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 lost a sense of community, so it was Grace Haven's job to bring them all back together. Seriously! This rag-tag group of ex-hippies plus a few theologically unsophisticated leaders was going to be the healing of Christendom. People would tell you that.
To their credit, a large chunk of the leadership did their homework. The Grace Haven library had, among other things, a complete set of the Ante-Nicene Fathers and the Post-Nicene Fathers, at least 20 bound volumes of writings from the earliest days of the Christian faith—people such as Tertullian and Origen. After all this study to get back to the "true roots" of unadulterated Christendom, a large chunk of the ARC decided to join the Greek Orthodox Church—their biggest evangelistic haul in decades. Not quite what Ray and the other leaders had in mind!
Meanwhile, the Farm changed radically. The Learners were gone and the seeds of Grace Fellowship Church had been planted. No more would the Farm be a study center; now it would be a retreat and conference center. There was still a core of young unmarried transients, though. The Farm had a secretary, and so did the ARC. One or two young men were on site to keep up with maintenance, mowing, and Ray's building projects. The Farm also had campus groups, modeled on the groups run by Campus Crusade (Ray was, after all, a former Campus Crusade staff member.) and two or three young men ran these groups at places such as Denison. These five or more workers formed a community of their own (Many of us remember the "brothers in the basement.") and were scheduled to rotate among the Farm Families for Farm Dinner. A main reason now to keep up the gardens and to keep feeding pigs and beef cattle was to provide for the Farm Families (who often had little cash) and to feed the workers at Farm Dinners.
Grace Fellowship Church emerged more slowly. The early model was informal house churches that met in the middle of the week. Many of the members of these house churches would still participate in more traditional churches on Sunday morning, so these people had sort of a dual membership. The mid-week house churches, in the early days, were the locus for teaching, preaching, and "Sunday school" as well as for sacraments. The house church model caused trouble on several levels. For one thing, the alliance was very loose, and some of them eventually just wandered away and began their own brick-and-mortar churches. For another, there were a lot of them, and each needed a leader, so the Grace Fellowship leadership was very large and very inexperienced. And—annoyingly—people who contributed money gave it to the house church (which had almost no expenses) rather than to the larger operation at the Lodge (which had a lot of expenses and struggled to the point of having phone service cut off from time to time).
For many, the Sunday morning event at the Lodge took the place of a church service, though the leaders never intended it that way. It was more of a hootenanny for people who had been to church on Wednesday evening and didn't have any good place to go on Sunday. There was an agreed-upon start time (rather loose) but no set end time. There was no agreed-upon order of service—that would have stifled the Holy Spirit (who apparently didn't like advance planning very much). Chairs were arranged around the Lodge fireplace with the front row being old sofas, but we didn't have much use for them. The usual plan was to sing, standing, for at least half an hour. The songs were randomly chosen from the guitar players' favorites. We would never sing a song only once—they were all very short, so four or five repetitions were necessary—and sometimes we would sing it again later in the morning. The themes of the songs were mostly "Thank you Jesus that I feel so good" or "Jesus is really great." For someone like me, coming from a tradition of hymns by Bach and Luther, this was agony, but the folks from Ohio seemed to get pretty excited. After a lot of singing, someone would address the group with a rambling, unscripted sermon/testimony. (Finally, we could sit down.) There might be more than one such address. One woman in particular had something to say every Sunday, so I asked one of the leaders if she was the official preacher. Oddly, after my question, we stopped hearing from her. After the sermon(s), there was more singing (standing again) and occasionally a prophetic utterance or someone speaking in tongues. Then, when we felt we'd had about enough, by consensus we ended things.
A comment about music
The "starting over with our real roots" philosophy worked its way into music as well. During the Study Center days, Donna Kurtz (who was well educated in music) got a team together to assemble a new Grace Haven hymnal. It was huge—387 songs from all eras of the church. They did all the type and layout from scratch and had a lot of brown volumes printed up. By the time I got to the Farm, however, use of the hymnal was waning, largely because it was weak on the "I feel good" choruses. On Sunday morning, when I got there, everyone just knew all the same songs. There weren't very many of them. I remember thinking that I should visit the Bible bookstore to pick up a few cassette tapes so I could learn the songs and join in. Later, the church got an overhead projector so songs could be put on transparencies. That introduced a new set of problems because song leaders didn't feel tied down to any specific order of songs (don't want to stifle the Spirit) and would frequently sing verses out of order or repeat sections of songs several times. The result was a lot of shuffling and confusion for the poor guy who was managing the transparencies.
The song confusion finally got resolved when the newest building was finished and the church bought a computer and projectors so songs could be put on PowerPoint slides. There was also a new requirement (at which some song leaders balked) to have a list of songs by Friday night and a rehearsal on Sunday morning so the musicians and PowerPoint operator would have some clue what would get sung and in what order. Now it was possible to have a complete printout of the music, and when the leader got carried away and jumped to a different verse or repeated a verse, the computer operator could key in the number of the correct slide and the congregation would have some hope of following along.
*As I write this, I get the idea that the ARC doesn't really exist any more, at least not in the sense that it did a few years ago. Grace Fellowship Church makes no mention of the ARC on its website, nor does, for example, the website of Grace Church in Toledo, and the old ARC website is dead. The newer website doesn't list any member churches and features a very brief "we're alive and well—let's start over" video from the current leader.
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