GFC Survivors' History

GFC went through several distinct phases, and I wasn't there for the first part, so it's possible I've missed (or fouled up) some of what follows. This is how I heard and remember it. My daughter Rebecca forwarded a link to this issue of Time magazine from 1971, which contains a great article on the beginning of the Jesus People (look on page 58). GFC fits very firmly into that history. To get the whole picture, though, we need to add in Francis Schaeffer , an American pastor who emigrated to Switzerland to start a residential study center to help the disaffected European intellectuals find the Christian faith. Mansfield industrialist Hod Bolesky, who made his money through Therm-O-Disc, visited Schaeffer's study center and decided we needed a similar center in Ohio. At L'Abri, Schaeffer's center, the plan was that the students would live on-site, work cooperatively to keep things going, and study—largely by listening to Schaeffer's lecture...

After being at GFC for a number of years, I wanted to find a way for the church to feel more togetherness, and potluck dinners seemed like an obvious strategy. After all, when we were in St. Louis, the church there had a potluck every single Sunday, and it turned out to be an incredible tool for church growth—so much so that the local newspaper made a big deal of it when they profiled the church. The GFC potluck turned out to be the most archetypically GFC thing we had ever done. And it was a disaster. My potluck renaissance wasn't the first time GFC had tried to eat together. After all, everyone on the Farm participated in Farm Dinners, but those were all prepared by one household (which really means they were prepared by one woman), and shared with the single people who lived on the Farm. But those weren't dinners for the church as a group. And there had been occasional church dinner events, but the normal strategy was for each family to stake out their territo...

This whole idea grew from several years of reflection, but what really kicked it into motion was a day of conversation with family and friends after attending the funeral of a friend. My perspective on GFC was always quite non-typical. For one thing, I spent about eighteen years living on "The Farm," but only a few (about three) as a "townie" who lived in an ordinary neighborhood and had a normal job. For another, I arrived from St. Louis, where I was part of a very good church with a strong tradition of preaching, teaching, and traditional worship, while most GFC people felt very alienated from such a church and wanted as little as possible to do with "the organized church" (as they would have said it). For yet another, when I got to Ohio, I was the number two (or perhaps the number three or four) member of a team that came in to help publish the denominational magazine. Definitely not number one. And in all the years of being associated with GFC, I neve...

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...