Stephen CHEEK

CHEEK, STEPHEN (b. Whit Notley, near Braintree, Essex, England, 20 Dec 1852; d. Warwick, Qld, 17 Feb 1883). Churches of Christ evangelist.

Stephen Cheek migrated to Tasmania with his parents, landing in Launceston on 2 April 1855. The family spent five years in the Evandale district, and in the mid 1860s farmed near Rosevale, where they became prominent. While a school teacher and superintendent of the Congregational Sunday school at Rosevale in Tasmania, Cheek's attention was drawn to Churches of Christ through a newspaper debate in a Congregational paper, Day Star, between an Anglican clergyman and G B Moysey, minister of the Hobart Church of Christ. As a consequence, Cheek was baptised but associated himself with the Brethren, under whose auspices he itinerated as an evangelist. He drew a large following in Tasmania, particularly in the Bream Creek area and in the Drummond district in Victoria, which he brought with him into Churches of Christ, once he came to accept their position.

When the 1882 Victorian Conference of Churches of Christ was unable to assist with the development of the cause in Qld, Cheek, after a private conference with Frederick W Troy, a former Baptist and representative of the small Queensland nucleus, offered his services.

Cheek, who began publishing a monthly paper, the Christian Pioneer, which achieved a circulation of 2000, enjoyed a brief career in Qld, which saw four churches with an average membership of twenty established in seven months. His career was cut short when he was caught in a downpour between Killarney and Warwick in 1883. He died of typhoid fever.

G Chapman, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism: A History of the Churches of Christ in Australia (Melbourne, 1979); R J Clow, Evangelism in Australia: The Life of Stephen Cheek, Pioneer of Churches of Christ in Queensland (Warwick, 1933)

GRAEME CHAPMAN