Rev. Bill Crews; Meals, Mission, and Meaning

In this episode of The Big 6-Oh, we sit down with Reverend Bill Crews, the tireless heart behind the Bill Crews Foundation, to talk about compassion, community, and confronting poverty in Australia. 

Bill shares powerful stories from the frontline of social justice and explains why he’s still driven to make a difference every day. It’s an inspiring conversation with a man who’s spent a lifetime helping others find hope.

Transcript

00:00

If you're old enough to remember when phones had cords and the only thing that went viral was a cold,  then you're in the right place. Welcome to the Big Six-O with Kaylee Harris and Guy Rowlison. Because who better to discuss life's second act than two people who still think mature is a type of cheese?

00:36

It's Good Friday, so today means a lot to this week's guest and we're joined by the Reverend Bill Cruz from the Exodus Foundation in Sydney.  Bill, g'day, welcome.  Most Australians will be familiar with the extraordinary work that Bill does, but a bit of background for our listeners in other parts of the world.  Bill is a Christian minister at the Uniting Church. He's the minister  at the Ashfield Parish in Sydney's inner west.

01:02

But he was born in England and migrated to Australia in his early years and believe it or not studied electrical engineering at the Uni of New South Wales. Before in late 1969,  he first visited the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross and became involved in their voluntary programs. So by 1971, he decided to quit engineering and work full time at the Wayside Chapel. And he was a member of the team that created the first 24 hour crisis center.

01:31

in Australia, which is extraordinary. And  in 1978, with the late Ted Knopf's, they created their first life education center that have since spread all over the world,  Kong,  Thailand, New Zealand,  England, America promoting drug avoidance and harm minimization strategies. And then he joined the uniting church and became a minister in Asheville where he started the famous Exodus Foundation. We'll get Bill to explain what Exodus is in a second.

02:00

It's best known though for its free restaurant called The Loaves and Fish's Restaurant, which feeds  hundreds of people every day. Bill, I could just take up the whole half an hour talking about your extraordinary life, but I want to bring you in now and say  hello and thank you for your time. it's  an honour. Now,  when  you joined the Uniting Church,  what made you  do that? What made you take that calling?

02:30

Well, I'd been at the Wayside Chapel for 13 years  and  I got the feeling, you know, time to move on sort of thing, but I didn't have any money or anything like that. So I looked around and the only church I found that would pay student ministers was the United Church.  So I thought that's the one. So if the Catholics had paid.  Maybe, maybe.

03:00

The Catholic Church is the mother of us all  and  I like it. I like it. But  I'd be a bit difficult for me at times to sign the pledge.  But an electrical engineer, should I use the dad joke and say what sparked the  moving from circuits and systems through to compassion and community? Well, I happened one day.

03:28

I didn't think I was the world's greatest engineer, but I was probably better than I thought I was. And I was doing a lot of research, you know, and all the time through university I'd be getting high distinctions for English and philosophy and all that and passing all the engineering things. And I happened one day to end up at the,  one night at the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross and honestly I'd never seen anything like it in the world. It had homeless people, it had

03:58

runaway kids, had hippies, it had people like Sir Robert Heltman, there were the high and the low and everything, all muddled up together. And it was  at the time when King's Cross was in a lot of transformation  and I just found, I'd found home  and I started visiting shut-in old ladies who were being terrorised by developers and all of that and there were all these kids on the street.

04:27

All these kids, many of them abused by priests and nuns and God knows what else and institutions and all of that. And I couldn't in all honesty not  stay there. I couldn't. I couldn't. Because  most of the institutions that have been set up to help those people in a way didn't or allowed the abuse to go on. And I felt I've got to stay. Simple as that.

