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A bit of background

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 who should have a say here, and if you would like posting privileges, say so in the comments. I just want to keep things relatively healthy. The whole point of this project is healing.

By the way, the software puts the most recent posts at the top, but the older ones don't go away. They just get shuffled down to later pages.

—Curt Allen

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GFC History, volume 1

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...

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