My wife was partly brought up in Luzern, Switzerland, by a nanny nicknamed “Häf.” When Barbara became a believer through the ministry of L’Abri, Fraulein Häfliger consulted her network of connections in this small country and discovered that she had been influenced by “an American pastor living in Huémoz.” Huémoz is a tiny village in the Protestant canton of Vaud. Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) was indeed an American, and he was an ordained Presbyterian. Additionally, it is also true that in the last part of his life, he allied himself with the American evangelical right. But the implication given that he was some sort of national, using his mountain top as a platform to spread the influence of America, is misguided.
When I first came to L’Abri, the community where the family eventually settled and ministered to people, I was an agnostic. I was immediately struck by the international character of all the guests and students present. I had grown up in France and felt most welcomed there. The speaker in the church on Sunday morning was from Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia). Students came from all over Europe. And there were a few Africans and a handful of Asians. The “lingua franca” was English. This all spoke powerfully to me about the Christian faith.
EARLY EVIDENCE
To begin with, as is the case for most non-native Americans, Schaeffer’s origins were “international.” He was from German working-class people on his father’s side and the English middle class on his mother’s. His wife, Edith, was born in Wenzhou, China to missionary parents.
Schaeffer was converted in part because of a random (humanly speaking) read through a book of philosophy. The book, covering the Greeks and all varieties of Europeans, raised questions that could only be answered by the Scriptures. During seminary, he got caught up in what he called “The Movement,” a fundamentalist group led by the likes of Carl McIntire, Allan MacRae, and James O. Buswell. It was Presbyterian, but in addition to the Westminster confessional standards, its adherents held to a premillenarian eschatology and generally forbade “liberties” such as dancing, theater, gambling, drinking alcohol, and smoking.
Crucially, this group was strongly separatist. Believing in “the purity of the visible church,” they formed a new denomination, the Bible Presbyterian Church, and adhered to alternative missions organizations such as the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions and the International Council of Christian Churches. Both were fiercely opposed to the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the National Council of Churches (NCC), which were considered liberal or “modernist” (some even suspected the WCC of having ties with Soviet communism).
Schaeffer was a pastor in St. Louis, and a leader in these two groups. He was also the co-founder of Children for Christ, whose strategy was to lead children to Jesus Christ through Bible studies, regional camps, and the like. It was intensely separatist, though it became international.
A defining episode in Schaeffer’s ministry was a prolonged trip to Europe in the summer of 1947. Following the war, the Independent Board expressed concern over the state of the church in various European countries. Liberal theology, as well as its variant neo-orthodoxy, had come from Europe. The Schaeffer’s were not sure that Christians on that continent were fully aware of that, nor of the dangers, as they saw it, tied to their departures from historic Christianity. Fran and Edith hung a poster on their bedroom wall that said, “Go ye into all the world.” In the spring of 1947, the Independent Board discussed Schaeffer’s calling intensely and decided to send him on an exploratory mission to Europe.
By any standard, this was an exhausting expedition. Transportation was by air, sea, train, and bus. Schaeffer visited numerous countries, sleeping in 53 different places, conferring with hundreds of church leaders, mostly evangelicals who resisted participation in the WCC. As both he and Edith would comment later, this trip, though exhausting, paved the way for their move abroad.
Why was Schaeffer drawn to Europe? The reasons stated above were crucial. It was felt that many Christians were not properly armed against the heterodoxies of liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. Americans could help. Yet there is more. My own family is not particularly evangelical, but we moved to France just after the war. There were significant business opportunities for my father, who was in the telegraph industry. Significantly, Europeans in general, and French people in particular, grateful for the sacrifices of the American military, welcomed us “expats.” During the Cold War, Joseph Nye described the United States as the greatest (though flawed) power on earth in an article provocatively titled, “The New Rome Meets the New Barbarians,” published in The Economist in 2002. He predicted that, like all great superpowers, America would eventually recede. Francis Schaeffer seemed to know both the power and the risk of decline in the West, which explains both the opportunity and the urgency with which he carried out his mission.
Besides his tireless pleading among churches to resist liberalism in all its guises, Schaeffer visited as many museums as possible. Schaeffer was captivated by the visual arts. He used to take his family to museums in St. Louis and other places they lived before moving to Europe. His friendship with art historian Hans Rookmaaker is poignant. When I was at L’Abri, where the family eventually settled and ministered to people, Fran led trips to Florence to discover the beauties of the Uffizi, the Academy, and the great churches there, such as the Duomo. The community held periodic arts festivals in Huémoz. He not only enjoyed paintings for themselves but believed art to be a key to the worldview of an era. He thought evangelicals had deprived themselves of exploiting this unique illustration of trends. He believed art and culture were way ahead of theology in the drift toward irrationalism. This was expressed in his well-known “line of despair,” which traced the shift from a belief in absolutes to relativism. Theology was in last place, after philosophy and the arts.
It is my view that his love for the arts is what “saved” him from becoming a right-wing malcontent. In the famous “hayloft experience,” which I will describe shortly, Francis Schaeffer went through a spiritual crisis where he had come to wonder whether he had so stressed doctrinal orthodoxy that he failed to exercise the requisite application of Christian faith to every area of life. Especially, he had thought that he lacked love and compassion for those with whom he had disagreed.
