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Marjorie’s hundred years of service.

9:07pm Thursday, 29th September 2011

Lea Carswell

Marjorie Deasey’s 100^th birthday was only a few weeks away when the Lord called her home in May 2011. She is remembered as a faithful, pioneer missionary with her husband, Dudley, and the spiritual mother of the Gogodala people of Papua New Guinea. Her memorial reads: “With Christ, whom she loved and served. Marjorie’s enthusiasm and commitment to the Christian gospel has been a great encouragement and challenge to many both in PNG and Australia.”

Recognising at 90 that she had led a remarkable and blessed life, Marjorie wrote her story with a PNG missionary colleague, Gwyneth Priestly, resulting in the self-published 2004 book, Never Say I Can’t.

Raised in a family of faith and conviction, Marjorie grew up to love the stories of the Bible and went on to grow in her own faith.

“When I was nearly eleven years old, my Sunday School teacher had talked about loving mothers. It was Mother’s Day, 1921 and she asked me what I would like to give my mother that would make her very, very happy. I had thought about this and I remember sitting on a little chair and saying that I wanted to go home and tell my mother and father that I loved the Lord Jesus,” Marjorie recalled.

“When I arrived home and told my mother, tears filled her eyes. It was obviously a tremendous thrill for her to see her daughter make a commitment to the Lord, whom she so loved. That was the beginning of my love for the Lord and the greatest decision that I ever made. I never forgot what I had done that day and it deeply affected the rest of my life.”

Her story is testament to that endurance. With her faithful husband, Dudley, Marjorie was closely involved with mission groups and ministries focused on evangelism.

She said, “Five very happy years of married life went by and we were working with various evangelists, particularly the Reverend John Ridley. Dudley was appointed to the councils of the Unevangelised Fields Mission (UFM) and the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) and we began to think that we were going to continue living and working in Australia.”

Their situation and Dudley’s blossoming career in the insurance industry allowed them to provide hospitality to visiting missionaries. One of their guests, Len Twyman, stayed with them for a few days as he passed through Sydney on his way back to Papua New Guinea. Reading one of Len’s prayer letters soon after, they noted his call for a ‘mother and father’ to come and help with the ministry in Balimo, a small community in the interior. Handwritten in the letter’s margin, Len had added, “What about you?”

Marjorie said, “We read his comment in the margin with interest but did not give it much thought,” although she spent the next few days discussing with God why it would be impossible for her to leave the comforts of the Sydney suburbs for the unknown remoteness of a Papuan village. By the weekend, she and Dudley had each wrestled with the idea and had resolved, individually, to hand over their lives to the Lord and to go to Papua New Guinea.

They later learned they had reached that conclusion at the same time, and their plans were confirmed. “We cried, we praised the Lord, we rejoiced in a manner which we had never known before. We were both going to Papua! When Dudley and I felt the call of God to go, it was not because we were needed, it was because we had heard God’s voice saying to us, ‘Go! I want you to go.’”

They headed out in 1940 into the true unknown. Who could have seen how much they would accomplish in the name of the Lord, and how much would change in world of the Gogodala?

By 1973 the Christian church in and around Balimo was autonomous with its own pastor training facility and well-established groups running Girls Brigade, Boys Brigade, Christian Endeavour, Sunday Schools, Literacy Clubs and Women’s Clubs, conducted in their villages by their own committees. Though the Deaseys had no children of their own, they had been honoured to share the parenting of babies within the Balimo community and had become entrenched in life there.

However in 1974 they became casualties of the ‘changing face of mission’ and changing values for expatriate workers. Their mission (formerly UFM, and then Australian Pacific Christian Mission APCM) instructed them to retire when Dudley reached 65 years. They were also caught up in a movement of the times to re-empower indigenous cultures and to minimise the impact of western influences. Unfairly, the local authorities accused them of ‘destroying the culture of the Gogodala people’, obtaining signatures from Gogodalans unaware of what they were signing.

They departed in September 1974, sad to be cut off from the community they loved. Dudley and Marjorie spent some months in Australia visiting churches where people often asked of their future. Their answer was, “God has not told us to leave Papua New Guinea, so we will return and live in Port Moresby”.

Indeed they spent most of the next 17 years there, voluntarily working with the Gogodala people in the capital of the now-independent nation. They were back in Australia when Dudley died in February 1993.

In 1999 Marjorie returned to Papua New Guinea and immediately received a note from a Pastor she knew, ‘Agi (mother), please speak at these villages – Dogona, Balimo, Saweta and Kimama.’

A quarter of a century away from these villages was as nothing as she again took her place among the families she had known for so long. During her three-month trip a group of Gogodalans honoured Marjorie’s 88^th birthday. She said, “The couples who had been my first dear children gave me a surprise … party! They were now aged and some were disabled but still full of fun and intrigue.”

Irrepressible seems like the right word for Marjorie who lived all of her years to the fullest. She had qualified for her NSW Driver License when aged 82 (the state’s oldest new driver) and was still driving well into her nineties.

Driving gave her the ability to do things like attend church sports games and enthusiastically cheer on her team. Without doubt, with her reliance on Christ, her enduring love for others and her ‘never say I can’t’ attitude, having Marjorie on your side sounds like a winning proposition.

Marjorie’s book, Never Say I Can’t, has been updated. To obtain a copy email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)