GFC Survivors' History

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...

Public praying at Grace Haven wasn't much like prayer at other churches—the most memorable thing about it was lack of content. If someone was sick or had lost a job, you would almost never hear, "Please, Jesus, heal Mary" or "Please help Sam find work." No—almost all of what you would hear was "Thank you, Jesus" and "Praise you, Jesus." Not "Thank you, Jesus, that you will heal Mary" or "Praise you, Jesus, that Sam's future is in your hand"—just "Thank you, Jesus" and "Praise you, Jesus." I've seen people praying this way over a person who was desperately ill with cancer—"Praise you, Jesus"—and it seemed very odd, thanking Jesus that she was so sick. Eventually they did get around to asking that she would be healed, but they spent a lot of time thanking Jesus and praising him that she had gotten so ill. There are a lot of things one might thank Jesus for: n...

Chet When we moved to the Farm, Chet Weigle was introduced to us as the Farm Manager, and it always seemed that he was Hod Bolesky's employee. Perhaps in the old days of the Learners (an era which was ending as we arrived) he had done a lot for the Farm, but when we got there, his role was very quickly diminishing. He lived with his wife and children in a house at the top of the hill, and his basement was the home of Woodville Taxidermy, which, along with teaching at Mansfield Christian School, was his source of income. For the first year or two I was on the Farm, the Weigles were part of the Farm Dinner rotation and got a share of the garden and meat production, but we never saw Chet or the kids at any of the church events. His wife Carol was much more part of things, though, and was good friends with the farm wives. My first memory of an interaction with Chet is quite specific. My family was living in the big farmhouse at the far side of the meadow, beyond the ponds...

In the material that follows, I need to emphasize that I was always very much an outsider at Grace Fellowship. In my 30+ years at GFC, I was never an elder and never served on a committee, so all of my observations are very much the views of an "ordinary church member." This is, in itself, an interesting commentary on GFC leadership. In most churches, a constant question is is how to find people who are willing to fill leadership positions. Whether it's a Presbyterian Session or an Episcopalian Vestry, the membership rotates, and the result is that a large proportion of the congregation knows how leadership works. (And of course, the challenge faced by the pastor and other leaders is to keep those leadership spots filled.) There's less of an "us versus them" feeling about leadership when most of the eligible people sooner or later end up on the leadership council. Grace Fellowship was different. The elders, always a very small gr...

Every church defines itself by its theology, and Grace Fellowship was no exception. At the center of every Christian church's self-identity is the belief that Jesus is the Son of God and that he died for our sins—if a group cannot agree with that statement, we really cannot call it a Christian church. Beyond that absolute core belief, however, every church has defining theological statements that are non-negotiable self-definition statements. If a person or group cannot agree, for example, with the doctrine of transubstantiation and acknowledge the authority of the Pope, the label "Roman Catholic" doesn't really fit. Theological self-definition of Christian churches looks a bit like a bull's eye target, though the edges of the rings might be somewhat blurred. For most churches, the central, "must-have" doctrines include statements about the sacraments (baptism, Eucharist, etc.) and often statements about how the believer ca...

My family arrived at the Farm for the July 4, 1979 weekend. The first thing we encountered was the annual tent meeting conference—that year it was an arts conference organized by Tim Barber. Our arrival coincided with several basic changes at Grace Haven. As we moved into the big white farmhouse at the end of the meadow, the last of the Learners were packing to leave the Farm. The days of a residential study center were over. A main reason we came to Mansfield was to help produce Commonlife magazine, Ray Nethery's brainchild, which he created to help spread his vision of church renewal. This was the genesis of the new "denomination," the ARC (Alliance of Renewal Churches*), though if you had called it a "denomination," you would have had a fight on your hands. The concept was that all existing churches—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—had gone off the rails, probably around the time of Constantine (323 AD). They fought over theology and had l...

I'm writing this on Easter Sunday 2021, which seems appropriate for this very personal look back at the religious environment in which the Jesus People sprouted and in which Grace Fellowship (along with a lot of other church start-ups) began. —Curt Allen It's time for a little church history Back as far as the 1850s a scholarly movement called Higher Criticism sought to study the Bible to discern what the original texts really meant and what the authors really intended to say. The result was a trend for the larger, established churches to embrace theological modernism (complete with evolution and a belief that the world was extremely old), and a fundamentalist "back to the Bible" backlash that took the Bible literally and generally took a dim view of modern academic studies. By the 1960s these movements had ossified into theological Liberalism (the official theology of the larger mainline Protestant churches as well as the Episcopal Church and man...

Looking back, the military camps were a lot weirder than we thought at the time. My older daughter and her two best friends were in the last group at Trail to Life Camp, up in Greenwich, Ohio, run by one of the Mansfield Christian School staff who had Grace Haven connections. Trail to Life seemed to have been a kid version of Marine boot camp, complete with obstacle courses. The theme (reflected in the camp song) was that "we are the army of the Lord." Part of the idea was to toughen the kids up. When the camp closed in the early 1980s, there must have been a lot of nostalgia for military-themed summer camps because Grace Fellowship quickly got their own: Cross Training Camp. When I think back on my own childhood and remember church summer camp, I remember Bible stories, nature studies, swimming, and games like capture the flag. Grace Haven kids remember some of these things, but they also remember that everyone had a military rank and a lot of time was spent learning to...

One of my first memories after arriving in Ohio was getting invited to a barbecue at a farm near Butler, Ohio. It was pretty wonderful: volleyball and plenty of food and an Ohio summer evening. Then things got confusing. Someone set up rows of folding chairs and we had to sit down and have a worship service. Someone had a guitar and everyone knew all the same songs (there were only about two dozen songs anyhow), so we sang and prayed. Over the years, there weren't that many different social events, but it seemed that (with one or two exceptions) they all ended up with prayer meetings. One member told me that, to her, a prayer meeting was the best kind of fun to be had. Social evenings often had some sort of ulterior motive or (at minimum) had to be "redeemed" with a prayer-and-praise service at the end. One example was the annual Harvest Party (couldn't call it a "Halloween Party"), to which we were supposed to invite outsiders. Once they we...