first four places visited I preached in my shirt sleeves. It was absolutely out of the question to leave your coat on, however decorous you might wish to be.’
This lack of decorousness may have been new to the young New Zealander, but the truth was that if you wanted to do something radical, something new, in Pentecostal ministry, some place at the frontier of society and religion was the place to go. Perhaps this is the reason why Queensland and New Zealand have likewise produced so much of Australia’s Pentecostal leadership (as I was writing this, I sit in a College in Sydney where practically all the administration and most of the faculty come from either of these two places). Both regions have given inordinate emphasis to ‘charismatic leadership’, if we use that term in its Weberian sense. Jones was a case of reverse migration – coming from the other end of the earth, he actually went to Melbourne to study at C.H. Nash’s missions-oriented Melbourne Bible Institute (MBI). Experiencing Baptism in the Holy Spirit at the Sunshine Revival in 1926, he experienced the left foot of fellowship at MBI, and so moved to preach at Melbourne’s Richmond Temple, then to Sydney, then into the back blocks of Queensland, where he met evangelists such as Lester Sumrall. Using this connection, he attached himself to Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple, and bounced from there to close to McPherson’s original home in Ontario, Canada, where he filled in during the absence of foursquare pastor, A.D. Britton. He then found himself in that fundamentalist hotspot, Winnipeg, teaching in a Bible College, before moving on to evangelism in Britain. He was an example of the way that Commonwealth links and globalising Pentecostalism established the mental templates and physical relationships which built trans-Tasman Pentecostalism.
Reasons for the need to rely on such linkages are the same in religion as they are for economic and political relationships. Ian Jagelman, for instance, has explained the inter-reliance of the two Tasman countries on the small size of the relative populations, and the inability of either place to train sufficient numbers of leaders. As Philip Duncan noted, one of the ironic sides of C H Nash rejecting the Pentecostal experience was that the PCA suddenly gained six members of that rarest of Pentecostal categories, bible college students. ‘To provide the enthusiastic little Assemblies with ministry was a problem, until the power fell upon the students of Canon Nash's Melbourne Bible Institute and some came into our ministry straight away and were ordained as Pastors. Sydney gained Mr. Len Jones in this way and from this source, as he was in our ministry in those days.’ (Duncan, Pentecost in Australia) The emphasis on the now, the relative lack of education common among Pentecostals, and the lack of an institutional base meant that the entrepreneurial and the socially mobile in Trans-Tasman religious life could utilize relatively unstructured demand curves to move between the cultures. Common language and close political ties make the transfer almost without cost. And with the growth of large churches in the 1970s, the constant shifting of institutional needs, an expanding market, and deregulation of theological training and fellowship organization of the AoG in Australia has meant that this exchange has continued, despite the fact that Pentecostalism is increasingly institutionalized on both sides of the Tasman. As Jagelman notes, ‘Increasingly we are likely to find it difficult to locate people capable of leading our large churches. In some cases the transition has been from father to son. But in the case of, say, Garden City at Mt Gravatt in Brisbane, there was no son to take over. The search committee had to look as far as New Zealand to find a suitable candidate.’4 Or, given the history we are seeing emerge here of religious relations between the two countries, perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that the search committee had to look as close as New Zealand to find a suitable candidate.
One could go on with examples from Pentecostalism –as I have suggested, the Peter Morrow- Ray Jackson connection would be well worth following up, particularly in terms of the ongoing influence of Waverley Christian Family Church; or Kevin Conner’s influence on both sides of the Tasman, and through the Christian Outreach Centre movement based in Mansfield, Queensland. Let me shift my attention, however, to the Trans-Tasman links in my other area of interest, Presbyterianism. These links are strong, and (as already noted) predated Australian federation and New Zealand autonomy. Let me consider now some of the global context which helped reinforce the Tasman as a region for Presbyterians.
