Strength and Beauty — Francis Schaeffer and the Church That Captivates

16 Sept

THE SHOCK ABSORBER

The copy of Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There is a 1968 edition paperback. It smells like 1968.The cover is stark and simple. The argument inside is anything but.

Schaeffer hoped that orthodox Christianity — the church, the gospel, the community of people gathered around Jesus — would be a thing of strength and beauty in the second half of the 20th century. But is that how we would describe church?

L'Abri and the Shelter of Questions

In 1955, Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith founded a ministry in the Swiss Alps called L'Abri, the French word for shelter. The setting was striking: a chalet overlooking a beautiful valley, a glacier visible across the mountains, alpine meadows full of flowers in spring. People could come and live there, work alongside the community, share meals, ask their questions, and listen to Schaeffer lecture on everything from the history of art to the Enlightenment to the nature of God.

By the 1960s, hippies were making their way to L'Abri the same way the Beatles were making their way to the Maharishi in India, seeking wisdom, seeking transcendence, seeking something that the material prosperity of the post-war West had failed to deliver. The difference was that L'Abri offered them something specific: a Christianity that wasn't intellectually evasive, that engaged with science and culture and philosophy on their own terms, that demonstrated as well as debated.

Upon Stu and Lou’s visit there in 2000, they foudn the people staying there debating a different set of questions: early deconstructionists, people questioning whether any of it was worth believing. But the posture was the same: come, stay, ask, live with us.

Schaeffer’s influence on Stu was huge. It gave him was a framework for thinking about Christianity not as a thought system or a Sunday morning event but as a way of life to be lived out in community. It also gave him a conviction that the gospel was relevant not just in the first century but in the twentieth — and demonstrating that relevance required actually living it out, not just arguing for it.

The Adequate Universal

On page 97, Schaeffer engages with what he calls the adequate universal for love. Modern man, he argues, quite properly considers love to be overwhelmingly important. But he has a problem: in a worldview where life emerged by chance, where the universe has no creator and no meaning behind it, love also emerged by chance. It has no foundation deeper than biology or evolution or cultural preference. Love can easily degenerate into something much less than the total idea of love: it gets hollowed out, used to justify almost anything. This he says, is a structural problem in the secular worldview.

The Christian, he argues, has what modern man lacks: an adequate universal. Before the creation of anything else, the Trinity existed. And within the Trinity, love existed, between the Father, the Son and the Spirit, for eternity, before the foundation of the world. The love we experience and seek and build our lives around is not an accident. It has its origin in something that has always been.

So if the Trinity has been practising love for eternity, and if God created us to participate in that love, then the fracture introduced by sin is not the end of the story. Jesus comes to remove the barrier. Through his death and resurrection, the way back into that relationship is opened. The Lord's Prayer becomes possible: we can approach God as Father. Paul can call men and women sons of God, co-heirs with Christ. The church is not just a gathering of like-minded people, it's a community being drawn into the eternal love of the Trinity.

That's what Schaeffer gave Stu: a reason why the church matters that runs deeper than community strategy or ministry methodology. The church is where people encounter the love that nothing else can offer.

If You Drink of Me

This finds basis in Jesus's words to the Samaritan woman at the well: if you drink of this well, you will thirst again. But if you drink of me, you will never go thirsty.

This is what captivates Stu about Jesus — and what drove the experiment that Soul Revival represents. The culture in the 1990s was full of wells that people were drinking from: sporting teams, consumer goods, social status, the pub scene, the party circuit. The pattern was always the same. You drink, you're satisfied for a season, and then you're thirsty again. The Bible puts it clearly: even sin is sweet for a season. The sweetness doesn't last. The bitterness always follows.

As Cronulla Sharks chaplain for the last 10 years, Stu knows full well the experience of following a sporting team as a metaphor for every finite source of meaning. They might win. They might not. Either way, next season begins again with the same hunger. The well doesn't stop being a well just because you keep drinking from it.

What Jesus offers is categorically different. Not a better well, a different kind of source entirely. And Stu's question, watching his friends choose the sporting club and the concert and the pub over the church during the nineties was: what would it take for people to see the church as the place where the action actually is? Not an event to attend alongside everything else, but the community that offers what nothing else can?

The Strength and Beauty of the Church

Schaeffer's phrase, from the appendix to The God Who Is There, is that he hoped the church would be a thing of strength and beauty in the second half of the 20th century.

Its questionable whether this was fully realised. Many would not have described the church as a thing of strength and beauty. They would have described it as boring, irrelevant, something their parents made them do, an event that competed poorly with the alternatives on offer. The church existed, but action was elsewhere.

What Soul Revival has been trying to do for thirty-five years is close that gap. Not by making the church more like the concert or more like the sporting club, but by making it more genuinely itself: a community where the love of the Trinity is actually experienced, where people are known and cared for and challenged and equipped, where the gospel is proclaimed clearly and people encounter the one who offers living water.

Schaeffer's three principles for evangelicalism structure the aspiration:

First: maintain the full doctrinal position of historic Christianity. The gospel is not something that can be assumed — it has to be actively held and passed on.
Second: put that belief into practice. Jesus's call in Mark 1:15 is to repent and believe,not just to assent intellectually but to turn, to follow, to let him be Lord as well as Saviour.
Third: exhibit both individually and corporately that God exists in this century. Not just in the private sphere. In the visible community life of the church.

In his last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, Schaeffer's warning was that the West was failing on all three. Reducing Christianity to moral behaviour without explaining the foundation. Assuming the gospel rather than proclaiming it. Letting the individual Christian life become so privatised that the corporate exhibition of God's existence in the church simply wasn't happening.

Custodians of the Culture

What does it look like to be a custodian of a community shaped by the gospel rather than by the surrounding culture?

The commitments culture at Soul Revival, the group of people who are committed to Jesus and committed to the community, who set the tone and model what it looks like to be genuinely all-in, is one answer to that question. The gospel is simple. Jesus is the way. The constant pressure of culture is to add to it or subtract from it, to syncretise it with whatever framework is currently prestigious, to reduce it to something less than what it is.

At the end of a concert of a Larry Norman concert, when the crowd was applauding him, he put up one finger and said: One Way. The crowd stopped clapping and put up their fingers too. One way. Not one of many. Not a valuable perspective in a crowded marketplace of meaning. The way, the truth, the life. Nobody comes to the Father except through him.

Keeping that simple. Keeping it central. Demonstrating it in community. Making the church a thing of strength and beauty that people genuinely want to be part of, not because it's more entertaining than the alternatives, but because it offers what nothing else can.

That's the aspiration. And it's worth holding onto.

Discussed on this episode

Francis Schaeffer - The God Who Is There

Francis Schaeffer - The Great Evangelical Disaster

Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast.

The Shock Absorber is a podcast for church leaders doing church a little differently. Next episode: the tangibles of church project management. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Email Joel at joel@shockabsorber.com.au, and join the Shock Absorber Network at shockabsorber.com.au.