Foreword to the Signature Edition by Steven Garber
Are you going to L’Abri?”
I still remember standing on the side of a road outside of Geneva, Switzerland, thumb out with my backpack beside me, hoping for a ride. A small car stopped, and the driver asked me that question. Most of fifty years later it is fresh in my memory, even as strange as it seemed at the time—there I was, living into the life that was becoming mine, joining pilgrims who came from all over the world, each one of us with our own hopes for what might be in the mysterious, almost mystical place called L’Abri.
In the years of the 1960s and 1970s thousands of young men and women made their way to the little farming village of Huemoz, each one longing to be understood, willing to do just about anything to make sense of their lives, believing that being human mattered, but yearning to know why. With no internet and no brochures, the word on the street was that L’Abri was a place where people mattered—and the language of “honest questions and honest answers” was the heart of its life.
The working assumption was, of course, that one could ask a dishonest question, and yes, that one could give a dishonest answer. Both fall short of what makes for a good life, an honest life.
One snowy winter’s eve we all gathered in the chapel for an evening of no-holds-barred conversation; any and all questions were invited. With standing room only, question after question was asked. Someone over my left shoulder began to speak, and even to my young ears it seemed that he was more interested in talking, perhaps even in hearing himself talk. Given the intellectually stimulating environment, with questions running through all hours of the day—over meals, at work in the gardens and kitchens, walking along the lanes—there was always the temptation to have a very impressive question, with great meaning and substance. That night, I wondered whether those words would become a true question. They never did—but years later I remember being stilled by the response that came next.
“If you have a real question, I will take all night listening to you. But I will not play with the truth.”
Those words still echo through my heart. I had never before thought that truth mattered like that, that it was something to honor. I went to bed that night in one of the little chalets pondering what I had heard, and what it would mean for my life.
Like so many others, I had dropped out of school. Not because I was flunking out, but more because I had questions that needed to be addressed if I was going to keep on. My first year away I lived in a commune in the Bay Area of California, hitchhiking back and forth between Palo Alto and Berkeley, listening in on gurus of all kinds of worlds and worldviews. I began to understand that each of us asks and answers the same questions. Who are we? What is the world really all about? Does life mean anything? Do I? Do right and wrong exist? What about truth? and beauty? and justice? And finally and most profoundly, is there a God, and can we know anything about him?
Those questions are asked and asked again throughout history, in every century and every culture, as their answers matter for the way we live in the world. And they were the serious questions asked and answered within the community of L’Abri.
But as rich as the face-to-face conversations were there, as winsome and transforming as the community life could sometimes be, we would not know of L’Abri without the books that came forth from its life. The 1970s were very rich years for L’Abri and the wider world, its ideas rippling out to eager people everywhere.
If there is one book that is woven into the tapestry of L’Abri, so much so that we cannot understand the one without the other, it is The God Who Is There. A shot across the bow for Schaeffer and his work, the book set forth his core convictions about reality and truth, about the human heart, and yes, about the nature and character of God.
Like most of Schaeffer’s early writing, this was born of lectures birthed into being by the editorial graces of James Sire—long the senior editor of InterVarsity Press—who was sure that there was a world beyond Huemoz that wanted to learn from Schaeffer. And he was right. People the world over began reading the books that came from the little community—not only the ones that Francis and Edith wrote, but also Os Guinness’s The Dust of Death, Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, Donald Drew’s Images of Man: A Critique of the Contemporary Cinema, Ranald Macauley and Jerram Barrs’s Being Human: The Nature of Spiritual Experience, and Udo Middelman’s Pro-Existence—and the reputation of L’Abri grew in ways that were both blessing and curse for the Schaeffers.
The great gift of L’Abri was the integrity of its life, offered to all who came. With the daily prayer that “God would bring those of his choosing to our doorstep,” many showed up, wrestling with questions about God and what it means to live in God’s world. While words mattered for Schaeffer, and he talked and talked all day long and into the night for years, life mattered even more. To make the argument that there is a God in the world who can be known was the heart of L’Abri’s existence, but without a doubt it was the day-after-day life that gave reality to the ideas.
Mind and heart were melded together. Words were important, but words made flesh were crucial. Apologetics, yes, but a living apologetic even more so.