04:57

And when was that? How long ago was that?  1971. Wow. was a different Australia then, wasn't it, in 1971? Yeah, yeah, well  was still  hangover and things from World War II. So that a lot of the homeless people were returned servicemen who had suffered, you know, and were on the grog and all of that. And a lot of the kids,  this is one of the untold stories, a lot of the kids  were

05:25

When a lot of the soldiers went away, their wives and girlfriends got  boyfriends.  And so when the  soldiers came back, what do you do with the kids? So they put them in homes. That's one of the big untold stories. And you're right, whether it was the Second World War, whether it was Korea, whether it was Vietnam,  there must have been a multitude of  stories and change.  And as we say, 71 was so long ago now.

05:55

And society has changed, but the problems haven't really, have they? The problems haven't changed and  in lots of ways it was a time of change, but the change got paralysed so that a lot of the dreams of that time didn't really come to fruition, you know. So you go to Ashfield and you're the minister there? Yeah.

06:18

the church, how did the Exodus Foundation get its name and how did it come about and what did you want to achieve? I've watched Ted Noff's a lot and he got charged with heresy and all this sort of stuff and I thought if I did exactly the opposite the church wouldn't give me a hard time which is not true. There was no money so I had to earn my own salary and all of that sort of stuff so I had to go out and get a high profile and I needed a high profile because that protected me from

06:48

the bureaucrats in the church  and  it was on the main road between  Sydney and Melbourne. So there were all the hitchhikers and all the poor people and all the people. And also at the cross I'd been taking in all these homeless kids, so I just started doing that at Ashfield. And before long kids started turning up because  I remember talking to the Roay police at

07:17

at  Central Station  and they started bringing kids that night and we got nothing so we slept them in the church and just did what we could.  You just do what you do. You've got to do it, you know.  And we just opened the church up, slept the kids on the pews.  I had 10 old ladies, lovely old Methodist ladies who called one another Miss and all were hats to church,  most of them old maids and they helped me.

07:46

I kept saying, you don't know what you got here. They said, that's all right. And it turned their lives around, you know. One of them said to me a while ago,  years ago, she said, we were just a bunch of old girls going out backwards.  She said, and you came along and there's homeless kids and people out of jail and this and that and the other. And wow, wow, wow, I can't die yet. It's so interesting.  Like it turned their lives around. How did you fund?

08:15

those activities. How did you fund feeding these kids? Always begged for money. Begged who? Whoever would listen. Whoever would listen.  Singo, I wrote a letter to Singo and he turned up one morning and he had this paper bag with all this money in it and he said, I just want it on the horses.  So I took that. Then there was  an old gal wrote me a letter and she said, you're not to ring me, you're not to write to me, you have no contact with me at all.

08:44

because here's $10,000, this was 30 odd years ago, here's $10,000 and when my family find out they're going to be really angry with me. So it just happened. Yeah. And so this evolved more or less by itself. Just the word of mouth got out. of itself, yes. So you've been feeding the homeless and supporting the vulnerable for decades now. What's changed and what hasn't?

09:13

What hasn't is the cries of the people in suffering. That hasn't changed at all.  I think at the moment this world is less kind in a way than it was.  I could  go and bang on the doors of politicians or get on the radio or get in the newspaper and say, is going on, you know, and the government's got to do something, and they'd respond. Now they just punch back. They punch back.

09:44

And that's  really difficult, really difficult to deal with because you present them with issues that they need to deal with and they'll punch back. And in a country like Australia, where are we falling short as far as  giving? Because we're a country, we're a rich nation, we're in a  reasonable position to help. Where are we falling short? We've got people who have got billions and billions and billions of dollars.

10:13

and people who have got the bum out of their pants.  And it's almost like the twain shall never meet. And I think we've allowed that gap between the rich and the poor to get too great, too great.  And I think people used to think that there was  an end to,  it greed, you know, but you find people can never make enough money. They might have a billion dollars but then they want two.