Sharing a common population in terms of migration streams certainly helped – the movement of Norman McLeod’s Coromandel migration from Scotland, to Nova Scotia, to Melbourne, to New Zealand, is only one of the more startling examples of this shared population base. Australian and New Zealand Presbyterians identified themselves as ethnic Scots/ Irish-Scots churches, and provided leadership through a well-trained, and (because university-certificated), a globally mobile cadre of ministers. Just how globally mobile they were is obvious from tracking receptions into Synods such as that of New South Wales where, through the early part of the twentieth century, receptions might include people from other churches, from NZ, Canada, Africa, Britain, Europe or the United States. The career of Samuel Angus, the great liberal leader of the 1930s, was typical: born in Ireland, educated first in Scotland (Edinburgh), the United States (Princeton) and Germany (Marburg), he spent time in Italy and North Africa, before coming to Australia.
These relationships became critical in Australia from the 1950s. Emphasis on an educated and respectable professoriate created a situation, both in New Zealand and Australia, where evangelicals were largely squeezed out of the formal training institutions of Presbyterianism. They reacted by forming alternate networks, networks which became quite public and politicized during such struggles as those over Church Union. The movement towards union, which had been defeated in the 1920s, and stalled through the Second World War, began again in the General Assembly of Australia in 1954, and (parallel to similar developments in New Zealand) by 1957 voting showed clear support for further interdenominational talks. That support was not yet overwhelming, but it was thought that with time and education, the opponents of union would come to their senses. This was a key assumption, for there were many Presbyterians who were not against union so much as against any form of union which divided the church. Leading Victorian Presbyterian lawyer, F.M. Bradshaw, on the other hand, (writing in a New Zealand journal) considered the 1954 vote the result of a collapse in the anti-Union vote in Queensland: 'Possibly a native straightforwardness prevented them from discerning the real issue when it was presented in a sugar coated form, while those further south have had perforce to learn the wiles of the ecclesiastical politicians.' Certainly, Bradshaw was to be centrally involved in the 'wiles' of the Union debate over the next two decades. Though the 1961 Victorian Assembly scotched a number of ecumenical proposals, it did not stop the Methodist Church of Australia, the Congregational Union of Australia and New Zealand, and the PCA from setting up a 21 member Joint Commission on Church Union to pursue negotiations. At the outset, the intention was for the committee to work on a Basis of Union, but discussions soon made it clear that a common statement of faith was also required. Much 'was made of the belief that the question was to be discussed on the basis of seeking theological solutions to the problems and not on the basis of seeking an organisational way through to union.' Since evangelicals were largely squeezed out of theological debate due to their institutional inability to field prominent professors of theology, they formed such mutual defense groups as the Westminster Society (on which more below). Such movements were part of a world wide resurgence in reformed confessionalism, which Alister McGrath has referred to in his biography of James Packer. As John Mackay, President of Princeton, noted at the time, 'The Ecumenical Movement and the Confessional Movement are developing side by side... This is one of the most crucial questions confronting Protestant Christianity in our time. For the plain truth is this. The Confessional Movement could develop in such a way as to wreck the Ecumenical Movement or at least reduce the World Council of Churches to a venerated ecclesiastical facade.'
