A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers: The Work of L'Abri Fellowship
Brief Lil’ Update
Hey friends! I’m sure you’ve seen my nonstop posting about it already, but Debbie and I are currently running a Kickstarter for our documentary called A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers—and we’ve just hit 50% funded with 9 days to go until our deadline of December 1st! If you haven’t pledged yet—or you’d consider raising your pledge—now is a wonderful time to think about it.
Jake Meador from Mere Orthodoxy asked me yesterday to write an essay for his website about the work of L’Abri, hoping to get it out before Thanksgiving. Turns out, it’s easy to write about a place that you love. If you still don’t understand why I’m always talking about L’Abri, this piece might be helpful.
Excerpt from Essay on Mere Orthodoxy
“This is God’s work. It grew like a tree, and in God’s own time it will die. The shelter didn’t begin as an institution; it began as a family. And by the grace of God, it’s a family still. There are flowers on the table; they call you by your name. There is a fullness of humanity there in a fallen world.”
This quote, lifted from the introduction to Sylvester Jacobs’ photography book called A Portrait of A Shelter, has often lingered with me as a fond and esoteric way of explaining the ministry of L’Abri Fellowship—a place that is known by many as both powerfully transformative and notoriously difficult to explain.
Is it a study center? Perhaps, but that sounds a little too academic. A retreat? Sure, but that comes across too leisurely. A conference? A church camp? A commune? Decidedly none of those. The term “monastery hostel” has always been my favorite in casual conversation, but L’Abri is admittedly neither monastery nor hostel. A former L’Abri worker named Wade Bradshaw once said, “any explanation of L’Abri brief enough to keep the interest of the questioner is going to leave them with misconceptions.”
Perhaps the simplest description is this: in French, L’Abri means “The Shelter.”
L’Abri Fellowship was founded in 1955 by the American theologian Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith in the Swiss Alps. It all began with Francis and Edith opening their chalet home to strangers with deep questions about life, allowing their hospitality to create a space for people to be honest and vulnerable. Francis, especially, was driven by the belief in “true truth”—the idea that if the claims of Christianity are indeed based in reality, they can (and should) be questioned and examined without fear of them falling apart. Schaeffer’s work resonated deeply with young people (many of them hippies and agnostics) who were still reeling from the evils of World War II and harboring profound existential and theological questions about God, meaning, goodness, and the universe.
The Schaeffers did not intend to start a community, but their hospitality and openness to the Holy Spirit’s work within every person who showed up on their doorstep created one anyway. Eventually, the work, hospitality, and ideas of L’Abri outgrew their home. Since the 1950s, L’Abri has slowly and prayerfully expanded to other branches around the world, with the largest in England and others in the USA, Brazil, The Netherlands, Korea, and Canada.
L’Abri did not start with an inherent goal of expansion or growth, though—and it doesn’t have one today, either. A worker at English L’Abri once recalled to me that when quizzed about the “five year growth plan for his organization,” he simply told the questioner that “our only growth plan is that we hope everyone who comes here will grow.”
But what is L’Abri? That question might be part of why my wife Debbie and I decided to make a feature documentary about it instead of using our feeble words. The two of us first met each other at English L’Abri, and last summer we spent 3 months shooting a feature film about the English branch. Now, we’re raising the final funds for finishing and release on Kickstarter through December 1st.
I’ve found that in the absence of an image or a feature film, metaphors usually help people to understand the work of L’Abri better than an objective description. The way Tolkien describes Rivendell in The Lord of The Rings remains the closest I’ve ever heard: “Frodo was now safe in the Last Homely House east of the sea. It was a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or storytelling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness.”
In the real world, English L’Abri is located in a 16th-century manor house in Hampshire, and students of all ages, backgrounds, and nationalities come to stay during three-month windows—some for a day, some for a weekend, others for the entire term. A small community of full-time workers and their families live in the various flats and small houses on the property, helping to take care of the manor, prepare meals, and aid students in processing their questions. An ordinary day at any L’Abri branch today usually includes three hours of work, three hours of free study, as well as regular tea breaks, an often-lively lunch discussion, and something like a lecture or a film/game night in the evening. English L’Abri probably has the highest percentage of long walks to the pub, too.
A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers, the film that my wife and I shot last year, is a feature documentary chronicling one summer at English L'Abri. The film follows a group of students from around the world as they look for belonging, wrestle with doubts and uncertainty, and grapple with finding spirituality and community in their ordinary lives back home.
If you’ve never heard of L’Abri before now, it may be because they deliberately avoid advertising themselves; in fact, when the staff of the English branch agreed to allow us to make a documentary, they did it under the condition that it would not be a commercial trying to get people to attend. One of the core ideas of L’Abri, since the time of Francis and Edith, has always been wholehearted dependence on prayer. L’Abri workers believe that this intentional vulnerability (through lack of fundraising) goes toward demonstrating the reality of the supernatural. If the students, workers, or funds cease to continue at a particular branch, it is believed that the branch may not be needed anymore. Because of this prayerful dependence, life at L’Abri often feels like a miracle, and the workers treat students with a sense of welcome that suggests that their very presence is an answered prayer. One student we interviewed last summer described it by saying, “if it’s true that God brings people to L’Abri, then that means that many of the conversations are so easy because they’re God-ordained conversations.”