10:42

or they want five or the human greed is bottomless, you know? And the only way we balance that is through taxation. But the people in authority or the people with leverage make sure that the taxation doesn't cover what's needed. You would only have to impose a tax on the world's wealthiest people of like 1 cent

11:12

and you would solve the  poverty problem in the whole world. So it's actually distributing some of that wealth.  It's that simple. It's that simple.  And yet we won't do it.  And we'll give  millions and millions in salaries to people.  And yet we won't say, well, you you've got enough. So on those hard days, what is it that keeps you going?

11:43

I was sitting in my restaurant the day before yesterday and I sit there and often have lunch with all the guests and there's a – I'll talk about that later – and this woman comes up to me and there's tears streaming down her face, you know, and she says, oh, she's a refugee from Syria and she says, can you help my family, she said, because you know there's all these internecine wars going on there between one side and the other and I don't know what side she was on or what side or any.

12:13

She said, they've been murdering my family. They're murdering my family.  And  they murdered the little children the other night, you know. And  can I bring the rest, can you help me bring the rest to Australia? And you think, hmm, yes,  I'll do what I can.  It's that, it's basically that. So what do you do in that situation, Bill? Would you approach the government? Yeah, we approach the government and

12:42

One time, right,  this was the power of the little old ladies because they were all pride of themselves on being non-political, which meant the Liberal Party held all its meetings in our church, you  know. And there was a little boy we'd found who was going to be deported. And these old gals, right, said to me, you go and see Philip Ruddock, he was the minister at the time, you go and see that Philip Ruddock because he'd spoken at the Liberal Party meetings in the church. You go and see him and you tell him

13:11

If that boy is deported, we will lie on the tarmac and the plane will have to run over our bodies. You would have loved that. Oh, it was gorgeous. And these old gals, know, gosh, you know. How do you, Bill, how do you stay positive with the pain that you see from the people that you see every day at the Loaves and Fishes restaurant? I remember

13:39

One story you told me a few years ago of two men came into the restaurant  and  one of them ate and the other one didn't. And at the end of the first guy eating, he took out his false teeth and gave them to the other guy so he could eat. how do you...

13:56

It's resourcefulness. It is.  Real resourcefulness. Yeah, but it's extraordinary stuff that most people don't get to see when you're exposed to this every day. How do you stay positive and how is that what drives you? Because it's extraordinary. Yeah. The care and the love and look,  I'll go  right.  I was in Calais, was in Calais, France in, in,  I don't know, 10 years ago, nearly 10 years ago, where

14:25

All the refugees were trying to get to England, you know, and there's 15,000 of them in this huge refugee camp. It's terrible.  They're terrible places, refugee camps. Terrible.  And  I'm there  and  I see a sign which says, NA meeting, Narcotics Anonymous, you know, and I thought, wonder how they do that here. So I go into an area which is

14:54

as big as this really, with a bit  of carpet on the floor.  There's wood and plastic and snow and dirt and terrible. And sitting in that, in a circle, were maybe 10 or 12 people, men and women, Middle Eastern,  Asian, African, all different,  all drug addicts, mainly  Muslim.

15:24

Um.

15:26

all in the depths of despair trying to get out of drug addiction.  In our terms, the lowest of the low. were,  tick it off, refugees, get rid of them, know. Muslims, problem, know. Drug addicts, problem. Boom, boom, boom.  Sitting in a circle, all telling their story. That's what the NA does, you know.

15:54

They're all talking different languages and everything, but you could read it all on their faces. You didn't need to understand the words. And it gets to me. And I think, oh,  what am I going to say? What am I going to say? And I said, oh, I'm Bill from Australia. And they go, English, English.  I say, no, I can't get you to England. I can't get you to England. And then it all poured out because it was  a personal, really hard time for me. And I said, oh,

16:23

I'm Bill from Australia, said, and I've had two failed marriages, I said, and my kids have suffered from that, and I'm feeling really bad about that, blah, blah, blah. And they all got up and they all hugged me. Oh, wow. But these people who had nothing gave me my life back in a way, you know? And I thought, I've got to honour that. So I went back to England and I threw out all my clothes and I just wear black in the hope people ask me, why do you wear black all the time?

