GFC Survivors' History

This one is weird, and I really don't know what I am talking about. When we arrived at the Farm in the late 1970s, Grace Haven had a restaurant downtown, located in a basement next to the Richland Bank building. The point of it was to provide temporary employment for the itinerate learners and space for a Christian bookstore. It was also a venue for the ever-present Christian guitar music. There are a lot of happy memories about the Deli, but it was sort of a money pit and always had management problems. One big deal was that the church folk were committed to the idea of keeping it open in the evenings, but downtown Mansfield was absolutely NOT an evening place. Everyone goes home at five, so there was no point in running a restaurant after about three PM. But they kept trying. Now here is the mystery. If you Google "Yellow Deli," you discover that there is actually a chain of them, scattered through several cities in the South. The detai...

I realize that it has been an extremely long time since I last posted, but perhaps this will finally put a button on a few things. The real question I am dealing with is how Grace Haven theology got to the point at which I left, and the answer has to begin a very long time ago. Well before 1950 There have always been theological divides within Christendom, and the Protestant Reformation illustrates that point beautifully, but things really came to a head in the middle of the 19th century. There had always been an enormous number of denominations in America, but this was a different battle. Earlier divisions were largely national or based on high-level theological disputes (for example, what, exactly, happens to the wine during Eucharist), but this one was different. Archaeology, modern technological advances, and such (even the invention of the steam locomotive) convinced people that we had arrived at some sort of peak in human understanding, so anything i...