In accordance with the WCC decision to pursue a more interventionist line in Church Union discussions around the world, the Australian Council of Churches drew the link between the scandal of disunity in the church and the disunity in the world which caused such mayhem as the Munich massacre. This ‘globalised’ the union debate in Australia, causing it to spill over into the larger battles being fought throughout the world. Evangelical opposition to WCC interventionism had been rising on the international scene for a decade, particularly through increasing activity by the Billy Graham Organisation and its backers. Graham was key in the interdenominational Evangelical meetings in Berlin and Lausanne, such that evangelical opinion was becoming increasingly organised at precisely the time that union debates moved into top gear. This provided the funding and an international stage for British reformed thinkers such as J.I. Packer and Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who carried their coherent, intellectual arguments to the USA, Canada, and (through publications, conferences, and the longer term training of theological educators) to Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Reformed and traditionalist Presbyterians could therefore reply, conscious of such trends, that while unity was one value, so was the liberty of conscience, a value for which Christians had died throughout history. In this sense, the evangelicals had the moral capital on their side – their leaders (men like Bill Camden, A G Kerr, J G Miller) had living links to the mission field, particularly the martyrs in the New Hebrides. Both here, and in the charismatic movement, the mission field had a powerful reflex impact on theological change in the home church. 'The real scandal of Christendom', New Zealand’s Evangelical Presbyterianf reflected to its NSW readers, 'is not the denominational differences in the Protestant Church. The real scandal of Christendom is the spiritually-bankrupt liberalism, the phoney intellectualism, the sceptical neo-orthodoxy, the outright apostasy which is corrupting the very vitals of the professing Church of Jesus Christ.' The brothers, J. Graham and Robert S. Miller were leaders among the New Zealanders who came to Australia and brought with them the opposition to liberal influence. Graham Miller, formerly minister of Papakura, was prominent in NZ evangelical Presbyterian circles before coming to Australia as head of Melbourne Bible Institute, and was a consistent fighter against union on missiological and theological grounds. The family link was made complete when his brother, Robert, came to Australia in 1966 as minister of St Andrew's Launceston, before moving on to teach at Presbyterian Theological College, Victoria. The WCC spoke from Geneva. The Evangelical Presbyterian fired back with material from the Episcopal Recorder in the USA. As the debate clarified, both sides were thus representing global trends in the re-constitution of traditional communities of ideas.
The Westminster Fellowship, which had been formed in NSW (1948) and New Zealand (1950), provided a natural conduit for the mutual reinforcement of evangelical Presbyterian identity. In New Zealand, it had emerged from the Presbyterian Church League (1947), 'a stopbank thrown up hastily in the face of the increasing tide of Church Union propaganda.' It was specifically anti-ritualist: as that 'Ulsterman of lovable nature' and high preaching gifts, T P McEvoy noted in 1963, it was the 'hocus pocus' and attempt to 'elevate the elements' at an Australian Assembly Service in St Stephen's Church, Sydney, which had been the catalyst for forming the society. 'It became clear to us that the real issue was not Church Union. It was, and still remains, whether we shall adhere to the Reformed Faith, or return to the religion of the Medieval Church, Catholicism.' The New Zealand journal, the Evangelical Presbyterian, was quick to encourage members to vote “no” in the 1957 Union discussion in that country: 'the present proposals for Church Union, which, if pressed to their ultimate conclusion, could only result in a lamentable disruption of the Presbyterian Church, as happened in Canada in 1925.' Its byword 'A vote for Union now means a vote for Disruption later' tugged both at the historical precedents and the emotional content of the Great Disruption a century before. This magazine, complemented by Donald Geddes’ Prenewal newsletter in NSW, the meetings of the Westminster Fellowship under John Campbell, and the support of people such as W. Stanford Reid at McGill University in Canada, were to provide rallying points for evangelical activists on both sides of the Tasman through the 1960s and 1970s. Existing interdenominational agencies - such as SMBC in Sydney, Scripture Union, the InterVarsity (IVF) movement, the Westminster Conventions and international ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Sydney Anglican leaders such as Marcus Loane, and Banner of Truth publications provided similar supports from outside the church. Presbyterian Evangelical Conferences, Katoomba Convention, and Westminster Society rallies provided opportunities for inter-state leaders, such as Robert Swanton, to coordinate activities. InterVarsity in particular allowed Presbyterians to broaden their stance, and avoid merely looking like reactionaries. As Warner Hutchinson, the American IVF General Secretary in New Zealand noted, 'Another characteristic of the movement over the last four years has been the realisation of the new strength of the movement, so that the stance it represents to the outside world is not so much one of a retrenched defensiveness as it is a positive presentation of the Christian message.'5
What did this campaign indicate about Trans-Tasman religious ties? The first thing is the common ethnic base and colonial experience, and lasting impact of commonwealth ties which established a common religious world between the two countries. Missions networks, university and college networks, common publications, international denominations, all provided accepted pathways for people movement. The second thing is that both Pentecostalism and Presbyterianism demonstrate the power of marginality. Australia and New Zealand are two stations at the end of the global European cultural line. Australians and New Zealanders were travelers on the lines of global skill markets, which clergy, as the second oldest profession, traveled along with bankers, diplomats, teachers of various stripes, lawyers, scientists and the like. Lacking sufficient supply of clerical skill from the locality, New Zealanders and Australians spread the risks of their profession by sharing a common employment market. In this sense, then, the Tasman is a religious region because it is constructed as such by those traveling towards or away from it with regard to the great centers of the world. We who were born here have grown up listening to language which links us (in terms like ‘ANZAC’, for instance, those 6 bob-a-day tourists who formed one of the larger charter groups to head for Europe during World War I, and so even for those Australians who have never been to NZ, and vice versa, there is a sense in which we consider ourselves as a sub-region apart, not quite Asia, not quite Pacific, but in both.
