Here’s the latest version of a write-up on our daughter Lindy, who leads an Urban Mission ministry in Melbourne. The article is by Rowan Forster.

September 2004

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher

~~~ Lindy’s Mission — to Serve the Poor, Support the Servants, and Stir the Church.

When Lindy Croucher was nine years old, she dreamed of starting an orphanage in Africa. On a plane between visits to World Vision projects in several countries, Lindy discussed with her mother Jan the building designs, how many children and staff she would have and what their job descriptions and wages would be!

Five years later, Lindy accompanied her father, Rowland, on a trip to India, arriving first in Calcutta. She saw maimed and aged beggars lining the city’s streets, the able bodied children crowding around her to beg. She visited Mother Teresa’s home for the destitute and dying, where she remembers speaking with a boy her own age, dying from tuberculosis.

Lindy’s exposure at an early age to the desperate needs of people in the Two-Thirds World, stirred within her soul a compassion for the poor, and a determination to serve them in whatever ways she could. And this has shaped the course of her life.

Lindy says: “Jesus had a radical priority for the poor, and if I am to take discipleship seriously, I can’t ignore this. While I might excel more at other things in worldly terms, I consider the poor most worthy of my time. I believe this priority is integral to an understanding of the upside-down values of the Kingdom of God.”

A pivotal time came in 1996, in the period leading up to the three-month expedition Lindy led to south-east Asia. In preparing herself and the group she was leading, Lindy pulled out some Bible studies written by Steve Bradbury of TEAR Australia. These studies on justice, mercy, poverty and wealth were “incredibly confronting.”

“I felt deeply convicted about my lack of response to the poor in my own city and community. I became aware of the need to bring together evangelism and social action, and for Christians to move beyond the comfort of remaining snug in our middle class churches.

“One of the key Scriptures for me at this time was 1 John 3:16-17, which says: How can we say we have the love of God within us, if we have more than our share of this world’s resources, and see others in need, but don’t respond to them with compassion?”

“I knew that one day I would be accountable to God for my response to the needs of the poor. And I knew I couldn’t ignore this issue, even though my culture, and my private schooling had largely sheltered me from it.”

Lindy put her conviction into immediate action by approaching Prison Network Ministries, with which she was to serve as a volunteer for the next eight years along-side her serving at her local Baptist church.

It was this involvement that eventually led Lindy to UNOH, through recruiting Anji Barker as a volunteer with PNM.

After a critical conversation in Melbourne with John Hayes, the founding director of InnerCHANGE [an urban mission group in America similar to UNOH] — “he worked on me for hours”, says Lindy — she realised that joining UNOH was the next step toward more holistic involvement in lives like those of the women prisoners she’d come to love, and she signed up to do her apprenticeship the following year (2001). And the rest is history in the making.

In completing the one-year apprenticeship and then two-year novitiate, Lindy was part of the UNOH team that affected the remarkable transformation of Kelvin Grove (see previous issues of Finding Life) in Central Springvale. Lindy has gone on to exercise leadership roles in several UNOH ministries, including the Rainbow Church, the Noble Park neighbourhood, and a teenage girls’ club. She is currently serving as acting leader of the Melbourne chapter of UNOH. And there’s a strong possibility that in the not too distant future, she may be heading north to start a UNOH chapter in Sydney.

Of her involvement with the Rainbow Church, Lindy says: “Rainbow has been the most life-giving church community I’ve ever been a part of. It’s really family to me — a place of freedom to just be yourself. We’re a community of strugglers, with no-one pretending to have it all together. There’s an incredibly deep sense of acceptance, and of companionship on the journey.

“The people of Rainbow are my true heroes, with their courage to face and battle some very difficult life circumstances. They have definitely brought the Gospel alive to me as we journey together, seeking to follow Jesus through life’s struggles and celebrations.”

God has grown in Lindy a compassion for people who have never had a safe place to call home — a place where they feel they belong. “So UNOH’s practice of hospitality and community building are integral to any sense of my own calling”, she says.

Another key thrust to her calling and mission is “to do what I can to challenge and mobilise mainstream Christians to become more radical in living simply, sharing life with the poor, and taking their discipleship seriously.”

Lindy believes our churches could be doing much more to identify in practical ways with their Lord’s concern for the poor. In echoing the essential message of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25, Lindy resonates with this quotation from Helmut Thielecke: “Tell me how much you know of the sufferings of your fellow man, and I’ll tell you how much you’ve loved him.”

And quoting Barbara Brown Taylor, Lindy says her experience of life is a real testimony to the truth that “the opposite of rich is not poor — it’s free”.

Free in what sense? “Free from the demands imposed by the values and lifestyles pursued by the world. Free to be with people who know their need of God, and each other. Free from the many distractions that draw us away from the things that really matter to God. Free to pursue those things that keep us true to the path of following Jesus.”

Lindy’s first thirty years have been devoted to discovering this rare and life-giving kind of freedom, and empowering others to find it also. Whatever may happen next in her radically committed and Christ-emulating life journey, there’s no doubt that with Lindy in her current role as acting leader, the Melbourne chapter of UNOH continues to be in very safe and special hands.