Biographical Introduction

Our Father in Heaven, we want to praise you as the God of all creation, the one who's made this marvelous universe in which we live and who's made us to be your people, your children. As we begin this class together, we thank you that you've created each one of us to walk before you and you've called us to your Son Jesus Christ and asked us to be obedient to you. We pray, Father, that as we study together, the life and the ministry of Francis needed a shaker that you will encourage us to see what you are able to do when people are prepared to really put themselves into your hands. We thank you for them, we thank you for all you did in their lives and we pray that our time together may really be something which is glorifying to you and which is upbuilding to all of us and really challenges us in our own walk before you day by day. We ask it for Jesus' sake, Amen. I want to really start today by looking at the very early years of their lives of Francis needed lives, so to make the first couple of classes will be basically biographical, though I hope to draw some points at as we go along of what was really important to them from early on in their lives. Most of this information you'd be able to find if you read these letters and if you read the tapestry and others of Edith's books, Edith has started her book The Tapestry by writing about the pattern that God weaves in our individual lives. If you have ever met the shakers, the thing that would have struck you if you talked to Francis Shaker, one of the things that would have struck you was the tremendous sense he had of wonder and awe at what God had done in his needed life together and of what God is able to do and does do in all of our lives as we seek to trust him and serve him. If you've ever talked to Edith, this comes out immediately when you talk to her, just a tremendous sense of wonder at what God is doing, the wonder of the pattern that God weaves in our lives. Here she chose the title The Tapestry. You think of Paul's words in Ephesians 2 verse 10, where he says we are God's workmanship, created for good works which God has prepared beforehand for us to do. This is a constant theme of both Francis and Edith's ministry, of the wonderful things that God is able to do in our lives. The things that he has planned which he has created for us, perhaps the best thing to do would be just to read a section from the beginning of the tapestry where Edith speaks about this. This wasn't something they just felt about their own lives, it was something they constantly tried to communicate to everyone they had contact with about how God is able to take the individual details and choices of our lives and weave something really beautiful, something of significance in history. She says the tapestry seemed a concise title for such a book, that is an autobiography. The idea being that each of our lives is a thread, you are a thread and I am a thread, as we affect each other's ideas, physical beings, spiritual understanding or material possessions or as we influence each other's attitudes, creativity, courage, determination to keep on, moods, priorities, understanding spiritually, intellectually emotionally, we are at the same time affecting history. History is different because you have lived and because I have lived. We have each caused ripples that will never end and we continue to cause ripples. If you ever heard Shay for speak, this was the way he would speak all the time too, that all of us, each action of our lives is like casting a stone into a pool which causes ripples that will then go on forever, but whereas this isn't just ripples in water, this is ripples in the lives of other people. What we choose to do every day of our lives is affecting others, that is the wonderful way in which God has created us. In the picture brought to our minds by the tapestry, we are being woven together, threads that are important to a pattern, the pattern of the history of our life-top lifetimes, but also the pattern we affect in the future of history. And then she goes on to speak about the wonder of how God has made us. God has made us as human beings in his image to have true valid choice affecting creativity, love, communication, ideas which in turn have an impact or influence on each other and on history. As soon as we think we have a pattern or can do away with the distance between the parallel lines of God being truly God and human beings having true choice, we have then done away with the distance between finiteness and for infiniteness. There is a huge gap, a gap that must always remain between being finite and being infinite. Every God is infinite. There is a mystery that remains, our deep awe and worship continue. And this is, I think if we are going to understand the shafers and their emphasis on human significance, which might be questioned by some within the reformed community, we have to recognize why they emphasized it. Firstly of course they were convinced that it was a biblical emphasis. You can think of the sermon we heard this morning in convocation from Kennedy Smart about Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 9 about how Paul was so committed to having his life affect other people. He says that by all means I might save some, even though Paul was convinced that nobody has saved without the gracious work of God, Paul recognized and taught repeatedly that he had a responsible part to play as well in God's pattern of working out the salvation of individual people. So first then the shafers had a conviction that this was a fundamental and central part of biblical teaching that God has made us in his image to have significant choices that our choices affect history. But secondly for them that wasn't something to be proud about, to be boast about, as if we could stand over against God and say look what I have done, isn't it wonderful? But rather it was a cause for worshipping God, that the fact that the infinite God has made us as finite, significant persons able to have real choice that actually affects others and affects history is something that we will never understand fully as a shafer uses this image of parallel lines throughout history. An image