16:52

and I'll tell them that the people who had the least or had nothing gave me my whole life back. And I learned from that that the more stuff you've got in your life, the less you can give of yourself to somebody else. And that's where it all goes. And  I learned that after I was 70. It took me  all those years to learn that. Then a few years later,

17:21

I was, my son had a huge psychotic breakdown, you know, and he's in hospital in a really bad way, really bad way.  And I'm going and visiting and haranguing the doctors, all of that, doing what a father should do, right? And I look around, it was a public hospital, I look around and I see most of the other people in that psychiatric ward.

17:49

were people we see every day at my foundation. And I suddenly realised they were the people who gave me my life back. They were the people that the real power lives in the powerless. The big mighty people, they don't change the world. The powerless do. The powerless do. That is broader societal reflections.

18:19

We talk about there's a problem out there.  How do  you make people care about that problem out there when it doesn't directly affect them? Because we've all got a dark side. We've all got a shadow side. We've all got  areas that we don't want to look at in ourselves. And often those  very sides  are the sides that build

18:50

the destructive side of the world to coming together.  Like we believe the world's  solid and it's not. Like it struck me a while ago,  Jesus goes on and on and on saying,  my kingdom is not of this world. And people think about up there, but I suddenly realised it could be seen as a new way of seeing down here.

19:19

It's down here. It's a new way of seeing down here, which is a world that's where people actually care for each other. Do you think that will ever be a thing? No, but I think we work towards it and I hope what we are doing  is a symbol that it could possibly one day perhaps maybe happen.  Do you think there's more good in the world than bad? I think there's a balance.

19:49

Like I've just been,  we do some work in Thailand, so I've been in the rainforest with  the Buddhist monks, know, and they have all, they're isolated and they spend all this time in the rainforest contemplating their navel and all of that. And I was thinking, gee, that's really lovely, really lovely, but how is that going to stop the bombs falling? You know, so it makes you think, makes you think. You've got to do it

20:19

on the run, you know?  With Easter on us now,  what  does hope mean to Bill?  And how do you help people find it if they don't have it?

20:33

Depends how you look on time, I think that  really…

20:42

I do a lot of meditating  and  when you meditate every now and then you'll find that you're surrounded by a warm loving glow,  know, a warm loving glow.  And  I think that's at the core of all the – there's a whole lot of thinking now that, you know, science used to say the end product of evolution

21:12

will be consciousness. All these animals and all that gradually evolved to be conscious. But lot of thinking now is that consciousness was there before anything. That  evolution didn't drive consciousness. Consciousness drove evolution.  that coming up to Easter and there's the crucifixion and all that sort of stuff. The risen Jesus, we were told, the people recognized the risen Jesus by his words.

21:42

But we are told the risen Jesus, whatever this kind of means,  it means different things, is part of the Godhead, which says there's a wound at the heart of the Godhead.  I think a lot of it's the way you think about things, you know, and if you think God's all perfect and all of that, then we fall really short.

22:09

But if we're all working together muddling through this existence coming to consciousness, it kind of makes it all a bit different. It depends on how you look on things. You talk about consciousness  and one of your good friends is the Dalai Lama. How did that relationship happen?  Oh, I don't know. Because you would have met  many famous people. Yeah, I got invited to…they asked me to welcome him to Sydney years ago.

22:38

I gave this speech and he liked it. He liked it. Afterwards there was, I think it was 10,000 people there and I had to welcome him and made the speech and afterwards he came up to me and he said, oh, that was really good, know, really, really good. And he gave me this scarf and all these sorts of things. So I just kept, we just kept bumping into one another. And then one time he was coming over here and I said, come and feed my homeless people. So he and I, fed 400

23:07

homeless people and kids and God knows what and he loved it. He'd never done anything like that and he got up before all of them and he said I'm homeless too and it was such a powerful thing. I'm homeless. Came into my church, I showed him all around the church, he took off his scarf and he put it around the cross, you know. Then he gives me this gift like a bit later, he says take that as a gift from the Holy Spirit, you know.

