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 lectures and discussing them in small groups. The Mansfield plan was a bit different. Bolesky bought 150 acres on Straub Road, built several buildings (the Swiss connection is obvious in the architecture of the original Lodge building), and recruited Ray Nethery and Gordon Walker to run the operation. The Lodge contained a large commercial kitchen and a library with quite a good selection of books and dozens upon dozens of Schaeffer cassette tapes. The original setup sounds like a dude ranch. It had tennis courts and riding horses and was called Grace Haven Ranch. (And now you know why the Arena Barn, high up on the hill, had horse stalls and a large indoor area for exercising horses.)
The dude ranch phase doesn't seem to have lasted too long. Soon it was replaced by Grace Haven Farm. The idea now was a totally self-sufficient ministry center that would grow its own food and have several small businesses that would sell things to outsiders and provide employment for the transient learners. Those learners would study in the morning (largely by listening to the Schaeffer tapes) and do farm work in the afternoon. Four houses were fitted out with bunk beds for the learners, with a "Farm Family" living upstairs to shepherd them.
Grace Haven Farm actually worked pretty well for a quite a while. People did benefit and lives were changed. Two or three houses on Straub Road were bought or rented by people involved in the ministry. A basement on Mansfield's central square was rented and renovated for a bookstore and restaurant (The Yellow Deli*).
After the Farm
Grace Haven Farm wasn't adapted too well to long-term sustainability.
For one thing, the majority of the learners were not young intellectuals interested in delving into the philosophical roots of the Christian faith, nor were they farm kids who could pick up a chain saw and fell a tree. Most of them were suburban kids who needed to figure out their lives—some of them with deep psychological problems and/or drug habits. Some of them were unceremoniously dumped by their parents, who wanted Grace Haven to "fix" their kids.
The Farm Families weren't equipped to do psychological counseling or drug rehabilitation, so the stress on them was enormous, and there was a lot of burnout. Few had any training or qualifications beyond being someone's friend from a youth ministry. There wasn't a lot of practical knowledge about running a farm either. (For one example, the guy recruited to run the dairy knew about cows—beef cattle, not dairy cows. They are different. Stories circulated for a long time after the learners left, like the one about the time someone wanted to clear the snow off the frozen pond so people could go ice skating. He drove the farm tractor out on the ice, whereupon it promptly broke through and sank.)
Aside from trying to run a working farm using unskilled temporary help supervised by equally unskilled adults, there were a couple of other structural problems in the Farm model.
One problem was money. Grace Haven had no roots in local Mansfield churches. Almost all the staff and most of the learners were from out of town and the basic Farm attitude toward traditional churches was antagonistic, to put it mildly. The sources of cash were personal support donations to Farm Family members and profits from the Deli, bookstore, and scented candle sales. Bolesky would pay for some repairs, but the basic operation was always cash-poor, and the physical plant was expensive to run. (All the buildings had modern oil-fired baseboard heat, installed just before the Arab Oil Embargo, and among other things, that tennis court had to be maintained to keep Hod happy.) Remember that almost all the learners were teenagers and young adults who were alienated from their parents. Not much money from those sources.
The other problem was a lack of "What next?" Schaeffer, along with ministries such as Campus Crusade and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, envisioned young disciples returning to established churches to revitalize them. For a long time, though, the attitude toward established churches was adversarial: The Farm (and, indeed, the whole "Jesus People" movement) felt that their parents' generation of churches had shortchanged them, so going back to those old churches wasn't at all appealing. (One GFC leader informed me that there was no worthwhile Christian music written before 1972.) The Learners "graduated" from the program, got jobs, and started families. Small group meetings kept the fires burning for many. It was quite common for people to think of sort of a "dual allegiance," so many called themselves members of Grace Haven plus being members of a more traditional church. But for many, the mid-week meeting was the church, and as time went on, these mid-week meetings began calling themselves churches, baptizing people and celebrating the Lord's Supper together.
Thus, beginning as a dude ranch and moving through a study center phase, Grace Haven became a church pretty much by accident.
*There is still a Yellow Deli restaurant chain, based in Chattanooga. The description on their website sounds remarkably like the story of the GFC Yellow Deli in Mansfield, but their origin story doesn't mention Ohio and I don't remember ever hearing about a connection. The artwork, menu, and philosophy are very similar, though.
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