In 1908 the first Salvation Army hall was opened in Magellan Street. In 1935 a new hall was built in Molesworth Street, and on November 29, 1997, a new complex in Cambridge Drive, Goonellabah, was officially opened. Philip Sutcliffe and his wife Donna are full-time ministers, having been posted to the Northern Rivers three years ago. Philip took some time out from his 24/7 schedule to share his story with Sara Browne.

When our founders started the Salvation Army Church in London, they looked for an organisational structure that was already in place and functional and they looked to the military. We actually adopted the military terminology. So, our international leader is a General, our country leaders are Commissioners and then we have varying ranks on the way down. Out of training from bible college, when we’re ordained as ministers, our first rank is Lieutenant. We’re Lieutenant for five years and then a Captain for ten years and then a Major. Most officers sit at that Major rank for the majority of their service.

At the end of this year, we’ll have done eight years of service. We’re a couple of years into Captain now. In the Salvation Army, one of the things that really establishes us as different from other churches, is that husbands and wives get ordained equally and have the same level of responsibility. So, my wife Donna and I work together every day of the week. We went through bible college together, we were both ordained as Captains.

I’ve grown up in the Salvation Army. I was born in Gladstone in central QLD. I’m one of five children. When I was four, my parents decided to go to the Salvation Army bible college so they took all five of us to Sydney and they went through training and became Salvation Army ministers. Again, similar to the army, they move us around as they look at our skill set, our training, our background and say you’d be really good in a particular location.

So, after the two years in Sydney at bible college, mum and dad’s first posting was to Mt Isa. We had three years there and then they had a change of appointment to Cairns and we spent seven years there which was a fantastic location. I got to do all of my high school in one location. When I finished year 12, mum and dad got a posting to Rockhampton and I had some things I could have stayed in Cairns for but I decided to move to Rockhampton. That’s where I did a whole stack of training for what I call my ‘worklife’ before full-time ministry.

I’m a trained lighting designer for theatrical shows. I had a lot of interest in theatre and production work – I did my training in lighting design and stage management at the Pilbeam Theatre in Rockhampton. Then when I finished that I went straight across the road and worked for a local production company. We supplied lighting and sound systems for rock gigs and conferences, concerts and all those kind of things. I did that for about seven years straight out of high school.

Mum and Dad were in a regional leadership role for the Salvation Army while we were there. I met my wife who was attending the Salvation Army in Rockhampton. We got married and settled into our first house there, mum and dad kept moving on. A few years down the track, we ended up following the same path and going to bible college ourselves.

We’re full-time here and as with many churches, we get provided a residence to live in that’s fully furnished. When we’re moved from locations, we just take our personal belongings with us. We’ve been here in Lismore now for just over three years.

We arrived on the 1st of July 2019 and what a rollercoaster time to arrive into a new part of NSW. We arrived just as the bushfires started rolling through places like Drake and Rappville and Tabulam and out near Nimbin. Then we moved into a couple of years of the pandemic and then we thought oh yeah, 2022 is going to be a great year and we can start to sink our feet in here and gain some traction and then the floods hit.

In the Salvo world, usually, you don’t get asked about moving locations but our previous appointment was at Forster Tuncurry, beautiful beachside location. We really loved our time there, we were there for four years. Our line managers met with us and said ‘we don’t usually ask people where they would like to move to but we want to ask you guys if you’d be keen on moving up to Lismore.’ We’d never been to Lismore before so we actually came up just after the Easter weekend, spent a couple of nights and got to look around the town.

We fell in love with the place straight away – the culture around town, the community aspect. We’ve got two young children and when we looked around town with all the parks and things for kids to do we thought, what a fantastic location. So, we went back and said ‘yep we’ll move to Lismore.’ Not expecting the rollercoaster it’s been but in saying that, every single day we feel so lucky that we’ve been able to be a part of this community.

Philip, centre, with his two brothers

Whilst all the disasters and the pandemic and everything that has happened, it has actually allowed us to fall more in love with the community and see a completely different side to Lismore and the whole Northern Rivers. A side that a lot of people don’t normally get to see on a daily basis…the goodness of humanity and the way a community can come together, all of those things which allow us to really connect and engage with the community on a much deeper level.

I think this year is 133 years of the Salvation Army in Lismore. We’ve been here a long time and we’ve seen our share of floods over that time.

For the majority of that time, our main church building was located down in town next to Officeworks, right from the late 1880’s when we established here in Lismore. Our building over the years had seen many floods. We have heaps of different arms of what we do. Obviously, there is the church side. Both my wife and I are ordained ministers and we’ve gone through our theology degrees to have an ordination as ministers within a church setting. But then we’ve got the social side of the organisation. One of those arms is what we call our Salvation Army Emergency Services. A lot of us are trained up in disaster response.

