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SOUTHBOROUGH L’ABRI PRAYER/NEWSLETTER,
Summer, 2008
49 Lynbrook Road, Southborough, MA 01772

We just returned from our L’Abri members’ meeting in England. In preparing the Southborough report for that meeting it struck me that it was a great wonder that this branch of L’Abri or any of the other L’Abri communities exists at all. The heyday of communities in the recent past in the U.S. was from 1966 to 1973, during which time over ten million Americans lived in some kind of intentional community. Almost all of these communities collapsed by 1975. The collapse was not because they were no longer needed, it was because they didn’t work.

As we spoke at the members’ meeting, it seemed that “community” had been a major topic of discussion among students at several of the other L’Abri branches, just as it has been this last year in Southborough. This is precisely because our students have experienced such isolation and loneliness, with social forces pushing them toward high mobility, disconnection, competitiveness, speed, money, performance, measuring and being measured by surfaces. All the while the institutions which had provided strength and support for the individual’s stability and growth – local community, family and church – are themselves profoundly weakened by the same fragmenting forces of modernity. Virtual communities on the internet, though sometimes better than nothing, seem to call attention to the problem of loneliness more than to be any solution to it. You could well argue that the need for real life communities of all different sorts is greater now than in the 1970s.
One disillusioned communitarian wrote in the early 1970s that when communities were based on freedom they inevitably failed within a year. The communities that lasted were built around authority, sometimes rigid religious authority. He reached the sad conclusion, “If the intentional community hopes to survive, it must be authoritarian, and if it is authoritarian, it offers no more freedom than conventional society. I am not pleased with this conclusion, but it now seems to me that the only way to be free is to be alone.”

So, my question, how and why in the world is L’Abri still here, actually growing and thriving? The short answer would be “with the help of God”, but although that is completely true, it might be heard as no more than a cliché. The real answer is still a great wonder to me but I do have some scattered thoughts.

The Schaeffers started L’Abri as a way to honor God that he might use their work to demonstrate his reality into the world. That meant that the community was for God. It was not community substituting for God, as if to compensate for his supposed irrelevance or departure. Nor was it a community in which “being in community” was an end in itself. Community had a purpose beyond itself, to be a temporary shelter of hospitality and learning for all whom God might bring to the door. It also meant that there was no demand for it to be a utopian community, to teach the world the ideal way to live. In fact L’Abri has always been passionately anti-utopian. With all our best intentions, we must still live well within the darkness of the shadow of the Fall. As a result, utopias have always backfired, demanding the best, throwing away what is good, but ending up with what is worse.

Francis Schaeffer also spoke a great deal about the amazing Biblical interaction between “form and freedom” or “boundaries and freedoms”. We continue this conversation daily in all our branches. The moral principles in the Bible are boundaries of depth, not of detail. They are designed to restore our battered humanness and help us to live well as images of God in this fallen and unfair world. Unlike Islam, for example, the New Testament does not give us a blueprint for a whole culture, but very lean and deeply searching moral norms with silences in between them. We are given profound truths about, for example, marriage and the raising of children, but we are never told who should balance the check book or change the most diapers. The silences in the Bible are not there to be filled in by nervous theologians or preachers, but are freedoms to be explored by those looking to the guidance of the Holy Spirit in their lives. L’Abri has always struggled imperfectly to maintain Biblical form and freedom, to preserve the amazing affirmation of life in its wild diversity as promised by Jesus -- despite the Fall. These ideas have shaped both the daily running of L’Abri and the vision of the Christian life presented at L’Abri. Authoritarianism with its micromanagement has no place.

Then L’Abri has also lasted because God has responded to our prayers for workers and helpers, for students and for God’s vision for each next step of the work. He has also heard our prayers for finances and he has moved many, many, people to a generosity without which we might at any time in our history, have collapsed within a few weeks. L’Abri is not still here because it is some fixed institution, as if a part of the landscape. Its survival and flourishing in the midst of such vulnerability and insecurity is still a great marvel and a reason to thank God for his grace.

Our winter term was a very good one. We had a good group of students who interacted well with each other, sometimes learning good things through hard times -- which may well be the only way to learn some things. I sometimes fear that some Christian learning is a bit like learning to swim in a class room, without getting wet. This is where community life is such an important part of what goes on here.

Having a strong group of helpers in Amy, Rachel and Eliza was also really important. They were able to do a heavy load of meals each week and provide really important continuity.

It was Ben and Nickaela’s first term back in L’Abri at full throttle with their twins (now eight months old). They did really well in all the varied parts of L’Abri life – I’m not sure how. The twins, Eleanor and Abigail are a significant “theme” in L’Abri now. Pray for them and as they get ever more mobile and energetic, especially as the students of the summer term arrive this week.

We begin the new term with Amy returning as a helper, along with Jessica and Brad, who were students with us last term. Amy and Jessica will be doing meals and Brad will be working on deferred maintenance. Danny and Brad have begun before the term has started by enlarging Danny’s kitchen-dining room so that it will work much better serving larger numbers of students.
Joe and Sue Morrell are doing well. Pray for Luke’s transition to high school (still not sure where) and for Nate’s first experience of summer camp.
Mardi’s health continues to improve slowly with a bit of ground gained against her allergies and loss of energy. Pray that this would continue.
Do pray for health and safety for us and for our students and helpers.
Pray for our finances as the economy seems insecure and the prices go up.
Pray also for a L’Abri conference in Sacramento, California, July 31-August 3, 2008. The contact person there is Brian Morris, e-mail: blmorris72@earthlink.net., (specifics will be upcoming on the L’Abri website).

Ask God to be with us as we work to create a community here this term that will honor him and be profoundly redemptive to those who come to be with us.

Dick Keyes

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