Moorpark pastor is a world traveler
By Michelle Knight

knight@theacorn.com

Glenys and Pastor Duncan Filmer

The call to the ministry was just too strong for Duncan Filmer to ignore. Living in Australia at the time, he put down the tools of a farmer and picked up those of a pastor, traveling the world in the ministry until he arrived in Ventura County to start and pastor Moorpark Vineyard Church.

Born in Zimbabwe, Filmer lived in the southern African country for 25 years before immigrating to Australia in 1972. The land down under had more terrain than people, an inviting set of circumstances for a cotton farmer.

For the next 14 years, Filmer grew cotton in the Australian outback. During that time, he met and began courting Glenys. It was while accompanying Glenys to church one day that Filmer had what he calls “an encounter with God,” discovering a sense of spirituality he hadn’t had before.

“From that time on my whole life changed,” Filmer said.

He decided to enter the ministry and began attending a Bible college. But he soon became disillusioned and returned to farming. His interest in God and the call to the ministry, however, was so strong he couldn’t ignore it. By this time, Duncan and Glenys were married and had four children.

Duncan entered the Assemblies of God ministry and started a church and school in a small town of 3,000, where the nearest traffic light was about 300 miles away. Glenys, a school teacher, became the school’s principal. Recently, the Filmers were invited back to Australia to celebrate the school’s 20th anniversary.

The family next moved to the U.S. to start a church, school and daycare in an impoverished section of Yonkers, N.Y. It was an exhilarating time, said Glenys, because of the positive changes they saw in the lives of so many children. It was particularly touching to teach illiterate teenagers to read and help them prepare for productive rather than destructive lives, she said.

“It was just exciting to see education was their way out and God was their way up,” said Glenys. “When you see the fruitage of that sort of thing, it’s very exciting.”

Glenys said traveling the world in the ministry has taught them “to totally rely on God.” She added that their children adjusted well to new environments because they’d learned while growing up in the outback to do without a lot of material things.

The family lived in New York for 16 years. During the last four, Duncan Filmer was a roving pastor with another Pentecostal group, Christian Life International, using the Big Apple as a home base as he traveled to churches in India, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and back to Australia.

In 2001, with the Filmer children out on their own, Duncan and Glenys moved to Camarillo, where they found a small Bible study group willing to meet in Moorpark and become the foundation for a Vineyard church. The Vineyard Movement has Pentecostal roots and stresses a strong relationship with Christ, healing and speaking in tongues.

The group, now about 150 strong, celebrated its third anniversary last month with Duncan Filmer as pastor.

Quinn Mayer, Westlake Village resident, has been a member from the beginning. “We were so taken with his (Duncan’s) words and his leadership,” he said.

Church services are held Sundays mornings in the Performing Arts Theatre of Moorpark High School, so the church’s goal now is to locate land to build its own facility, Duncan said.

For more information about Moorpark Vineyard Church, please call (805) 484-4572.