Jean was a founder and leader, and then an international leader, in Children’s Bible Ministries and was responsible for jointly training scores of children’s workers in New Zealand and overseas.
A childhood of ill health
Much of what happened in Jean’s early life contributed to her passion and insights for children’s ministry. Born in 1943, Jean Williams was the daughter of an Irish Protestant father who had come to New Zealand to escape the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland. Her father and grandfather ran a thriving truck business franchise, and her father held half shares in a successful racehorse. The weekend household was filled with businessmen, parties and drinks, but Jean was seriously struggling. She believes it stemmed from a lack of bonding to her parents when she was born, for, following the earlier neonatal loss of a baby, her mother was in total dread of losing another and anyway went into septicaemia. Her father, despairing that his wife would die, opted out. There was a Caesarean section and no bonding for days. Perhaps this led to her severe stammer and years of abdominal and joint pain.
Jean started at Mt Albert Baptist Church Sunday School, but left when someone asked her to read aloud. However, elderly Mrs Turner in the church prayed for every child in the Sunday School and kept praying for Jean. While Jean’s pain and stammering persisted, her loving parents paid for hypnotherapy and colour therapy, but Jean could not even attend her lovely little girls’ school in Khyber Pass. Thanks to Mrs Reay, the pastor’s wife, conversing with Jean’s mother in a shop, something was about to change.
On learning Mrs Williams was unhappy because her 15-year-old daughter was so sick she could not go to school, Mrs Reay offered, surprisingly, ‘Would Jean like to sing in the choir of the Billy Graham Crusade?’ This was 1959. It was known that people with a stammer could benefit from singing. Jean accepted. She practised happily and then, the week of the meetings, succumbed to flu while expostulating, ‘Even if I die, I’m going.’ So the girl from what may have been the most drink-sodden house in Mt Albert, who was too sick to travel in a bus, persuaded her drinking father to take her to the Billy Graham meetings.
One night, as Jean sang in the choir ‘Just as I am,’ she heard an unexplained voice say, ‘I’ll never call you again.’ ‘What?’ She swung round to look. The next thought came clear. ‘What would it be like to be in a meeting like this, and not even want to meet God?’ Jean ran to the front and prayed the prayer Billy Graham led. The counsellor who spoke with her did the one thing Jean most needed—gave her a verse to hang on to, repeating it three or four times, ‘Behold! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them and they with me.’ Criticised by an aunt the next day, Jean said the verse over quietly and felt peace.
Jean’s heartfelt immediate question became, ‘Why didn’t I know this earlier? Think how much hurt I would have been spared if I knew about Jesus sooner in life.’ Jean returned to Mt Albert Baptist Church and joined the choir while longingto help children follow Jesus. A woman in the church invited Jean to go with her to training with the Child Evangelisation Fellowship. Jean went with alacrity and found her lifetime vision.
Children’s ministry
The CEF leaders, Charlie and Beryl McRea, became Jean’s mentors. When they ran children’s camps during holidays, Jean saw Beryl counsel hurting children who were transformed by God-given self-worth. ‘To be able to counsel like that! That’s what I want,’ Jean breathed in hope. She under-studied Beryl while working weekdays in her father’s business. At a children’s camp, she met Bill Morley, who also had a heart for children. That was the basis for their marriage in March 1966. Her joint pain had improved, but her stammer lasted through her realisation that she was good at telling stories, until years later, an emotional release on knowing God as her heavenly father.
Together, Charlie and Beryl, Jean and Bill founded a new children’s evangelism organisation for the New Zealand Children’s Bible Crusade, later the Children’s Bible Ministries. Gradually, the understanding grew on Jean and Bill, with much sadness, that they were not going to have children. In the long term, that meant they spent their lives earnestly and cheerfully serving other people’s children.
One May, while the four ran a children’s camp at Blockhouse Bay, their ministry changed. First, there were two miracles. In a game of cricket, a seven-year-old boy ran across the pitch and received a smash on the head with a cricket bat. He screamed, he bled, his face swelled, and he vomited blood. A doctor came, all the children and leaders prayed, and the next day, there was nothing wrong. In the second miracle, a deaf boy, known to the others as deaf, began to hear. His group leader had prayed for him.