One of the things that happens in NSW as part of the state disaster management plan, the Salvation Army has the contract to provide the catering in evacuation centres. So anytime there is an official disaster declared and an evacuation centre activated, we will respond and provide the catering. We need to have a number of volunteers and it is harder now in a post covid world. We’re there until we’re stood down. Usually and historically, it would be a week to 10 days. In the February/March floods we were on site for three weeks the first time before we were stood down. We had a week off and then we were back for a week with the second flood.

We partner with the Department of Communities and Justice who are the coordinators of the evacuation centres, Red Cross, Anglicare, the Disaster Chaplaincy Network and all the other agencies that play a role in the evacuation centres. In a follow-up from that, we then move into the recovery centres as well.

Since the floods, we’ve been providing financial assistance to those that have been affected right across the Northern Rivers. We’ve got a team of people that are working every day of the week in and around our community including providing physical cash into people’s banks. The money that we’ve been giving out is what the Salvation Army raised through our national flood appeal. It doesn’t just cover the Northern Rivers, there were quite a few other communities in Brisbane, Gympie and Grafton.

There was a bit over 20 million dollars that was donated through that. We’ve also been distributing some government money as well. It’s a massive response. We’ve got multiple teams of people, some that usually wouldn’t be here in this area that are here every week providing assistance.

original Salvos building on Molesworth Street 

My parents really felt God calling their life to full-time ministry within the Salvation Army. Previous to that, they’d been involved with the Salvation Army for quite some time. Dad had grown up within it and mum had spent some time with her family in the Baptist church. They lived on a rural property and they had different denominations come and use the church each Sunday in that community. Mum got connected to the Salvation Army and it was through one of those interactions that she met dad and they married and decided, as a family, that they would worship at the Salvation Army in Gladstone.

Over those years they just felt that God had placed on their lives a calling to full-time ministry and service. I think my oldest brother was 12, my youngest sister was three. Most of the locations that we’ve been to, mum and dad have been the pastors at the church. Their guidance and teaching and their love and care certainly rubbed off on us kids and our interaction with the Salvation Army has been a really positive one. My two older brothers and myself and all our wives have all become Salvation Army ministers. My two sisters still attend the Salvation Army church as well. We’re all still very much involved.

There is absolutely a personal connection for me. Growing up and going through my high school years, then with the work that I did in the rock and roll industry…it has a very particular image related to sex, drugs and rock and roll. When I said to my parents that I wanted to explore that direction for my work life they said, ‘is it…really?’. Having my Christian upbringing to see and interact with the world made me see a void in people’s lives. Something should be there but we just don’t know what it is. Often it would be filled with things like alcohol and drugs and other things like that and I looked at the life that some people in the rock industry were living and I thought, hang on, I don’t have that same feeling, that void that they’re talking about. As I started to explore this more, this is where belief in God and a higher power and spirituality – that’s the void that seems to be missing in a lot of people’s lives. I went through a rollercoaster of questioning in my teenage years – is God real? Does all of this that I’ve grown up with really exist? I questioned it and my parents were very gracious in allowing us kids to explore for ourselves; what does a belief in God and Jesus Christ actually mean? And does it have a personal connection for us?

And so, I went through those years and as I was interacting with the guys in the production world, I was really starting to question – does God exist? What does he mean to me? Then I had what I would call a personal connection with Christ where I really felt his presence, his love and his grace. That cemented it for me. What I’ve grown up with, what I’ve heard, what I’ve understood, has belief and truth. I explored down the scientific line...how do we make God exist when we put it up against science and history and all those things? Science is actually helping affirm existence. What we read in the bible has historical proof to help cement those things as truth in our world.

We often say, you wouldn’t do this just as a job if you didn’t have some kind of personal connection and relationship. A lot of the stuff we go through, you wouldn’t willingly choose to do for a job. We’re on call 24/7. If there’s a disaster, if someone is in their last moments on Earth we sit with them, we counsel, we do lots of different things.

I wouldn’t choose to do this as a job if God hadn’t interacted with my life and called us to this service. It is absolutely a calling. I was extremely comfortable in the world and the work that I was doing in the production space. I loved it. It was a very well-paid job. I wouldn’t have given that up if it wasn’t a calling for us to drop everything and change our life course. I had no intention of going studying a university degree in theology. I was happy with what I was doing. I was never much of an academic, I didn’t really enjoy school and learning.

There’s certainly times I miss the production work. I do try to get out to live music – seeing joy that concerts bring to people’s lives – that’s the bit I really miss. But I’m also really grateful for the time and experience I had because those skills help me in how we do church now. Those skills allow me to train and mentor and provide upgrades to other churches in our community. Particularly over the last couple of years when covid hit and our churches were shut down. Churches were one of the longest sectors that had the most restrictions.

