Ted Noffs

Theodore Delwin "Ted" Noffs (14 August 1926 – 6 April 1995) was a Methodist (later Uniting Church) minister, writer and founder of the Ted Noffs Foundation and the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross, Sydney, in 1964.

During the youth revolt of the 1960s, Noffs was attracted to what he saw as the life-affirming side of the movement. Although aware of the problem of drug-abuse and the alienation of youth, he believed that they were "...a part of the paraphernalia behind the revolution, the symbolism behind the revolt." Noffs sought fairness and equality for all. With a focus on the practical, he raised funding from both government and business to set up facilities for the disadvantaged; in many cases these projects were the first of their kind in Australia.

Theodore Delwin Noffs was born 14 August 1926, in Mudgee, at the Rexton Private Hospital. He was educated initially at Parramatta High School, the University of Sydney and Leigh Theological College, Sydney. He entered the ministry in 1947 and was ordained in 1952, a year after he married Margaret Tipping who was to remain his lifelong companion and mother of their children Wesley, David and Theo. After further study in the USA where he gained an MA in rural sociology from Northwestern University, Chicago, and worked as a minister for the Wesley Church, also in Chicago, Noffs returned to Sydney where he took up the position of Assistant Pastor with the Central Methodist Mission from 1959-1964.

In 1964 Noffs founded the Wayside Chapel and devoted the rest of his working life to a practical, energetic and sometimes controversial display of Christian principles. As part of his pastoral agenda, he established an unconditional relationship with drug-using youths, marginal intellectuals, eccentrics, down-and-outs and other denizens of Kings Cross, an area of Sydney known widely for its crime, drug-abuse, prostitution and, in the late 1960s, its flavour of Bohemian radicalism.

The Wayside Chapel was pivotal to the realisation of Ted Noffs' idiosyncratic ministry, becoming the focal point not only for regular church services, but also topical debates, small theatre productions, its own poetry magazine Cross Beat and an 'ideas journal' named Logos. With the added presence of a coffee-shop which was always well attended by a cross-section of 'types,' the chapel represented a dialectic which brought together several otherwise discrete social groups.

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