Then Jean taught on Elijah, and three campers requested, ‘We want God to fill us like Elijah.’ Despite the four camp leaders, all Baptist, knowing nothing of such things, the Holy Spirit visited and hallowed the experience of these three girls, and then of others.
This was at the beginning of the charismatic movement in New Zealand. The move of God at the camp felt richly blessed, but along came trouble. After the camp, three Baptist men complained. One sent letters to all Baptist churches warning them not to send children to the camps. Surprise! The next camp had more Baptists than ever. Rev Ian Kemp at the Tabernacle told Charlie and Beryl in his church to keep doing what they were doing, saying, ‘God does not leave out the children.’
However, Jean felt her own church was dead. ‘God, confirm this from your word and we’ll leave Mt Albert Baptist,’ she prayed. But she felt God point her to Ezekiel 37 about the dry bones that lived, and this, as she experienced it, promised change. ‘Okay, God. I’ll stay,’ she concluded, even though many people left Baptist churches in the 1970s. Looking back, she says, ‘I didn’t try to rock the boat. I could sing quietly in tongues. We were good friends with the leading families. Mt Albert Baptist Church even put me in charge of its children’s ministry.’
More children’s camps
Back in their children’s work, there was an imponderable they had no answer for—the need for a property, a place for the growing camps. For a while, they used Orewa District High School and other schools, but their camps needed a big marquee and an interminable setup effort. Then, in one camp with 240 campers and staff, Jean was speaking at a morning session when she saw the marquee lift in the wind. It crashed with a torrent of rain, but as it landed, six men, apparently super-humanly, held up the six supporting poles above the children. That astounded them. The men could not even remember moving from their seats to each pole. When the children had all scrambled out and the men had no more strength, the poles fell. The only injury was a broken arm. It was God’s visible mercy.
Yet more children came to camps. More leaders to train. Where to find a permanent site? They searched the upper North Island. Finally, a property in Raglan came up. As Jean and the others drove through the gates, they could not believe their eyes. It was almost exactly what they needed, designed for children, with an ‘E’ shaped dormitory building and further buildings, a swimming pool, a tennis court, swings, a slide and seesaws. On one side, it looked out to Raglan town and on the other to the Tasman Sea. Remarkably, finance became available. They dedicated the Raglan base in April 1969. For about 10 years, they held two camps concurrently during school holidays, one at Helensville High School and one at Raglan.
And overseas
After a four-month course at Pentecostal-leaning Faith Bible College in Tauranga, Jean and Bill felt a new pull to train children’s workers overseas, initially in the Philippines. They hesitated. How would the New Zealand camps continue? They delayed while Jean nursed her father through the remission of cancer. Others started children’s work in Fiji and Tonga in 1967 with YWAM. Jean and Bill left for the Philippines in 1973, first to Manila, and then to Quezon City, where God provided a base at 3 Scout Street.
Jean could see almost no programmes for children in the churches there. Her task would be training workers and starting children’s camps with Bill to help. They had begun when Jean had to return to New Zealand to help her mother, who had a heart attack. Bill continued the work, but it was a struggle. Eventually, he felt God released him to return to New Zealand. God had new people for Children’s Bible Ministries, including stalwart Hugh Dickey for the camps, Bible in Schools, after-school clubs and training seminars. From 1975, Jean and Bill led the New Zealand work with Jean holding the chequebook, and then, with Hugh, they became the international leaders in 1990 when Jean was 47. They cared nothing for whether the visible leader was a man or a woman. Jean and Bill knew Hugh was a brilliant teacher, Jean the main voice, and Bill the prayer mainstay. That was all they needed. ‘You accept one another’s gifting. That is key,’ is Jean’s modus operandi.
And what drove the teaching and training for children’s workers? ‘It was founded on the principle of reaching people for God while they were children,’ says Jean. ‘To teach not just the Bible but discipleship—to give children the ability to apply what they learn of Jesus in everyday life, as simple as, when mum can’t find a parking place for the car to say, ‘Mummy, can I pray for a car park?’ To experience God answering prayer and leading children to Jesus in such a way that they know how, where, and what to pray in everyday life. Then, when they face teenage questions, they have a memory bank of the times God helped them, so they can release questions to God to care for. This was the core. Along with it came the practicalities and the principles.
