To Think Christianly

A History of L'Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center Movement

Charles E. Cotherman

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2028
• ISBN:
  9780830839247
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

- 2020 ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover AwardIn the late 1960s and on into the next decade, the American pastor and bestselling author Francis Schaeffer regularly received requests from evangelicals across North America seeking his help to replicate his innovative learning community, L'Abri, within their own contexts. At the same time, an innovative school called Regent College had started up in Vancouver, British Columbia, led by James Houston and offering serious theological education for laypeople. Before long, numerous admirers and attendees of L'Abri and of Regent had launched Christian "study centers" of their own—often based on or near university campuses—from Berkeley to Maryland. For evangelical baby boomers coming of age in the midst of unprecedented educational opportunity and cultural upheaval, these multifaceted communities inspired a generation to study, pray, and engage culture more faithfully—in the words of James M. Houston, "to think Christianly."In this compelling and comprehensive history, Charles Cotherman traces the stories of notable study centers and networks, as well as their influence on a generation that would reshape twentieth-century Christianity. Beginning with the innovations of L'Abri and Regent College, Cotherman elucidates the histories of- The C. S. Lewis Institute near Washington, DC- R. C. Sproul's Ligonier Valley Study Center in Stahlstown, Pennsylvania- New College Berkeley- The Center for Christian Study at the University of Virginia- The Consortium of Christian Study Centers, which now includes dozens of institutionsEach of these projects owed something to Schaeffer's and Houston's approaches, which combined intellectual and cultural awareness with compelling spirituality, open-handed hospitality, relational networks, and a deep commitment to the gospel's significance for all fields of study—and all of life. Cotherman argues that the centers' mission of lay theological education blazed a new path for evangelicals to fully engage the life of the mind and culture.Built on a rich foundation of original interviews, archival documents, and contemporary sources, To Think Christianly sheds new light on this set of defining figures and places in evangelicalism's life of the mind.

IN FEBRUARY 1970 Francis Schaeffer, an American pastor, missionary, bestselling evangelical author, and founder of the increasingly influential Christian community L’Abri in Huemoz, Switzerland, received a letter from a young American named David Gill. Gill, two years out of the University of California, Berkeley, was working as a high school history teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was also an emerging leader in Berkeley’s countercultural Christian World Liberation Front. In less than two years he would serve with Sharon Gallagher as the coeditor of the front’s underground newspaper, Right On!, and help found a free university known as the Crucible. In his letter, Gill outlined how Schaeffer’s 1968 book The God Who Is There had “revolutionized my testimony at UC Berkeley.” Then he came to his main question: “Have you ever considered a sort of ‘Farel House West’ in Berkeley?” In Gill’s opinion, Berkeley seemed just the place for a branch of L’Abri and its residential study center Farel House. “Berkeley,” he enthused, “would be an ideal place to take over an old fraternity house and use it to confront modern men . . . with the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.”1

Gill was not the only evangelical interested in re-creating Schaeffer’s innovative learning community. Between winter 1970 and summer 1971 Schaeffer received similar letters from a number of individuals who went on to become leading players in the development of an evangelical study center movement in North America. In June 1970 Jim Hiskey, a former PGA golfer who in collaboration with the National Prayer Breakfast had started a L’Abri-style campus ministry at the University of Maryland, wrote to tell Schaeffer “how grateful we are for your ministry.”2 From the other side of the continent Jim Houston, founding principal of Vancouver’s Regent College, a newly formed venture in lay theological education, wrote in August 1970 to ask Schaeffer whether he would speak at the next Regent summer school. “We really need you at this critical time,” Houston noted. “The launching of any orbital mission requires tremendous thrust to begin with and we feel that you alone can provide some of this [thrust] by supporting us next summer.”3 During spring 1971, while Schaeffer was speaking at the first US L’Abri conference at Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, he met R. C. Sproul, a young Presbyterian minister from Cincinnati who had studied for a doctorate at the Free University in Amsterdam. Within a week Sproul wrote Schaeffer to follow up on a discussion the two had regarding Sproul’s desire to start a L’Abri-type study center near Ligonier, Pennsylvania.4 In September of the same year, Beat Steiner, a student leader in Action Ministries at the University of Virginia, struck up a correspondence with Schaeffer. Steiner hoped Schaeffer might agree to conduct a series of lectures the next spring at the University of Virginia.5

