GFC Survivors' History

This one is weird, and I really don't know what I am talking about. When we arrived at the Farm in the late 1970s, Grace Haven had a restaurant downtown, located in a basement next to the Richland Bank building. The point of it was to provide temporary employment for the itinerate learners and space for a Christian bookstore. It was also a venue for the ever-present Christian guitar music. There are a lot of happy memories about the Deli, but it was sort of a money pit and always had management problems. One big deal was that the church folk were committed to the idea of keeping it open in the evenings, but downtown Mansfield was absolutely NOT an evening place. Everyone goes home at five, so there was no point in running a restaurant after about three PM. But they kept trying. Now here is the mystery. If you Google "Yellow Deli," you discover that there is actually a chain of them, scattered through several cities in the South. The detai...

I realize that it has been an extremely long time since I last posted, but perhaps this will finally put a button on a few things. The real question I am dealing with is how Grace Haven theology got to the point at which I left, and the answer has to begin a very long time ago. Well before 1950 There have always been theological divides within Christendom, and the Protestant Reformation illustrates that point beautifully, but things really came to a head in the middle of the 19th century. There had always been an enormous number of denominations in America, but this was a different battle. Earlier divisions were largely national or based on high-level theological disputes (for example, what, exactly, happens to the wine during Eucharist), but this one was different. Archaeology, modern technological advances, and such (even the invention of the steam locomotive) convinced people that we had arrived at some sort of peak in human understanding, so anything i...

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 ...

The original point of this blog was to help me in my personal healing journey, and during the last year or so, I've made a lot of progress—which also explains, at least partially, why I haven't had anything to say for a long time. But I began thinking about Grace Fellowship, and one very curious fact has really jumped out at me. (I ran into Bob Gardner the other day, discussed this with him, and he agrees.) The whole point of Grace Haven Farm, back in the 1970s, was that the culture of the typical church just didn't relate that well with the young people of the day. Church folks wore nice suits, sat in pews, and sang hymns, and none of that appealed to the kids, either those inside the church or those outside. Thus one point of the Jesus People movement was to free the Christian message from those cultural trappings that didn't work too well. Grace Haven was right in the middle of all that, and blue jeans, love beads, dancing in the meadow and guitar music were the nor...

The summer my family arrived at the Farm, Robin Rothaar and Debbie Ankney (now Debbie McKee) began their first session of Kingdom Kampers. Robin and Debbie were long-time friends who taught physically handicapped children in the Mansfield City Schools. Kids who must use wheelchairs or crutches don't get to go to ordinary summer camps, and the two women wanted to give them the camping experience. Inside their non-cooperating bodies, these are still kids. That's difficult for outsiders to see, especially if the affliction interferes with their ability to communicate (cerebral palsy, for example), but the aim was to give them a dose of good outdoor camping fun just like other kids could have. They played games, did arts and crafts projects, went swimming, and had water balloon fights. Of course, all this activity needs a lot of volunteers to help with such things as pushing wheelchairs, and that is how my family got involved. Almost as soon as we were unpacked from the move, my wi...

I haven't given up on this project, even though it's been dormant for about a month. The last few weeks of an academic semester are very time-consuming for a teacher, and I've been grading papers and dealing with all the last-second emergencies that close out a term. I have several ideas for the near future, and one reader has pointed out that a lot of what I've written seems extremely gloomy, so here's a look at what I'm thinking. The 1980s was a very active and interesting time to be at Grace Haven, and looking back I was glad to be there. Because of the diffuse nature of the place, almost nobody got to have a finger in every pie, so my recollections will be very personal and very much conditioned by the fact that I was living on the Farm (and not in town) for most of it. Here are a few topics I hope to cover in the future: The Arts and Grace Haven Arkenstone and Commonlife magazines. Kingdom Kampers Later theological development of the Farm/Church

For me, coming from a big city to Mansfield, it was striking just how many stand-alone "pastoral counselors" there were. Grace Haven had one whose office was in the Lodge (which makes sense, I guess, because there wasn't really a pastor over the whole body). Anyhow, when I look at Google, there are still more than a dozen counseling offices, most of them lining Lexington Avenue. Ashland Seminary seems to be the source of all these counselors—two years (64 credits) and you're a professional. (Most of the courses are three hour "Introduction to" courses, and six of those credits are hands-on practicum hours.) The appeal to the Christian community is obvious. Aside from the Evangelical anti-expert bias, there has always been a suspicion that secular psychologists or psychiatrists would try to talk Christian patients out of their faith (which would actually be a serious breach of professional ethics). Secular mental health profes...