Today I'll start with a very short history of L'Abri. In 1955, Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith were living in Switzerland with their children. I think at that point they had two or maybe three children. The Schaeffers bought a chalet in the tiny town of Huemoz (pronounced "Way-mo") right before their visas were going to expire and moved in with only a vague idea that they wanted to open their home for people who were questioning spirituality. Soon after they moved to Huemoz, one of their daughters started to bring friends home on the weekend from her school (I forget if it was a boarding school or if it was a university), and Francis Schaeffer started to talk to them about what their spiritual beliefs were and about what Christianity said about the world. As those girls found a lot of their questions answered, they began to tell other people and word started to spread that there was a place up on a mountain where a man would talk to you about philosophy and theology. Soon people started showing up to stay and talk about spirituality and philosophy with Schaeffer. At this point, the visitors were simply sleeping on any empty floor space around the Schaeffer's house.
Schaeffer started to lecture on various topics with the emphasis always being that Christianity is not simply a spiritual truth, disconnected from the practicalities and complexities of daily living, but that it is an all-encompassing lens through which we can view and respond to everything we encounter in our lives. At some point a chapel was built to house L'Abri's growing library and to give the students at L'Abri a place to have church on Sundays. Also, other chalets were purchased around the original chalet in order to house more students and workers who came to work full-time at L'Abri.
Currently, L'Abri consists of seven chalets. Chalet Bellevue is where the all of the students live and eat most of their meals. Four other chalets house workers and their families, and two chalets are reserved for visiting lecturers and non-traditional students (eg married couples). L'Abri also owns a good-size chapel called the Farel House which is used as the meeting place for church on Sunday mornings, the space for the two lectures that take place each week, and is also used for housing the library of about 1500 books and 1200 tapes of lectures given at L'Abri.
Below is a quotation, taken from the L'Abri website, that explains the emphasis of the teaching at L'Abri:
First, that Christianity is objectively true and that the Bible is God's written word to mankind. This means that biblical Christianity can be rationally defended and honest questions are welcome.
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Second, because Christianity is true it speaks to all of life and not to some narrowly religious sphere and much of the material produced by L'Abri has been aimed at helping develop a Christian perspective on the arts, politics and the social sciences etc.
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Third, in the area of our relationship with God, true spirituality is seen in lives which by grace are free to be fully human rather than in trying to live on some higher spiritual plane or in some grey negative way.
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Fourth, the reality of the fall is taken seriously. Until Christ returns we and the world we live in will be affected by the disfigurement of sin. Although the place of the mind is emphasized, L'Abri is not a place for "intellectuals only".
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We are as concerned for living as we are for thinking and from the beginning the concern has been that the truth is as much exhibited in everyday life as it is defended in discussion. We do not do this perfectly of course but depend on the Lord to bring forth a measure of reality in our daily life.
Today, there are branches of L'Abri in England, America, Canada, Korea, Sweden, and Holland, all of which operate under those principals but with different results depending on the types of workers and students that come to each branch each term.
If you're interested in learning more about L'Abri, I suggest going to their official website: http://www.labri.org. Or, if you're really interested, you can buy Edith Schaeffer's book, L'Abri, which chronicles the beginnings of L'Abri and how things worked out for the first decade or two. Tomorrow, I'll post about what an average day at L'Abri was like so stay tuned for more.
In other news, I received most of my recent order from Amazon.com yesterday. I got a 120 gb external hard drive, a new wireless mouse, and a system for learning French. Big day!
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