SETTLING INTO MISSIONS WORK
Later, Schaeffer became the recording secretary for an international conference sponsored by the American Council of Christian Churches. As Colin Duriez notes in his book Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life (p. 76), the Council issued “an invitation to the evangelical and reformed Churches of the world to meet in Amsterdam, Holland, August 12 to 19, 1948, there to form, if it please God, an International Council of Christian Churches, for The Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ.” The stress on “the world” is hard to miss. Amsterdam was chosen in part because the city would host the first meeting of the WCC just a week later. It was also a resolutely international center. This is where Schaeffer first met Hans Rookmaaker.
He believed art and culture were way ahead of theology in the drift toward irrationalism.
The Schaeffers went on from there to take up residence in Switzerland. They ended up in Chalet Bijou, in the skiing village of Champéry, located in the Roman Catholic canton of Valais. Travel to various parts of Europe was relatively easy from Champéry. The Schaeffer’s also exercised more and more hospitality to people from, literally, all over. It was there they began fully to realize their future vocation, as they received Finishing School young women from different parts of the world, answering their questions and presenting the gospel to them.
SPIRITUAL CRISIS
As is well-known to Schaeffer admirers, the man went through a serious spiritual crisis in the early 1950s. Several factors gave birth to this dark period. There is a moving account of the crisis in Colin Duriez’s excellent biography (pp. 103–117). To put it in language Schaeffer would himself adopt, those in “the movement,” including himself, had come to a place of “cold orthodoxy.” At bottom, this was a contradiction in terms. Schaeffer felt that he had been right in doctrine, including his separatism, but lacking in love. He could not live with the tension, and so he put everything, including his original commitment to the gospel, into question.
After months of self-examination, pacing up and down the hayloft in their chalet, he came to the conclusion that his step of faith had been right. But he also confessed to a serious lack of “reality” (a favorite term in the L’Abri vocabulary). He had forgotten about walking with the Lord “moment by moment,” and the application of the Christian faith to all of life. This included not only the arts but every kind of human interaction. Eventually the Schaeffers broke with the movement and became independent faith missionaries. This experience was foundational for the work of L’Abri, as he would state in his book True Spirituality (1972, p. 3).
FACING PRESSURE AND SERVING WELL
In a series of dramatic events, the Schaeffers were told to leave Switzerland because of “having a religious influence in Champéry,” no doubt under pressure from the local Roman Catholic bishop, who had grown suspicious of their evangelistic successes with prominent villagers. In an extraordinary twist of providence, they ended up in the tiny village of Huémoz/sur/Ollon in the Protestant canton of Vaud. The full story is found in Edith Schaeffer’s L’Abri (1992) as well as her larger book, The Tapestry (1981).
To that place scores, then hundreds of visitors arrived with questions about the faith. L’Abri was to become truly a “shelter” for anyone who would come and receive a welcome. Their outreach was nothing if not international. The Schaeffers loved people. I experienced this firsthand. They loved people from every corner of the earth.
Here’s one homely illustration. My wife Barbara and he were walking up the road toward Villars. They paused briefly over a little graveyard. With tears in his eyes, Dr. Schaeffer reflected on the hope of the resurrection. One day these graves would open and the people would gaze upon Jesus.
Francis still traveled a good deal, but their ministry at home was clearly the hub. And things grew. Eventually, Schaeffer began to record his lectures, which were distributed worldwide. He also wrote books which documented his lecture material. He authored 23 of them, and they sold millions all over the world, in English and in translation. Finally, he made two films which had widespread popularity: How Should We Then Live? And, with C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER TODAY
Today, some forty years after his death, there are ten residential L’Abri communities all over the world. The reasons for the global character of Francis Schaeffer’s vision are various.
First, as someone who was widely read in philosophy and art history, he realized how Europe had been the hub for the generation of the most important cultural trends in two millennia. The subtitle of his monumental book and film How Should We Then Live? is The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, which expresses this well. The sources and character of his historiography merit extensive discussion. But there is no question about its scope.
Second, Francis Schaeffer had an inborn inquisitiveness about people, places, and things. This is hard to put into words. But when one was with him, one sensed a nearly voracious interest in global phenomena. He ministered during the Cold War. In an interview with Colin Duriez, he warns against Russian hegemony (Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life, pp. 214–216). He might have been surprised by the “miracle year” of 1989, followed by the near collapse of world-wide communism. But then he would have been confirmed in the recent war on Ukraine.
His support in the latter part of his life for the American right, the moral majority, and the anti-abortion campaign was puzzling to some of us. It probably should not have been. He always had conservative “republican” values. And the likes of Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy were drawn to his suggestions, in one of his last books, The Christian Manifesto (revised and republished by Crossway in 2005), that in some circumstances believers may have to exercise civil disobedience.
Finally, Schaeffer knew that the Christian faith was the most “translatable” of world religions. C. S. Lewis, in his “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger (God in the Dock, pp. 177, 183), reminds us that our work is to translate every important theological concept into the vernacular. This was essentially what Francis Schaeffer did so well, in all of his ministry.