The original point of this blog was to help me in my personal healing journey, and during the last year or so, I've made a lot of progress—which also explains, at least partially, why I haven't had anything to say for a long time.
But I began thinking about Grace Fellowship, and one very curious fact has really jumped out at me. (I ran into Bob Gardner the other day, discussed this with him, and he agrees.)
The whole point of Grace Haven Farm, back in the 1970s, was that the culture of the typical church just didn't relate that well with the young people of the day. Church folks wore nice suits, sat in pews, and sang hymns, and none of that appealed to the kids, either those inside the church or those outside. Thus one point of the Jesus People movement was to free the Christian message from those cultural trappings that didn't work too well. Grace Haven was right in the middle of all that, and blue jeans, love beads, dancing in the meadow and guitar music were the norm.
So the whole point of Grace Haven, back in the beginning, was to be an appealing, culturally relevant place where teenagers and young adults could find Christian faith.
The interesting (and sad) thing, however, is that the children of that generation didn't find faith. The dancing teenagers of the 1970s got married in the 1980s, had children, and by the turn of the century, those children were themselves young adults. And if you name the "pillars of the church" from the 1970s and 1980s, and ask how their children are doing, very very few of them are strong practicing Christians. (And many of those who actually are didn't stick with the Grace Haven tradition.)
I honestly don't know why it all came out this way, but I have a couple of suspicions. One is that the whole emphasis of Grace Fellowship has been on experience and feelings rather than on truth. Another is that the idea of any kind of authority or expertise was definitely distrusted. This meant that when the kids got together for youth group events, they could dance and sing, but never found out very much about the truth of the Gospel—and often when they did, the teaching was filtered through some self-appointed authority who gave it a weird spin. (I'm thinking of Bill Gothard as an example.) The intensely decentralized setup of Grace, with each household as its own church (and really its own denomination), meant that Grace Fellowship Church could never really define and teach Christian truth on its own. I remember kids asking in Sunday school about baptism and the Lord's Supper, and the only answer I was allowed to give was "Ask your father."
Kids saw through that. They saw that there was no real center to the Christian experience, just guitar music and dancing. And teenage culture moved away from the Beatles, so by 2000, the young, relevant music of the 1970s had become old-fashioned grandfather stuff.
Maybe it's no surprise that the kids moved on.
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