The fame that came from the writing was hard on L’Abri, though, as celebrity always is. The personal and familial was not possible in the same way, as their words began having a life beyond the reality of their community. From one conversation I had with Mrs. Schaeffer along the way, I think she saw that what had been was being lost, or at least in danger of being lost. This was her life, and she wanted to protect the life that brought her loves into being.
Having paid attention over the more than sixty years of L’Abri’s ministry, it has intrigued me to see “little L’Abris” form in other places with other people, many now under the umbrella of L’Abri Fellowship, alive and well in England, Holland, Canada, the United States, Brazil, South Korea, and Australia. And beyond that, the growing work of “study centers” the world over are always one more try at doing what L’Abri did, offering an intellectually rich spirituality born of the truest truths of the universe, incarnate in settings far from the mountains of Switzerland.
A generation later most twenty-somethings who long for more than they yet know do not even know of Francis Schaeffer and L’Abri. The weight of the words “Well, Schaeffer says” no longer wins every argument. And as we have lived with his analysis and critique over the years, there are legitimate criticisms about some of his convictions and conclusions. He was not an oracle, even living on a mountain as he did.
But what he gave is a gift still worth the time and energy it takes to understand him. To believe that there is a God who is there, and who has not been silent, matters supremely. If we don’t get that right, we will get nothing else right. One might imagine that great arguments about metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics were the substance of L’Abri’s life, and in one sense they were never not important. But the ordinary student who came to L’Abri was often first directed to study the New Testament book of Romans. Yes, the very soul of the pedagogy was fixed on getting God right, and from that, getting ourselves right. The great questions of the twentieth century were relevant, but only to the extent that they were tethered to the biblical text, allowing the attentive reader to feel the tension between the Word of God and the world made by God.
Reading The God Who Is There through the years, often asking my students to read with me, I have been taught again and again that there are basic truths that form every life. The embodied apologetic that was L’Abri at its truest treated men and women as worthy of honor, taking each one seriously, as seriously as one made in the very image of God deserved. The way that food was prepared, meals were served, people were listened to, beauty mattered, work was important—taken together they were a way of living out the conviction that God is there, and that he cares about the way we live in his world. Simply said, that God is there makes it possible for us to be here, to be the human beings we were meant to be.
To believe that God exists, that he is “there,” is a line in the sand for human life under the sun—and everyone everywhere wonders about this, wanting answers that make sense of what we see and hear, of what we believe and the way we live. We are perennial people, after all, and the conversations I have had in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and Australia are the same conversations about the same things.
A generation later, I have become an attentive student of Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright who became a prisoner who became a president—and sometimes I have wondered what Schaeffer would have made of him. Havel argued, “If we lose God in the world, then we must be willing to give up on meaning and purpose, accountability and responsibility.” With a terribly stark insight, he only underscored the argument that became incarnate within L’Abri: There is a God who is there.
This was Schaeffer’s vision, seen through his own glass darkly. Theological and philosophical ideas were central to the work of L’Abri, but always held in tension with what they meant for ordinary people living in ordinary places. That has always been the best of L’Abri.
Even as I write these words, my daughter has gone “home” to Huemoz once again. In her early twenties, she spent a semester studying international health and development in Geneva. Mixing with diverse peers who had their own rooted reasons for caring about the world, and having seen sorrow personally in a bush clinic in Africa and studying its systemic causes and consequences in her program, she wanted to understand more of what she believed and why she believed it. That took her for a weekend up into the Swiss mountains to Huemoz, and then back again a few months later. Eventually she spent several years there, living within the community of L’Abri, taking its life as her life. She came to see it as her second home and has been back several times over the last twenty years; in her heart, she is never far away.
But now she is there only for a week, wanting to breathe the Swiss mountain air again, and she has brought her young daughter, who can only toddle her way through the village streets and mountain pastures.
For my daughter, unique in the world that she is, it was her questions about God and life that brought her to L’Abri, and the challenge of working them out kept her there. Now a woman with a full life, she can only go more fully into the reality of the world that is there, brought into being by the God who is there. And in so doing, she is slowly finding a truer way to be human in the world—which has been the long hope of L’Abri, its very reason for being.