For both Pentecostals and evangelical Presbyterians, the key factor has been their marginality. They are marginal groups within marginal societies, Pentecostals in terms of their numbers, evangelical Presbyterians because of developments inside their major gatekeeping institutions. They used the accepted commonality of Trans-tasman religious culture as ways of both spreading personal risk, and developing counter-cultures which supported alternate meaning structures. New Zealand could be the Australia one desired but could not actuate, and Australia could be the New Zealand that one had to leave because it lacked the scope. One could acquire status in Australia by being invited to preach in New Zealand, and one could acquire influence in New Zealand, ironically, by leaving it behind. It was one world, but being politically and geographically separated into two parts, it allowed the construction of convenient fictions, which in turn allowed skilled entrepreneurs to create alternative meanings, advance their own careers, and build alternative institutions in otherwise marginal settings. I am less aware of the current international Presbyterian scene than I am of movements within Pentecostalism, but at least in the latter case these developments have made Australia and New Zealand some of the more dynamic religious cultures in the Western world, frontiers for the transmission of charismatic, missionary and indigenous spiritualities, and channels for these influences back into the North American and European heartlands. In a period where various denominational leaders are despairing over the apparent death of Christianity in those former missions sending cultures, these islands in the sea might yet have a powerful role to play in the future of global Christianity. Such developments gives ever greater meaning to the much used verse in Isaiah:
Therefore in the east give glory to the LORD; exalt the name of the LORD, the God of Israel, in the islands of the sea. From the ends of the earth we hear singing: "Glory to the Righteous One."
Notes
* This is the text of an address presented to the Staff Seminar of the School of Liberal Arts, University of Otago, October 19 2001. My thanks to Professor Gerald Pillay, Dr John Stenhouse and Dr Brett Knowles for their organization and hospitality during this period.
1 Australian Evangel, 11 July 1928.
2 Australian Evangel, 11 August 1928.
3 Australian Evangel, 1 February 1929.
4 Ian Jagelman, ‘Church Growth: Its Promise and Problems for Australian Pentecostalism’ in Australasian Pentecostal Studies, no.1, 1998.
5 C L Gosling, 'The Origins of the Westminster Fellowship', Evangelical Presbyterian (hereinafter EP), xiv.6, Nov. Dec. 1964, 722-3; T P McEvoy, 'When the Candles Burn High the Gospel Burns Low', EP, xiii.4, July 1963, 223, for the description of his gifts, see Bradshaw, 'A report', EP xv.2, March-April, 1965, 86. EP vii.1, May 1957, 1. See A G Gunn, 'My tour in Australia', EP xiv.2, Mar 1964, 449, in which Gunn met extensively with Westminster Society members in NSW. EP xii.3, May, 1962, 19; xv.1, Jan-Feb 1965, 38f; xiii.2, Mar 1963; xiii.5, Sept 1963. In 1963, T P McEvoy noted that 'the Evangelical Quarterly is selling like "hot cakes" at the Scripture Union Bookshop in Sydney. An increased evidence of the Evangelical trend is seen in the display of Banner of Truth Trust publications in the Methodists and Presbyterian Bookshops here. 'Sovereign Grace' may find itself in unsual quarters! May this movement and others in sound evangelical literature continue to grow!'