As the correspondence between Schaeffer and a veritable who’s who of evangelicals in the early study center movement demonstrates, it is virtually impossible to talk about the emergence of a Christian study center movement in North America without referencing Francis and Edith Schaeffer’s L’Abri Fellowship.6 From its founding in 1955 L’Abri (French for “shelter”) offered a generation of evangelicals the chance to discuss ideas and receive what the Schaeffers described as “honest answers to honest questions.”7 Not a commune but certainly a spiritual and intellectual community, L’Abri gave the Schaeffers a place to hone their thinking and a platform from which to launch into a global ministry as writers and speakers, and eventually filmmakers and political activists.8 Based out of their home, L’Abri was the canvas on which the Schaeffers’ deep appreciation for beauty (from table settings to classic and modern art), their firm conviction that Christians need never fear pursuing the truth, and their embodiment of the Reformed idea that the lordship of Christ extends to all of life cast a vision for the flourishing life that inspired a generation of evangelicals to reconsider the spiritually, intellectually, and culturally stunted versions of Christianity many had encountered in their homes and churches. As hundreds and then thousands of American evangelicals read the Schaeffers’ books, made the pilgrimage to L’Abri, and enjoyed food and conversation around the Schaeffers’ table, many developed a taste for the intellectually and culturally engaged Christianity the Schaeffers espoused. For some this hunger led to advanced academic study. For others it led to engagement in spheres of society such as the arts, business, or formal ministry. For a few, however, L’Abri was more than a stopping place; it was a model to be replicated in the places they called home. It was the start of an evangelical Christian study center movement.

New Vistas: The Schaeffers’ Break with Separatist Fundamentalism

In many ways the Schaeffers were unlikely candidates and an alpine village in Switzerland an unlikely place to launch a movement. Indeed, when the Schaeffers quietly started the ministry of L’Abri out of their home in June 1955 few outside their inner circle of prayer partners (or praying family, as Edith referred to them) even took note. By 1955 Francis Schaeffer seemed well past his most influential days. The onetime agnostic who had come to faith in high school and impressed his professors in college and seminary with his natural intellectual abilities and zeal had at one point been a rising star in the Bible Presbyterian Church (founded 1937), having served in increasingly influential pastorates beginning with tenures in Grove City and Chester, Pennsylvania, before eventually landing a post at the large Covenant Church in St. Louis. While there, his star continued to rise as he and Edith had demonstrated an impressive ability to develop and lead ministry to children, eventually founding Children for Christ as a separatist version of Child Evangelism Fellowship. These experiences led to a call by the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in 1948 to serve as missionaries to children and their families in postwar Europe. Francis seemed poised to become a national leader within fundamentalist circles in North America.

But Europe changed Schaeffer. Like American artists, writers, and jazz musicians who flocked to Paris decades earlier, Europe seemed to offer Schaeffer a freedom to develop his taste for art, philosophy, and even good conversations in a context that reverberated with the newest currents in thought while simultaneously distanced from the internecine struggles that dominated American fundamentalism.9 As Schaeffer found a new voice and sensibility in Europe, he forfeited a portion of his standing within American fundamentalism. By 1955 Schaeffer found himself outside his previous denomination and increasingly marginalized by the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, which did not approve of his growing emphasis on evangelism through home-based hospitality and spiritual conversation. Both emphases had been shaped by the Schaeffers’ longstanding practice of inviting people into the family’s home for meals and conversation as well as his own spiritual crisis, which occurred in the winter and spring of 1951, when he had attempted to root out doubt by returning to his teenage agnosticism in order to rebuild his faith on a firmer foundation.10

