Rod Bower - Outspoken: The Life and Work of the Man Behind Those Signs

Dear Christians. Some PPL are gay. Get over it. Love God.

On 24 July 2013, Anglican priest Rod Bower put up these words on the roadside sign of his Gosford parish church. Next he posted them on Facebook, sparking a social media revolution. The post was shared thousands of times suddenly the one-time butcher was on the public stage.

Today Fr Rod has close to 65,000 followers on social media. He uses this platform to raise questions about Australias corporate soul, to assert that we are all brothers and sisters asylum seekers, Muslims, those identifying as LGBTI, Indigenous Australians and for such messages, the death threats pour in.

How did a shy adopted kid from the country become this steadfast conscience of our nation, preaching both peace and disruption? Part life story, part love story, part manifesto, Outspoken describes an evolution as surprising as are Fr Rods views about Christianity.

Utterly frank, both philosophical and funny, this is a singular book by a singular person. It illuminates the life and work of the man behind those signs .

O N A BEAUTIFUL autumn day in 2017, I was on my early-morning walk when an elderly parishioner broke my peace. The approach wasnt for a friendly chat, however. Fixing me with a glare, he said, Why arent you like all the other priests weve had here before?

I had no ready answer.

I knew him to be a local and respected businessman, a member of several service clubs. He was and is, I believe, a good man in the way our society assesses goodness. When I first came to Gosford I had been told that although he didnt regularly attend church, I was expected to visit him once a year and he would give me a cheque. Our conversations in his beautiful waterfront home involved me sitting politely in silence while he told me in various ways that the problems with this country were caused by dole bludgers, foreigners and socialists; he generally understood all three terms to be synonymous. I dutifully went two years in a row and then I could stand it no more. I didnt return the third year.

On this autumn morning we had a brief exchange I gathered he was irate about something he had read about me in the tabloid press concerning my relationship with the Muslim community. Despite my protestations, he refused to believe he was basing his argument on misinformation. However, his question was a penetrating one. Why was I so different to my predecessors?

I will admit that my response to him on that morning was less than professional. He had fired the occasional barb at me as we passed on our walks for several weeks. Usually, I brushed them off with a good-humoured response, but on this particular occasion I caught his anger and fired it back at him.

When I clumsily suggested that I did what I did because I was following the example Jesus had set, he emphatically told me not to bring Him into it.

His anger connected with anger deep within me, something that was difficult to control and at best could only be channelled.

Since then, I have pondered his question many times. Why am I different?

I HAVE NEVER been anyones first choice. I was certainly not the first choice for the young girl who found herself pregnant with me. Nor was I the first choice for the childless couple who could not fulfil their desire to procreate, so adopted me. My wife did not plan for her first marriage to break down, nor did her children expect to be separated from their father or for their mother to then marry me so that they had to form a new life with a stepfather.

I have spent my entire life seeking to be the best at being second choice. This has given me a particular empathy for others for whom life has not offered a first-class ticket.

I was conceived in March 1962 in the womb of a 16-year-old Newcastle girl from a working-class family. My father was an apprentice butcher. This situation was neither planned nor manageable for these two young people. Although my birth father did offer to do what he thought was the right thing under the circumstances, my birth mother felt she had no choices other than to carry me to term and then to relinquish me at birth. She had been given no education about reproduction, and when pregnancy occurred she was powerless and was simply swept along by the cultural demands of the day. This however carried me from the potential of non-being into the potentiality of being. I will be forever grateful for the gift of life, the unplanned, unchosen and accidental nature of which seemed to set the pattern for how this gift would be lived out.

My parents the couple who raised me were married in 1954. Thanks to my father having had a bout of the mumps in his early adulthood, they were not able to conceive children. Dad came from a Novocastrian business family who were involved in the meat industry and Mum from a Hunter Valley grazing family, so theirs was a marriage of some synergy.

Without the responsibility of children, in hedonistic 1950s postwar Newcastle their social lives were a whirlwind of friends and acquaintances. In this context, my fathers issues with alcohol began to emerge. When Mums father died in 1959, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to remove themselves from the Newcastle party scene. They relocated to the more sedate and relatively safe environs of the NSW Hunter Valley and took over the running of my maternal grandfathers grazing property. This was Warakeela.

It was the place to which I was brought in early January 1963 and where I was to spend the first 14 years of my life. My first official outing was to my baptism at St Andrews Anglican Church, Mayfield on 23 February, eight years to the day after my parents were married in that church. I would not return to that building until Christmas Day 1984, a day that would change the direction of my life forever.

My early childhood was for the most part idyllic. In place of the toys that most young boys long for, I had the real things: a real dog, real horse, real trucks and tractors, real farm animals. Like most of us, my recollections of this time rely on manufactured memories created from photos I have seen or stories I have been told.

One story, which again echoes in the space between being and non-being, comes from when I was about five years old. Because the tractor had a flat battery, it had been parked facing downhill above the house. I often used to wander out to the shed and climb onto the tractor and pretend I was driving harmless enough in the safe confines of the machinery shed. On this occasion, I managed to release the brake and began to career down the hill screaming with joy and exhilaration at the ride, oblivious to the impending doom I faced. Providentially, my father was at the kitchen window and removed the door from its hinges on his way through to catch me just in time. This was not to be my last brush with death in the context of encounters with farm machinery.