A Short History

Bert Moritz & Pieter Stok. Trowel & Sword Revisited, September 5, 2023.

Preamble: It has been a year since TSR’s first post, “Building A New Nation” was published on Oct. 2, last year. A month earlier we had launched our website with the article below. The original idea, conceived several years earlier, was to revive T&S as a denominational magazine, not just as a means of disseminating information but also as a way of encouraging congregations and individuals to reconnect with each other instead of being isolated from fellow Reformed churches in this vast country of ours. Sadly, there appeared to be a lack of enthusiasm for such a venture at the time. As a result, Trowel & Sword Revisited was born as a compromise between an established denominational magazine and… nothing. It is still our hope that the day will come when we as a denomination will see the need and the value of a magazine promoting Reformed principles both internally and to the world. There are already some who have seen the light as the following testimonies show:

Many will commend and thank you, Bert and Pieter, for thinking of publishing relevant and interesting material from Trowel & Sword – and making it happen.
Even though the 20th century has passed into history, it is well worthwhile digging out and republishing some of the chronicles and encouragements of our pioneering foreparents. Fred VanderBom

Wonderful to hear of your endeavours for the Kingdom…! I always regretted that some of the excellent material from T&S was mouldering away somewhere in the CRCA’s dusty archives. I recall excellent articles by the likes of people like Dr Klass Runia and Prof George Van Groningen that would be so beneficial for people today to read. I applaud your efforts and trust it will bear fruit. John Westendorp.

As an Aussie with no Dutch heritage in our churches, I really appreciate this and look forward to encouragements and challenges from the generations gone by – on whom shoulders we stand! It’s a good to be provoked into thinking: what are we doing with what we’ve inherited? And how can we build further based on what we’ve learned? Isaac Overton.

Love this idea, my father was an elder in Holland and then in the Sydney/Sutherland churches.
My husband also was an elder in the Sutherland church but sadly now in an aged care facility.
I well remember Trowel and Sword magazines and still have some we kept.
Will be lovely to see them again. They were very helpful to the new migrants. Johanna van der Jagt.

Thanks Bert and co.
Three great memories of T&S: my dad was the printer for the first 20 years or so, starting at home on a Gestetner he’d brought with him from Holland, typing it on our kitchen table in Kingston, then getting my brothers and me to collate and staple them, before bundling them up for distribution. This continued in Geelong for some time. And locally in Kingston, there were no “pigeon holes” in the church building, and distributing T & S in the foyer on a Sunday was considered Sunday work, so my brother George and I were assigned each month to walk all over Kingston, Kingston Beach, Blackmans Bay and “Little Groningen” to hand deliver on a Saturday afternoon. Up to ten miles each. Good exercise! And Dad confessed that occasionally Aunt Harriet or Aunt Tilly (van Groningen and Piening) were a bit late with their contributions to the children’s or women’s pages, and he wrote them! I suppose his journalism and printing and accountancy training in Holland stood him, and T&S, in good stead! Peter van der Schoor

And so, we begin our second year of publication in the same way the we started the first; with the same article we used to launch our website: tsrevisited.com. We thank our subscribers and hope that as we move forward, there may be many more.

A Short History.

The first edition of Trowel and Sword was published by and for the Reformed Churches of Australia and New Zealand in October 1954, with the final printed edition being distributed in December 2010.

The denomination itself had only been established three years earlier and consisted mainly of Dutch immigrants who had been part of the post-war exodus from Europe looking for a new life and a new beginning. They came with a pioneering spirit, full of hope and fervour, beginning their new lives in a strange environment and often in what would today be considered substandard housing.

Their lives revolved around work and their churches; often tiny congregations spread across the length and breadth of Australia and New Zealand.

What they achieved in those early years was truly remarkable and included permanent places of worship, Sunday schools, Youth Groups including Cadets and Calvinettes, Holiday Clubs, Beach Missions and other outreach activities which often led to the planting of new churches, the establishment of the Reformed Theological College for the training of ministers as well as being instrumental in the starting of many Christian schools. 

They dreamed dreams, worked hard and prayed ceaselessly, and God blessed their efforts.

A detailed account of the development of the Reformed Churches is contained in “A CHURCH EN ROUTE” – 40 Years Of Reformed Churches Of Australia.

The Present

Today we must ask ourselves whether much of that effort and momentum has slowed to a walk, or even a crawl. We seem to be just as busy but our efforts are focussed in a different direction. Instead of forging ahead in working for the kingdom of God, we have become sidetracked and even bogged down by the issues thrown at us by an increasingly secular and antagonistic world such as divorce, promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality, same sex marriage, cancel culture and gender fluidity. To the world, the Christian teachings as espoused in the Bible are now considered to be “controversial”.

So instead of lighting fires for Christ we have become preoccupied with fighting the fires lit by Satan and his followers.

Like the church in Ephesus, have we lost the love we had at first? The solution for the Ephesians was to: “Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the works you did at first.” (ESV. Rev. 2:5)

Moving Forward By Looking Back

The pioneers who began the journey have all moved on to glory. They are gone… but not forgotten. Their thoughts, their writings and their dreams remain although perhaps relegated to a different time. I often hear it said that the world has changed. “Things are different now”. “We live in a different time”.

So did Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Samuel and David. So also did the judges and the prophets. And so also did Jesus Himself. 

Yet we still look to them and learn from them. So also we can look to the early leaders of the Reformed Churches in Australia and New Zealand. We can still learn from them and follow their examples.

This then is our purpose. To resurrect the writings of the greats of the CRCA. See what they had to say and adjust our thinking and our actions to carry forward their dreams and aspirations for this, our adopted nation. We will do this by publishing a weekly blog using articles taken from the pages of Trowel and Sword – the CRCA newsletter which may be gone but not forgotten.

We invite you to join us on this journey of moving forward by looking back. Look for the masthead: Trowel and Sword Revisited.

Bert & Pieter.

We look forward to receiving feedback about any of our posts. We also encourage you to share our posts with family, friends and acquaintances; in fact anyone you think may appreciate and/or benefit from the knowledge and wisdom handed down to us from the past.   To view previous posts visit our website at www.tsrevisited.com