incidentally which Spurgeon used repeatedly in his ministry as well, he spoke of lines which as far as we can see run parallel but they meet at the throne of God. But her point here is that we may not be able to understand this, but it should cause us to worship God, how the sovereign God is able to take our real choices and weave his patterns in history. So there are two convictions here, the one is the conviction of our significance which scripture so clearly teaches and which our experience teaches us every moment of every day. And at the same time, and overarching that, a powerful conviction of God's hand at work in history, Shafer used to use an image repeatedly which Mrs. Shaffer mentions in this book but we come to moments in our lives when we have to make a choice which we know is really important and we may take time over it, we may pray over it, we may struggle over it but we have to make that choice and we know it has tremendous importance in our life and in the life of others. But when we can stand back and look at it, we see that we've been on escalator that's been moving all the time. That was an image he liked to use. That is that in fact, we are significant yet God, God's overarching hand is above and working through our lives to bring about his purposes in history. The Shafers never tried to work that out to say, how do these two things work together? Bay saw it as a reason for worshiping God, for having awe and wonder before God that we are His workmanship created to walk before Him and to do the good works which He has planned for us to do. We are significant and He is sovereign but I don't think it's possible to understand anything really much about the ministry and this one understands this, incidentally I would say it's not possible to understand our own lives and this one understands this, either that God really has made a significant, that's what it means to do, made in His image and though that image is damaged and touched so badly by the fall, it's not destroyed. We are still God's image bearers and that image is being made new in Jesus Christ and God calls us to walk before Him now with choices that honor Him so that we may learn as Paul says in Romans 12 to choose to do His good and acceptable and perfect will. It doesn't come automatically, that's something we have to grow in as we walk before Him and yet at the same time we may have this wondering sense of awe at how God is able to be sovereign overall and we've His patterns out in our lives through the choices that we make and this is a marvelous thing to see. We see it all the way through Scripture and it seems to me it's something which is central both in our understanding of our own lives but also in our attempts to communicate the gospel to other people. One of the problems that our generation faces is not being able to give any meaning to the life of the individual or to the whole of history but Christianity really gives us an answer because it puts these two together that God is the one who gives meaning to all of history and yet He's created us as significant persons whose choices are affecting history as it goes along. Now we'll turn to their origins. First, Francis Schafer's origins. His ancestors came to the United States from Germany. His father's name was Frank Schafer. At one point early in his life he'd run away to see to join the navy and was in the navy including a spell in the Spanish-American War. Then when he returned from his time at sea he became a rigger in some steelworks in German tan Pennsylvania. Frank Schafer was a working man, a practical man. He had no academic or cultural or philosophical interests in his life. He was not a Christian. He passed on nothing to his son in the area of an interest in culture or human thought or philosophy or in Christianity. What he passed on was pride in good work, in hard work, the ability to make things with his hands and to design things and a tremendous sense of the dignity we might say of the working man. His mother was Bessie Williamson. Her father had died when she was 80 years old. She'd had a very hard childhood. She'd been part of a family of four children, then her mother and an elderly grandfather that made six of them. Without a man in the household, they had had a tremendously hard life. Through her childhood and teenage years she had worked with her mother taking in the laundry of neighbors. Her life was very hard. It made her very bitter in some ways and also gave her a very strong sense, perhaps because of the hardness of her life that you've got to look out for number one, you've got to look out for yourself if you're going to get anywhere in life at all. A tremendous insistence on her own rights, one might say, when we used to use modern jargon. Towards the end of her life, she became a Christian and became a greatly softened person. I knew her as grandmother Schaeffer when I first went to work in the Swiss Lebris in 1960. Seven I suppose it was. But these two Frank Schaeffer and Bessie Williamson were married and then on January the 30th 1912, France's August Schaeffer was born. He was an only child. His mother didn't want to have more than one child. She felt to have more than one would mean she would be a slave to her children, so one was quite enough. There's a rather funny incident which he just relates that he was born at night. They had to fetch a doctorate for the birth to their home. He was drunk. He managed to do the job of delivering France's Schaeffer fine, but he was drunk enough to forget to register the birth. And it was until 1947, when he applied for his first passport, that they discovered that his birth had never been registered. But again, just looking at this early part of his life, France's Schaeffer had no Christian upbringing. His family went to church, but it was not a Bible-believing church in any way, so he had no Christian upbringing either from the church they attended or from his home. And as I said before, there was no interest either in ideas in the home or in the arts or anything like that. His childhood in growing up at home was spent helping his father with painting, carpentry, and so on. At school, in his early years, apparently he discovered