Over the two-year period our building here was shut for nine months, we couldn’t come to meet in church. And then we had the restrictions around not being able to sing. Where other places in community were not required to wear masks, churches still were. Having that background knowledge meant we could move our services online. We stream our services every Sunday here. All of that kind of knowledge and understanding has been helpful in allowing us a church to continue doing what we do just in a different format.

Philip on the job during flood recovery

Internationally, our mission statement is that we will come along side people without discrimination. So, we have a very clear set of policies that talk about the fact that we will serve alongside anyone in our world. On a local level here in Australia, we have that under our inclusion statement and we’re very clear – it doesn’t matter what your ethnicity, how you identify, what your education background is – we will help and walk alongside people no matter what.

The Salvation Army as a church still believes in the biblical aspect of marriage, that it is between a man and a woman. But in terms of access to our services, we provide that to anyone and everyone. Anyone that walks through our doors or pulls me up on the street, I see them as a valued member of society in the eyes of God and will do whatever I can to help them improve their quality of life. It might be advocating for them, providing financial assistance, sitting down and having a conversation, having a cuppa – it doesn’t matter what people’s background is - I don’t care because they’re a human being and they have worth and value. I actually preached about exactly that yesterday in our church here. It was a reminder for people that we, as the Salvation Army, are called to love unconditionally.

This is an updated version of a picture that our founder released very early on in his ministry. It talks about all the things that happen in our world and we are called to help fight all of these things. 

When the Salvation Army began, William Booth had grown up in the Methodist Church. In the early to mid-1800s, church had become this very elitist group of people. There was a lot of people in society who were pushed to the outer extremes. Those that were suffering any kind of addiction or abuse or were poor or malnourished – Booth said actually these people also belong in church. But church was a place you attended if you had status and wealth and money and education. He went out and met with people and talked to them about the love of Jesus.

His original plan was to help them feed into the already established church. He never had the plan of establishing his own denomination but when he introduced these people to Jesus and their lives were transformed, the established churches wouldn’t accept them. They originally called themselves the Christian Mission, they were going out to do what Christ has called us to do. In one of his very early communications out to some of the members of the church, he noted that we’re not just a Christian mission, we’re helping people to find salvation through the love of Jesus. That’s where the name came from.

The Salvation Army is now 158 years old and we’re in 133 countries around the world. The original vision that he had – to see the least, the last and the lost in society provided a safe space and have their needs met – but it was also a place where they could find the love of Jesus. The two go very much hand in hand for us.

Our hope is that our kids will experience the same peace that we feel about living our life in the church and for Jesus. Every day as we look around the world and see what’s happening in churches and how life is changing. We’re often part of discussions within our organisations about what the church going to look like for our children growing up. For us, as we look at our boys, we want them to grow up in a world where they feel they are valued, their opinions matter and that they can express themselves however they want to.

I certainly look back at the way I was brought up. My parents so freely allowed me to go and explore what life looked like in that production world I wanted to follow. I was free to make my own choices and decisions. There was never any pressure that I had to follow in the family’s footsteps. We just want our boys to find their place in life. We’ll support them on that journey. If its in the church and doing what we do, fantastic. But if it's another way, fantastic, we’ll support them either way.

Within the Salvo world, we have a five-year minimum and ten-year maximum at one location. That maximum is changing. As with any church, there is a continual shortage of ministers to fulfil the roles of leading congregations just here in the Northern Rivers. You go back five years and there was a set of ministers in Ballina, Casino and here in Lismore.

Earlier this year, just two weeks before the floods, we officially became known as the Salvos Northern Rivers so we’re now responsible for Ballina, Byron, Lismore, Casino. We have one Sunday service here but mid-week programs and activities happen in the other communities. This is the new reality for how church is.

We’re invested in this community, we’re here for as long as the Salvos keep us here. With what we’ve journeyed through here, Lismore will always have a special place in our hearts, because of the journey through flood recovery and pandemic and other natural disasters. We love this place. We’d love to be here for another ten years or more. We’ll wait and see what the Salvos do with us.

My wife and I are both 36. We started ministry when we 29 so certainly in the space of church ministers, we are very much on the younger end of the scale. Many times when I talk to people on the phone and then I turn up they say, ‘I was expecting an old guy’. In our community here there are a number of other young pastors coming through. The reality is for a lot of churches that fulltime ministers are aging. It’s a big problem in every denomination. The people we took over from were going into retirement. We see an amazing future for the Salvos. We come in with new life and new vision and new energy.

We have two days off in the week. Sunday is obviously a busy day. It's hard to switch off. I love photography. I love getting out into nature and taking photos. Christmas is always a big time for us. I love decorating the house. This year I was finally allowed to jump into the next level of Christmas lights so this year will be the start of fully programmed lights and music. That’s been a project I’ve been working on in my spare time throughout the year. I started in January.