What follows is a very personal history of Grace Fellowship Church in Mansfield, Ohio. It's not going to be chronological, and I expect others will pitch in their bits too. Two dangers face me/us in this project. One is that the product will look and sound something like a Hallmark greeting card, all sunny days and flowers in the meadow. The other extreme, of course, is that GFC will come out looking a lot like Jim Jones' terrible Jonestown experiment (which, ironically, was doing its thing at about the time my family first encountered GFC). Grace Fellowship is/was really neither, though the title of this blog does make the point that for many of us it was a church which one survived , not one in which we thrived. A few mechanical details This is, at the start anyhow, very much one person's memories, but the blog isn't private at the moment. Anyone who knows the URL can see it. I'm going to enable comments, but keep them moderated. There are a lot of other people
I know that I haven’t posted for a while, and I assume nobody is really reading this, but I feel I should make this comment. This past year or so has been a year of strong healing as I have discovered a LOT of things about myself. One of the very strong themes this year has been learning what happened to me—what people did to me. There’s a big list, but the one that fits the GFC history has to do with Collective Narcissism . This YouTube video explains things better than I can , but the point is essentially that a narcissistic system was working to destroy our “muchness” (to borrow a term from Johnny Depp’s Alice in Wonderland ). Thinking back, aside from the obvious markers such as the feeling that we alone on the entire planet had gotten Christianity right, one of my most vivid memories is that a largely invisible group of elders “sort of” ran everything and had opinions about all sorts of things in my life. I say “sort of” because several other very shadowy ent