Even when the church is a little bit of what it should be, young people will come…

“I don’t think we have to worry about youth.  What we have to worry about is the church.”

When these word were penned in 1970, the “sixties counterculture” was in full bloom.  LSD trips, free love, anti-Vietnam war protests, rock and roll, and existentialist philosophy were the stuff of pop culture.  The mood of the moment was captured in slogans such as “question authority,” “make love, not war,” and “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

It was the era of the “hippie trail” which stretched across Europe and Asia from London and Amsterdam to Kathmandu, Goa, and Bali.  Hordes of young people moved back and forth on the trail—on foot, by bus, hitchhiking, by train, or in the occasional Volkswagen microbus. 

Their quest was for many different things:  a study or career break, dodging the draft for the Vietnam War, the hedonism of easy drugs and easy sex.  Some of the travelers were hardcore dropouts, the genuine hippies.  Many were seeking answers to life’s most vexing questions, often winding up in the ashram of some Indian guru.  Many—hundreds, if not a few thousand—made stops in the village of Huémoz, Switzerland.

Those who came to Huémoz came to visit L’Abri, the Christian community founded by Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith.  For visitors who came saying, “We heard that there may be some answers here,” Schaeffer’s goal was to provide “honest answers for honest questions.”  The young people who came—atheists, existentialists, eastern mystics, and dropouts from the evangelical church—found not just philosophical and theological answers; they also found living answers in the L’Abri community.

When Schaeffer wrote in 1970 that we have to “worry about the church rather than about youth,” he was talking primarily about community:  “Even when the church is a little bit of what it should be, the young people will come.  They will come in their own way, they will come from the ends of the earth when the church is in some poor fashion that which God meant it to be.”

In The Church at the End of the 20^th Century, Schaeffer offered several suggestions for how Christianity could become “a practical, moment-by-moment affair.”  If the church today is to retain and attract young people, we would do well to consider the advice given in the last chapter, “Revolutionary Christianity.”

Open Your Home for Community

Don’t start with a big program. Don’t suddenly think you can add to your church budget and begin. Start personally and start in your home. I dare you. I dare you in the name of Jesus Christ. Do what I am going to suggest. Begin by opening your home for community.…

How many times in the past year have you risked having a drunk vomit on your carpeted floor? How in the world, then, can you talk about compassion and about community – about the church’s job in the inner city?

L’Abri is costly. If you think what God has done here is easy, you don’t understand. It’s a costly business to have a sense of community. L’Abri cannot be explained merely by the clear doctrine that is preached; it cannot be explained by the fact that God has here been giving intellectual answers to intellectual questions. I think those two things are important, but L’Abri cannot be explained if you remove the third. And that is there has been some community here. And it has been costly.

In about the first three years of L’Abri all our wedding presents were wiped out. Our sheets were torn. Holes were burned in our rugs. Indeed once a whole curtain almost burned up from somebody smoking in our living room. Blacks came to our table. Orientals came to our table. Everybody came to our table. It couldn’t happen any other way. Drugs came to our place. People vomited in our rooms, in the rooms of Chalet Les Melezes which was our home, and now in the rest of the chalets of L’Abri.

How many times has this happened to you? You see, you don’t need a big program. You don’t have to convince your session or board. All you have to do is open your home and begin. And there is no place in God’s world where there are no people who will come and share a home as long as it is a real home.

The Unantiseptic Risk

How many times have you risked an unantiseptic situation by having a girl who might easily have a sexual disease sleep between your sheets? We have girls come to our homes who have three or four abortions by the time they are 17. Is it possible they have veneral disease? Of course. But they sleep between our sheets. How many times have you let this happen in your home? Don’t you see this is where we must begin? This is what the love of God means. This is the admonition to the elder – that he must be given to hospitality. Are you an elder? Are you given to hospitality? If not, keep quiet. There is no use talking. But you can begin.

There is a different kind of unantiseptic situation. How many times have you had a drug-taker come into your home? Sure it is a danger to your family, and you must be careful. But have you ever risked it? If you don’t risk it, what are you talking about the drug problem for if in the name of Christ you have not tried to help somebody in this horrible situation!

If you have never done any of these things or things of this nature, if you have been married for years and years and had a home (or even a room) and none of this has ever occurred, if you have been quiet especially as our culture is crumbling about us, if this is so – do you really believe that people are going to hell? And if you really believe that, how can you stand and say, “I have never paid the price to open my living place and do the things that I can do”?

I have a question in my mind about us as evangelicals. We fight the liberals when they say there is no hell. But do we really believe people are going to hell?

It’s not only at L’Abri in the Alps where this has meaning. When I was a pastor, I knew what it meant to go down to the nightclubs at night and fish the drunks out at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning and take them to their homes. Do you?

Back in the forties when my wife, Edith, had a black cleaning woman come in, she ate lunch with her every day. When they ate together, Edith put a candle in the middle of the table so the table setting would have beauty. Have you ever done that? This is the way community begins. There is no other way. Everything else is false if it is further away than this.

The Church at the End of the 20^th Century is unfortunately out of print, but used copies are available here.  And it is included in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview (5 Volume Set), available here.