GFC Survivors' History

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...

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...

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...