In some ways it was Schaeffer’s own struggle with doubt that made L’Abri possible by pushing the pastor-turned-missionary to consider ways to better reach his European neighbors with a message that emphasized an intellectually honest quest for truth and a deep spirituality built on genuine love for God and neighbor. While the combination of these traits was not common within American evangelicalism in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were evangelicals, such as Harold J. Ockenga (1905–1985) and Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003), who were attempting to balance intellectual and spiritual vitality through endeavors such as Fuller Theological Seminary (founded 1947) and Christianity Today (founded 1956). Like many neo-evangelical efforts, which built on World War II sensibilities toward mobilization and large events, many of these ministries tried to carry out the formation of minds and hearts with large programs or crusades fueled by equally large ambitions and a handful of deep-pocketed donors.11 The Schaeffers’ approach was different. Rather than making evangelicalism bigger through sheer numbers and name recognition, the Schaeffers made evangelicalism different by combining and expanding neo-evangelical efforts to engage the intellect and culture with L’Abri’s key innovation—their decision to base a robust and holistic appreciation for the intellect, culture, and Christian spirituality not within the context of a mass rally or accredited theological institution but in a community built around home-based hospitality and the rhythms of everyday life. Inadvertently harking back to the monastic model of prayer and work in the context of study and community, L’Abri was a working, living, studying, praying community before communal living became a countercultural standard.12

Before not only their evangelical peers but also most Americans, the Schaeffers seemed to intuit that a home-based ministry of hospitable presence was the vehicle through which they could carry the message of a God who was truly there to a world that had lost all sense of absolute truth and crossed what Schaeffer described as “the line of despair.”13 To a certain extent the Schaeffers’ work at L’Abri was an extended and multifaceted effort to help a generation dealing with this loss of truth and the fallout of the postmodern shift, which deprivileged all universal truth claims (or metanarratives) in favor of a relativized understanding of reality in which individuals came to understand truth in terms of their personal experiences and the communities to which they belonged.

Building a Shelter

L’Abri was the Schaeffers’ means of confronting this shift in truth and the accompanying fallout in individual lives. Francis first landed on the name L’Abri for a new missionary outreach in fall 1954. The name symbolized his hope that their home could function as a spiritual shelter where individuals could come for help. Edith liked the idea and immediately spun into her characteristic action by beginning to compile a folio decorated with pine trees on a hillside and inscribed with the words “L’Abri . . . come for morning coffee, or afternoon tea, with your questions.”14

Before L’Abri could move beyond the pages of Edith’s sketchbook, however, there were practicalities to consider. First, the couple had to navigate a series of obstacles, the most notable of which were two letters they received on February 14, 1955. The first informed them that they were evicted from the canton of Valais due to their work as Protestant missionaries in a Catholic canton. The second letter took the eviction further by requiring that the Schaeffers leave Switzerland entirely. It seemed like the Schaeffers’ dreams for L’Abri were coming to an end. Yet what seemed at first like an abrupt end to their European ministry actually marked an important beginning. While they were forced to leave the Catholic canton of Valais, the family was eventually permitted to remain in Switzerland provided that they find a house in the Protestant canton of Vaud by March 31, 1955. In the nick of time, they were able to make a down payment on a house, Chalet les Melezes, just outside the village of Huemoz in the Protestant canton of Vaud.15 Situated at an altitude of over three thousand feet, the long balconies and many windows of the chalet provided panoramic views of the Rhone Valley and the famous Dents du Midi mountain range. In the years to come, account after account from those who visited L’Abri contained reference to the significance of the alpine beauty that surrounded the chalet.16

Convinced that God had provided them with favor to stay in Switzerland and a chalet that was ideally situated for the ministry of conversations and hospitality t...