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...

Public praying at Grace Haven wasn't much like prayer at other churches—the most memorable thing about it was lack of content. If someone was sick or had lost a job, you would almost never hear, "Please, Jesus, heal Mary" or "Please help Sam find work." No—almost all of what you would hear was "Thank you, Jesus" and "Praise you, Jesus." Not "Thank you, Jesus, that you will heal Mary" or "Praise you, Jesus, that Sam's future is in your hand"—just "Thank you, Jesus" and "Praise you, Jesus." I've seen people praying this way over a person who was desperately ill with cancer—"Praise you, Jesus"—and it seemed very odd, thanking Jesus that she was so sick. Eventually they did get around to asking that she would be healed, but they spent a lot of time thanking Jesus and praising him that she had gotten so ill. There are a lot of things one might thank Jesus for: n...

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...

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...

One of my first memories after arriving in Ohio was getting invited to a barbecue at a farm near Butler, Ohio. It was pretty wonderful: volleyball and plenty of food and an Ohio summer evening. Then things got confusing. Someone set up rows of folding chairs and we had to sit down and have a worship service. Someone had a guitar and everyone knew all the same songs (there were only about two dozen songs anyhow), so we sang and prayed. Over the years, there weren't that many different social events, but it seemed that (with one or two exceptions) they all ended up with prayer meetings. One member told me that, to her, a prayer meeting was the best kind of fun to be had. Social evenings often had some sort of ulterior motive or (at minimum) had to be "redeemed" with a prayer-and-praise service at the end. One example was the annual Harvest Party (couldn't call it a "Halloween Party"), to which we were supposed to invite outsiders. Once they we...

After being at GFC for a number of years, I wanted to find a way for the church to feel more togetherness, and potluck dinners seemed like an obvious strategy. After all, when we were in St. Louis, the church there had a potluck every single Sunday, and it turned out to be an incredible tool for church growth—so much so that the local newspaper made a big deal of it when they profiled the church. The GFC potluck turned out to be the most archetypically GFC thing we had ever done. And it was a disaster. My potluck renaissance wasn't the first time GFC had tried to eat together. After all, everyone on the Farm participated in Farm Dinners, but those were all prepared by one household (which really means they were prepared by one woman), and shared with the single people who lived on the Farm. But those weren't dinners for the church as a group. And there had been occasional church dinner events, but the normal strategy was for each family to stake out their territo...