by Adrian Brookes
London, 1944. Hitler has turned his V1 flying bombs—his vengeance weapons—against England. A 10-year-old boy, playing outside his London home, catches the first inkling of a V1 approaching—a distinctively-pitched buzz. He freezes, and for a few moments tries to persuade himself he is mistaken. Then the wail of the air raid sirens removes any doubt. His wide eyes leap to the sky and seize on the red flame of a rocket winging over the bomb-scarred city. It is coming straight towards him; and, like everyone else under its path, he holds his breath in terror, praying the flame will keep burning until it has passed over.
His neck cranes under the looming mass of the bomb, and the hideous drone fills his ears. Suddenly the flame disappears, the nose dips and the noise gives way to a dreadful silence. The bomb is hurtling towards the ground. In a few seconds it will explode, smash houses and kill.
'My father was away evangelising,' recalls John Hewitt, retired president of the Apostolic Church Australia. 'There was my mother and my two sisters and myself. I rushed inside and said, "Quick! Into the hallway!" because that's where we were to be in the case of any bombing. I was just pleading, "The blood of Jesus! The blood of Jesus!" We waited and waited—and there wasn't even an explosion.'
The next day they found the V1 had fallen harmlessly on parkland next to the house, where it was defused. 'It's one of those real testimonies,' says John, 'that I grew up knowing God's response to calling on the power of the blood.'
Born in the Fire
John, the son of international evangelist John Hewitt, says he was 'born in the fire and not prepared to live in the smoke.' John senior, a Welshman, was one of the pioneers of Pentecost in Australia, and his tireless work kept his family constantly on the move, firstly throughout Australia, then further afield. 'By the time I was four,' John says, 'I was across to the UK for the third time and I'd been to South Africa a few times… I had an elder sister who died at the time of birth in Wellington, New Zealand. The second child was born in Pretoria, South Africa, I was born in Melbourne, Australia, and my younger sister was born in Swansea, South Wales.'
Finding themselves in Britain at the start of the war, they had no choice but to stay there for the duration. They returned to Australia in 1945 and settled in Adelaide, where John got a job in a sports store. He was a keen soccer player, and was selected for the South Australian under 19s squad. However, his refusal to comply with the Sunday training schedule prevented him playing for the state. Switching to Aussie Rules, he was selected for a junior state team and played against Victoria.
Pentecostal by Conviction
During these years John became more and more convinced he was destined for ministry. 'I really sensed the call of God in my life from a teenager,' he says. He went to Queensland, planning to go to a Baptist Bible college, but decided against it when he found out he could not marry for three years after beginning his course. He had met his wife Desma in 1950, and they were planning to marry much sooner than the college would have allowed. John studied by correspondence with the Apostolic Ministry Training College, with which he qualified for ministry.
In the meantime his beliefs were firming. 'Whereas I'd been brought up in Pentecost, now I became genuinely Pentecostal by conviction, and I knew I could never really satisfy myself in anything less than the freedom of expression in the Spirit, as in Pentecost.'
John was ordained in Brisbane on 5th November 1955 and married Desma in January 1956. They spent five years at the Apostolic Church in Brisbane, then moved to pastor a church in Cessnock, where they stayed for two years. They then accepted a call as missionaries in Papua New Guinea. At that stage they had two small sons, John and Dale.
'We were at Laiagam,' says John. 'It was one of the more remote areas that had been just opened up for mission work. During those years we were six hours' walk away from the nearest Europeans… It had only been derestricted for 12 months when we got there. We were pioneering in an area where there had been no previous Europeans or missionaries or anyone other than an armed patrol having gone into that area.
'We were there for 18 months without a vehicle and without even a radio. They were pretty primitive days… After 18 months I became the field superintendent, and it was a determined effort on my part to see no-one had that sort of isolation again.'
The Unknown God
The Hewitts had had no training in any of the PNG languages, not even pidgin English. Nonetheless, within a few weeks John was preaching in pidgin, which an interpreter then rendered into the local Enga tongue. 'I wouldn't like to hear a recording of that today,' John says with a chuckle, 'but it was sufficient for the interpreter to gather what I was saying.'
Learning the Enga language eventually gave them an insight into the culture and into ways they could link the gospel with the people's worldview. 'We'd use various things from their culture, stories and history that we'd picked up and that we could use as illustrations to communicate the sense of God's love for them,' John said.
'They had their own gods, and we were able to use that. For instance, they had a god called Yupin. It was a sort of
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