many, many years later, long after he was married. In fact, when they were preparing the bits of paper, which were put together into the tapestry, he discovered that he had tested out in his first school as the second most intelligent child in 20 years, but his parents never told him that. They weren't interested in encouraging him to study, to be interested in ideas in any way. Their design for him was to go into some kind of practical work like engineering. So when he went to junior high school, the courses he took were practical courses, not in preparation for college at all, but mechanical drawing, woodwork, metalwork, and things like that. He carried on helping his father all the way through high school laying floors, building garages, bricklaying, plumbing, all of those kinds of things. He wasn't very happy during all this though he didn't really know quite why. He said at that time that he inwardly dropped out. In those days, people didn't externally drop out of high school in the way they do now, but he dropped out inwardly and carried on mechanically with his schoolwork during the vacations and weekends. He had various jobs working in a fishmongers, hauling ice, working in a meat market, all kinds of jobs like that. He remembered very clearly his first exposure to classical music. He'd gone to some kind of electrical display and they had during this display put the display on to Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture and that creating in him is his beginning love for classical music which later on was to develop into something much fuller, but that was his first exposure to classical music. His first exposure to philosophy was accidental and this brings me to a section which we can entitle his conversion. He carried on going to church though the church wasn't teaching the Bible, but his Sunday school teacher had put him in contact with a white Russian cant and it was France's safest job to teach this man English and he didn't have any books that were helpful at all, so his Sunday school teacher suggested that he go to one of the big bookstores in downtown Philadelphia to get a beginner's English reading book. The bookstore gave him the wrong book and he came home with a book of Greek philosophy and that was he would have seen that. He saw that as one of the little points where God has his hand very much in our history that we may be completely unaware of it at the time. It was a book most unsuitable for teaching somebody beginning English but that was what the book store gave him. He'd never seen anything like it before but he started to read it and he loved it. He just loved and began to read more and more widely and as he began to read philosophy he had no classes, nothing like that at school. He began to see that philosophy was dealing with all sorts of basic questions about human life but he could see too that the philosophy he was reading had no answers to those questions at all. At the same time and I suppose he was 16 or 17 at this time he realized that what his church was teaching didn't give any answers either to the kind of questions that he and other people had about life and he decided at that point that Christianity should be discarded not that he'd been exposed to it but he didn't know that but he felt that to be honest he ought to start reading the Bible and he decided he was just 17 I think at the time he decided that he would read the Bible from beginning to end just like he was reading the other books that he was reading the books of philosophy in fact he started reading the Bible every night he'd read a bit and then he'd read a bit of all of it which was one of the books he was he was reading right then. Mrs. Schaefer says something fascinating about this she asked the question how did he read the Bible and she says this and this was something which was then to become something abiding throughout his ministry in terms of the way he approached scripture how did he read it who helped him to understand no one gave him any suggestions he wouldn't have known who to ask and in any case he had no idea there was any way to read it other than to read it in the same way as any other book he started at the beginning of Genesis and read to the end if you want to know why Fran had such a high regard for the Bible and feels it's adequate in answering the questions of life the answer is right here as a 17 year old boy with a thirst for the answer to life's questions he began to discover for himself the existence of adequate and complete answers right in the Bible he became a question simply by reading the Bible himself without any help from anyone else and he read it simply as it seemed to demand to be read just as it sat down there and right at that time as a 17 year old boy he saw that Genesis was answering questions about the very basic issues of life about who we are as human persons about the origin of evil about the origin of life that Genesis was answering basic questions that we have as human beings about life which he did not find were being answered in the philosophy that he was reading that he wasn't a trained philosopher he had no one to help in reading scripture but he saw the Bible answering those basic questions that he had and so he became a question just simply reading scripture by himself and he then began to grow as a Christian as he read the Bible more and more and as he began to see how exciting the answers the Bible gave were he read his philosophy less and less and he read the Bible more and more but at first he didn't know that there were other Christians that there was anyone else who thought that the Bible was true in this way he didn't hear it at church he didn't know that there were evangelical churches around that took the Bible seriously it wasn't until some later point that he discovered that there were other Christians so he was there simply reading Bible by himself beginning to pray beginning to try to be obedient to the Lord it reminds me of the story just incidentally of someone who came to stay with us at the English library this was years and years ago this was a girl whose now a member of the church where I've been a pastor for the last few years and she was a back