23:36

And he says, Bill, you're a, what do say? I said, I said, you know, if we were talking about it, I said, that's really good Christian stuff. And he said, yeah, he said, and you're a good Buddhist too.  I don't, I don't like words  that try to put you into a box because I think God or all that is, or whatever you want to call it is far bigger.

24:05

The early Christians, the Romans, thought of the early Christians as atheists. And the reason they thought they were atheists was because they didn't have an idol. And you have to have an idol to pray to. So the Christians don't have an idol, so they're atheists. And you can't name the magnificence  of all that is. Can't name it. And you would have spoken, whether it's the Deleu Lama, you would have spoken and met

24:36

hundreds and hundreds of people throughout your career, throughout your life. Is there one story or one,  something that sticks in your mind that's changed your view on the world or on Christianity or religion or has impacted on your life personally? I think, well often it happens every Sunday morning, right? The one  that I get a lot I think I've,  well there's a good few but

25:04

The one where the man was beaten up and by the side of the road and the religious people wouldn't touch him  because it was a holy time and to touch him would mean they were impure and they were so busy about keeping pure that they weren't pure. Those sorts of things  turn me around, turn me around and

25:32

Sometimes our church service, because all the street people come and all of that, they hang by a thread as you can imagine. There's a bit of chaos all the time. And I think this is it. This is what it is. It's not all the bells and smells and everybody. I do a washing of the feet tomorrow for the homeless people and we all wash our feet. And it's the most moving thing because as you wash somebody's feet, they tell you their life story. It's amazing.

26:01

And you're washing their feet. Yeah.  So if you could get… The old girls used to say, why don't you wear your robes? Yeah. I said it's a real thing. It's not.  I'd like to think politicians and businessmen were among those. But if you could get those people into a room,  knowing that you have to beg, borrow and  not necessarily steal money, but what would you say to them? Well, often they're very transactional so that…

26:29

they don't get the wider bits  and I find that's really kind of sad. Like at the moment there's all this Trump talk and all of that and I'm saying we have a real opportunity to build  a financial order that takes in account of the poor and the needy and the desperate. And we shouldn't, if we  export our

26:59

social capital, if we export  our goodness,  sales of widgets will happen anyway.  Like the Colombo Plan of 60 years ago is still such a huge,  people still talk about all of that, know, did such good. So  if I could get them all in the room I'd say  export goodwill  and

27:27

the sale of the widgets will follow. It's not necessarily the other way around.  If you just get transactional, then you end up like Trump and it can change overnight. But if you build good relationships, they'll last forever.  I'll just finish up if I can.  What legacy do you hope to leave? I'm not talking about buildings or institutions, but probably in the hearts of people. Listen to people.

27:57

Often  we can't hear what they say because there's too much chatter in our own heads and what people  say  we're re-examining ourselves a lot. I'd say listen to people and try and sit beside people.  One of the reasons we've got such loneliness in the world is because we don't listen to one another anymore and often we don't know

28:25

who our neighbour is or anything like that. so if people ring me up and say I'm lonely, I say get out of your room and talk to your neighbour.  I hope that's what would happen.  What we've tried to do is build a community of people within which there are pockets of expertise. And often you'll find with, call them charities, that

28:53

They do all the expertise work, but bugger the community.  Reverend Bill Cruz, thank you so much for your time on the Big Sixo podcast. Thank you.

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professional advice. Please consult with a qualified professional for guidance on any personal matters.

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Oh, and before we go,  let's give credit where credit is due.  Kaylee Harris and I came up with all the genius content for this week's episode.  Our producer,  Nick Abood,  well, he keeps the lights on and makes sure we don't accidentally upload a cat video instead of a podcast. thanks for keeping us on track, Nick.  Nick?  Nick?