Throwing Out the Life Line

Every time Sydney-born Methodist Evangelist Alan Walker, 52, delivered a sermon on radio or TV, his phone rang half the night with pleas for personal help. The experience told Walker that Australia's largest city (pop. 2,223,000) has a crying need--and a means at hand to solve it. And so he organized the Life Line Movement, which last March opened a $140,000 center in Sydney, where 250 Protestant laymen work 24 hours a day answering the telephone calls that come in to 310971.

Dialing the Life Line Centre brings aid of almost any kind. Switchboard operators can dispatch "trouble teams" in radio cars to answer the desperate pleas of alcoholics, unwed mothers and potential suicides. If a plea requires specialized help, Life Line can call upon a battery of professional men ranging from lawyers to psychologists to podiatrists. For cases that need follow-through, the organization can use the 14 homes, hospitals and hostels of Sydney's Central Methodist Mission, which Walker also heads. It even conducts group therapy for many of the disturbed people who come its way, although Walker and Life Line's volunteers believe that "the greatest therapy of all" is worship.

Walker believes that the ubiquitous, impersonal telephone is an ideal way to "put a mantle of Christianity" over the lonely crowd of the modern city. "Half of Sydney's population has lost all contact with the church," he says. "The problems emerging from the city cover the whole gamut of human need, from plain loneliness to suicidal despair." Since the Centre opened, the switchboard has taken more than 15,000 calls--including 90 from people who were threatening suicide. "We haven't lost one of them," says the Centre's director, Peter Stokes.

Most of its energies go to resolve less ultimate tragedies. Last week, for example, one trouble team was dispatched to help a nearly blind pensioner who had called to say he had lost faith in life; the team cleaned up his dingy room, bought him food, and above all found him the companionship he needed. Life Line is so vital an addition to Sydney that it is listed on the telephone directory's page of emergency numbers, along with the police and fire departments. And Christians in Brisbane and Adelaide have been inspired to organize similar groups, using Life Line's motto: "Help is as close as the telephone."

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