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An Easter Retrospective

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 many Roman Catholic teachers) and an extreme right wing—we called them the "Fighting Fundies."

Most Americans attended a church of some sort back then, and most middle-class suburban kids were listening to the Liberal preachers. The message we heard, exemplified by writers such as John A.T. Robinson (Honest to God) and echoed by recent preachers such as Bishop John Spong, was that Jesus, if he existed at all (and he probably didn't) certainly didn't do any miracles, and certainly didn't rise from the dead—and that the writings we called "Scripture" were all produced hundreds of years after the events they claimed to have witnessed, written by people who were just trying to shore up the religious institutions that employed them.

Not a very gripping message, and certainly not something a guy would fight and die for.

Church and Christianity, for us suburban kids, was essentially a cultural event. We put on nice clothes every Sunday to go sit with nice people in a nice building and sing nice songs.

Where I grew up, we encountered Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Seventh Day Adventists—but they were so far from our culture that they were not an alternative for a kid seeking to understand his religious urges. Roman Catholics and Jews were, to us, foreign countries. Fundamentalists, who handed out tracts and opened conversations with "Brother, are you saved?" were even farther out.

The mid to late 1960s were (to use a very cliché term) revolutionary. Hippies and the counter-culture arose from the anti-war movement and from a feeling that our parents' generation was dead and out of touch with how good it was to be alive. The Jesus People movement arose from the hippies and partly in reaction against them. The big revelation was that Jesus is a real person and that personal faith was far more interesting and powerful than simply wearing nice clothes on Sunday. A popular evangelistic phrase was "Jesus is the best drug of all!" Meanwhile, movements such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and teachers such as Francis Schaeffer were committed to the idea that the Christian faith needed to embrace both quality scholarship and a deep personal commitment to Jesus.

Legacies of the Jesus People movement

The positive influence of the Jesus People days was certainly important. Churches of the 1960s didn't like to adapt to the changing culture, and a lot of younger people felt shut out of traditional religion. The message that so many heard was cultural and dismissive of any real involvement with God—and the Jesus People movement was a great antidote to that staleness in the church.

Grace Fellowship always fit more comfortably into the Jesus People Flower Child movement than into Schaeffer's deep thinking. Dancing in the meadow always seemed more important than discussing theology. In a lot of ways, the church that grew out of Grace Haven Farm was a reaction against abuses (real or imagined) suffered by the early members at the hands of "the established church."

  • The established church wanted people to dress up for Sunday, so Grace Haven made a point of wearing jeans.
  • The established church asked members to make financial pledges, so Grace Haven never mentioned money and didn't take an offering for several years.
  • The established church had a set Sunday agenda, so Grace Haven never figured out in advance what was going to happen in a worship service.
  • The established church looked for theological precision, so Grace Haven refused to talk about theology on any level.
  • The established church had clear ideas about who is eligible for church membership, so Grace Haven let in anyone who was willing to call himself/herself a member. (Ray's phrase was "membering oneself to the church.")

I'm not sure what "the established church" means—it's certainly not the monolith that early Grace Haven people suggested.

One of the most ironical developments was that Grace Haven and the whole Jesus People movement aimed at bringing a younger generation into a real encounter with the living God, but the most recent developments in the Evangelical wing of the church (and Grace Fellowship) have convinced young people that the church (including all the new alternative versions) is essentially a political organization aimed at maintaining the American status quo. And the choice Grace Haven has made is to go with the Evangelicals.

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