GFC Survivors' History

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 nor...

The summer my family arrived at the Farm, Robin Rothaar and Debbie Ankney (now Debbie McKee) began their first session of Kingdom Kampers. Robin and Debbie were long-time friends who taught physically handicapped children in the Mansfield City Schools. Kids who must use wheelchairs or crutches don't get to go to ordinary summer camps, and the two women wanted to give them the camping experience. Inside their non-cooperating bodies, these are still kids. That's difficult for outsiders to see, especially if the affliction interferes with their ability to communicate (cerebral palsy, for example), but the aim was to give them a dose of good outdoor camping fun just like other kids could have. They played games, did arts and crafts projects, went swimming, and had water balloon fights. Of course, all this activity needs a lot of volunteers to help with such things as pushing wheelchairs, and that is how my family got involved. Almost as soon as we were unpacked from the move, my wi...

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...

GFC went through several distinct phases, and I wasn't there for the first part, so it's possible I've missed (or fouled up) some of what follows. This is how I heard and remember it. My daughter Rebecca forwarded a link to this issue of Time magazine from 1971, which contains a great article on the beginning of the Jesus People (look on page 58). GFC fits very firmly into that history. To get the whole picture, though, we need to add in Francis Schaeffer , an American pastor who emigrated to Switzerland to start a residential study center to help the disaffected European intellectuals find the Christian faith. Mansfield industrialist Hod Bolesky, who made his money through Therm-O-Disc, visited Schaeffer's study center and decided we needed a similar center in Ohio. At L'Abri, Schaeffer's center, the plan was that the students would live on-site, work cooperatively to keep things going, and study—largely by listening to Schaeffer's lecture...