In 1978, Bill and Jean, with Hugh and another worker, Filipina Maggie Borda, went to Australia, where they made three tours to fill a gap by training people in children’s ministry in the state capitals. Soon, Australia had enough people trained to run their own children’s ministry training sessions.
As international directors of Children’s Bible Ministries, Jean and Bill added a small children’s choir from the Philippines that was touring New Zealand. Then Jean was inspired by God to prompt one of their Filipino helpers, Briccio, who was himself disabled, to develop a branch of their work for children living with disability. It flourished. With Children’s Bible Ministries developing a strong partnership with New Zealand’s Christian Fellowship for Disabled, the two groups fostered an active and hugely appreciated work with children who had been so much neglected. There were huge stresses at times. One of the largest was the fire in the Philippines headquarters, which was also a Bible School.
In the year 2000, leadership in New Zealand passed to Mike Buckley, so Jean and Bill could focus on the international work. Thus began a period of frequent travel in which Bill led in prayer, and Jean and Hugh trained people doing children’s ministry in scenes as widely spread as Indonesia, India and Africa. I first met Jean in Bangalore, India, where she was training Sunday School teachers at a YWAM base.
Writer Hugh produced the ‘Life Changers’ curriculum (now in 25 languages). The team also taught in New Zealand, bringing people to our shores and training scores of them in children’s work in a 16 week course—people from Singapore, Nepal, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Nigeria, China, Pakistan, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Russia, Zimbabwe, Solomon Islands, other Pacific Islands and Egypt. New Zealanders attended too.
To do this, Children’s Bible Ministries needed an Auckland base for an office, a book room, materials sales, storage for visual aids, and a large room for training. Near Eden Park in Auckland, Children’s Bible Ministries was finally able to buy an old church, which they made the Children’s Bible Ministries centre, where they taught the 16-week course from January to April each year. Jean did not discontinue the courses for overseas trainees until COVID times.
Trainees felt empowered. Participant Felicity Tucker wrote this of her training.
‘Living and working alongside the CBC (later CBM) team was the most enriching experience. I learned so much through Bill and Jean’s storytelling. They had much experience and knowledge that they freely passed on to everybody, and I was in a privileged place to learn from them. The way they taught the children, expecting them to respond to the Lord in some way, was an eye-opener for me, and I wanted to be able to do it too. Under their guidance, I slowly gained confidence and grew in this skill.’[1]
Why this passion for children’s ministry, we might ask. Jean’s answer falls directly from her own life and years of conviction. ‘I know that when somebody gives their life to Jesus, he never takes his hand off their life. If they have a meaningful childhood experience of Christ, he is there for them forever. He is totally committed to us—no need for stress. Be at peace, even if they have been out of church for 25 years. “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”[2] My yearning is for every person to move toward God while a child. That can never be undone. That is what drives me. Jesus took the children in his arms and blessed them. That was not just “nice”. It was meaningful. It achieved something.’
In semi-retirement, Jean still helps with the children’s camps.
At Mt Albert Baptist Church
Jean was an elder at church at various times, depending on her other work, then chair of elders. She felt called into that role and worked and learned under a younger woman. They were each one voice among several. That was comfortable. They could enable others. Jean had an outstanding ability to welcome people and make them feel appreciated. ‘I love welcoming people. It’s not work. My own experience makes me know how people feel as visitors. I love to make them welcome.’ She has retired from eldership now, though still active in the Baptist church where she has worshipped for 66 years.
Endnotes
[1] CBM, Our Journey of Faith, Morley and Belding, Appendix 3, p. 142
[2] Philippians 1:6
Sources
Our Journey or Faith: The First 50 Years of Children’s Bible Ministries, compiled Bill Morley, ed. Julie Belding, CBM, Auckland New Zealand, 2014
Personal Interviews November 2024 and February 2025
Photos: Jean and Bill Morley. Supplied by Beulah Wood
