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...

I haven't given up on this project, even though it's been dormant for about a month. The last few weeks of an academic semester are very time-consuming for a teacher, and I've been grading papers and dealing with all the last-second emergencies that close out a term. I have several ideas for the near future, and one reader has pointed out that a lot of what I've written seems extremely gloomy, so here's a look at what I'm thinking. The 1980s was a very active and interesting time to be at Grace Haven, and looking back I was glad to be there. Because of the diffuse nature of the place, almost nobody got to have a finger in every pie, so my recollections will be very personal and very much conditioned by the fact that I was living on the Farm (and not in town) for most of it. Here are a few topics I hope to cover in the future: The Arts and Grace Haven Arkenstone and Commonlife magazines. Kingdom Kampers Later theological development of the Farm/Church

For me, coming from a big city to Mansfield, it was striking just how many stand-alone "pastoral counselors" there were. Grace Haven had one whose office was in the Lodge (which makes sense, I guess, because there wasn't really a pastor over the whole body). Anyhow, when I look at Google, there are still more than a dozen counseling offices, most of them lining Lexington Avenue. Ashland Seminary seems to be the source of all these counselors—two years (64 credits) and you're a professional. (Most of the courses are three hour "Introduction to" courses, and six of those credits are hands-on practicum hours.) The appeal to the Christian community is obvious. Aside from the Evangelical anti-expert bias, there has always been a suspicion that secular psychologists or psychiatrists would try to talk Christian patients out of their faith (which would actually be a serious breach of professional ethics). Secular mental health profes...

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...

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...

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...

This whole idea grew from several years of reflection, but what really kicked it into motion was a day of conversation with family and friends after attending the funeral of a friend. My perspective on GFC was always quite non-typical. For one thing, I spent about eighteen years living on "The Farm," but only a few (about three) as a "townie" who lived in an ordinary neighborhood and had a normal job. For another, I arrived from St. Louis, where I was part of a very good church with a strong tradition of preaching, teaching, and traditional worship, while most GFC people felt very alienated from such a church and wanted as little as possible to do with "the organized church" (as they would have said it). For yet another, when I got to Ohio, I was the number two (or perhaps the number three or four) member of a team that came in to help publish the denominational magazine. Definitely not number one. And in all the years of being associated with GFC, I neve...

What follows is a very personal history of Grace Fellowship Church in Mansfield, Ohio. It's not going to be chronological, and I expect others will pitch in their bits too. Two dangers face me/us in this project. One is that the product will look and sound something like a Hallmark greeting card, all sunny days and flowers in the meadow. The other extreme, of course, is that GFC will come out looking a lot like Jim Jones' terrible Jonestown experiment (which, ironically, was doing its thing at about the time my family first encountered GFC). Grace Fellowship is/was really neither, though the title of this blog does make the point that for many of us it was a church which one survived , not one in which we thrived. A few mechanical details This is, at the start anyhow, very much one person's memories, but the blog isn't private at the moment. Anyone who knows the URL can see it. I'm going to enable comments, but keep them moderated. There are a lot of other people...