time into drugs and a fairly kind of wild life and she was living with her at that time a boyfriend on one of the small islands in the channel islands in fact on the island of Sark and they were living in a deserted house where they were taking drugs together basically and just doing really nothing this was in the late 60s of that kind of period and in this house they discovered in a little niche in the wall a copy of daily light and just the fun that two of them started reading it every morning and evening because it said it was to be read in the morning and evening it was their first exposure to Christianity now they didn't have a Bible they just had daily light and they became Christians together just simply reading this they didn't have anybody to explain it to them they simply read it and I believed it they thought it was true and so when they they saw as they read along that Christians should be part of church so one Sunday they went to try to find a little church on the island where they were and the church they found was a tiny little pent-costal church which was basically just a handful of older people mostly older women and these older ladies had been praying for some time that God would bring somebody to them who they could help Sark is quite a small island but not a large number of inhabitants and so this young couple turned up and very wild and counterculture as you can imagine in their appearance but these old ladies just welcomed them with with open arms and began to help them to see that there were other people who were Christians as well now in a way their experience was rather rather similar to the kind of experience that Shaffer had simply becoming a Christian by himself I've met quite a few other people like this I have a friend who had in California who I saw just this last summer who became a Christian by himself also just after he finished high school his parents were divorced and there was a family Bible which nobody had ever read and he started reading the New Testament and by the time he got halfway through the book of Acts he became a Christian and again he had no contact with anybody else and as he went along reading the New Testament he saw the Christians ought to try to serve God so he said well I ought to do something useful and he went to Africa with a Peace Corps because that seemed to be something useful to do and that's how I met him some years later when after his time in Africa in the Peace Corps he came to stay at the English Tribune in 1971 but these are just illustrations of how God's Word is so powerful because it's true but if we read it honestly and seriously the Holy Spirit is able to use it to really touch people's hearts and lives and bring them to himself now the next turning point in Francis Schaffer's life came a few months later shortly after he graduated from high school he graduated in 1930 and he was still expecting to carry on with his father's design which was to study engineering at the Drexel Institute and in fact that's what he registered to do and started doing that for but on August the 19th 1930 another major turning point in his life took place he was walking down a street in Germantown feeling lonely and depressed I'd heard him tell this story many times as well as it's being recorded here in the tapestry he hadn't found anyone else up to this point who really cared about the Bible in the way that he did and as he was and he felt depressed because he really didn't want to go into engineering he was beginning to feel the longing to do something different not that he despised engineering or his father's kind of background at all but he began to feel longing to do some other things but as he was going along he heard a piano playing and some hymns being sung and there on the corner of the street was a tent meeting so he went in and there was an Italian American evangelist preaching the gospel very powerfully and very simply and this had a tremendous effect upon Schaffer because he thought there are other people who who believe the Bible like I do here is this man preaching the gospel that he believed in fact the evangelist was Anthony Zeoli many years later his son Billy was involved with Schaffer in making his first film but he said at this point in his life at the end the the evangelist Anthony Zeoli gave an invitation and he walked forward and the evangelist said to him are you committing your life to Christ or are you becoming a Christian or are you wanting to dedicate yourself more and he didn't understand the language he'd ever heard the kind of language before that was that was used so he wasn't really quite sure what to say but he came home and he said about it he wrote in his own diary I decided that I was going to give my life to Christ unconditionally but that is what I ought to do and he was just overjoyed to know that there were other Christians out there and after that first evening he went back to those tent meetings every day just so delighted to have spined someone who was preaching the same gospel that he believed his next year was a year of tremendous struggle he started studying engineering at the Drexel Institute but he had a longing to study for the ministry his problem was that his parents were totally opposed to this his father thought that ministers were drones and parasites just idle good for nothing his parents didn't want him to go to college they wanted him to carry on doing the same kinds of things his father had done but in his heart there was a growing and passionate desire to become a minister of the gospel and those next months there were very very difficult for him around Christmas he decided to become a minister that he had to start training for the gospel ministry and that meant he would have to go to college and so in January the 30th 1931 he went back to high school went to evening school to start preparing to go to college because he hadn't taken the kind of classes in college in school which would prepare him for college at all so he took evening classes in Latin and German to prepare himself for going to Hampton Sydney College in Virginia which was where he eventually went but his preparations were basically ignored at home and frowned upon