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Edith Schaeffer

A Wonderful Paradox

(1914–2013)

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She stuffed three of her father’s books and a couple of other heavy objects into the pillowcase, slung the sack over her shoulder, and trudged up the stairs. At the top, she bowed solemnly before an imaginary cross and then, with great drama, flung the pillowcase out of her hands and watched it tumble with a ruckus down the stairs, where it landed in a heap at the bottom. The burden of sin had been rolled off! The two sisters cheered triumphantly before clomping down the stairs to reenact their favorite game, which they called “playing Pilgrim’s Progress.” Except to Edith Rachel Seville, playing Pilgrim’s Progress wasn’t a game. Even as a young child she longed for a real “Pilgrim’s Progress moment”—an event she could point to with conviction as the moment of her transformation. “I wanted a before-and-after story,” she later admitted in her autobiography.1 The problem was, Edith couldn’t remember a time when she had not believed the truth of the Bible. For as long as she could recall, she had always believed in, trusted, and loved her God.

Born to Be a Missionary

Edith Seville was born the fourth child of missionaries in Wenzhou, China. As a young girl she often “played church” with her Chinese playmates, which, like her reenactment of Pilgrim’s Progress, she considered much more than a game. Edith felt responsible for conveying the gospel truth, and she carried out her mission with determination, insisting that her young friends pray with her and listen to her sermons. Still, she was aware of the challenges that lay before her. As she walked through town with her nursemaid, they often passed a pagoda along the Wenzhou city wall where the Chinese disposed of their newborn baby girls. The whimpers of the starving infants only fueled Edith’s passion to evangelize. She was convinced that once the Chinese people knew Jesus, they would no longer throw away their baby daughters.

The Seville family returned to America for what they expected to be a yearlong furlough in 1919, but they were forced to stay when Edith’s mother failed the medical examination that was required for their return to China. The family settled in Newburgh, New York, after her father accepted the call as pastor of the Westminster Independent Presbyterian Church. Although Edith was still convicted of the gospel truth, she worried that her attraction to fine clothing and the latest fashions made her too worldly. She felt that she didn’t “measure up” as a “spiritual Christian,” and she secretly wondered if the fact that she lacked a definitive and dramatic conversion moment indicated that she was somehow less than worthy or unworthy.

In the midst of this uncertain period, Edith attended a lecture by a leader in the Unitarian Church whose topic was entitled, “How I Know That Jesus Is Not the Son of God, and How I Know the Bible Is Not the Word of God.” The more the man preached, the angrier Edith got, until finally she sat on the edge of the pew, poised to jump to her feet the moment the man finished. Just as she opened her mouth to launch into her argument, Edith heard a quiet voice from the other side of the church. A young man had risen to his feet, not to argue with the Unitarian preacher, but simply to state his own faith. “That,” Edith’s friend whispered into her ear, “is Fran Schaeffer.”

The two dated for six months until, on New Year’s Eve 1932, Fran broke up with Edith. “He had decided he was growing too fond of me, and that we’d better break up the relationship because probably the Lord wanted him to go where no woman could follow,” wrote Edith years later. She added parenthetically, “I’m not sure just what he visualized that place to be like, nor where it might be; and nor does he!”2 Two hours later, Fran called back. He was miserable; he couldn’t live without her. The two were married three years later, a few weeks after Francis’s college graduation.

Trusting through Fog

Not long after they were married, Francis entered the seminary, and when he stood on the platform to accept his diploma, Edith prayed the words she would pray throughout her entire life: “Please, Lord, give Fran a tongue of fire to preach your Word. Never let the fire cool off.”3 She considered praying for her husband while he preached to be her primary responsibility, and she prayed that his message would touch not only others but himself. “It was very, very possible and practical for me to continue no matter what, even if we had just had a ‘fight’ of some sort before he spoke . . . very possible and practical for me to ‘sit under the word of God’ really forgetting anything personal, to listen to what was coming forth, and to be thankful Fran was ‘hearing this,’ as well as to ‘hear it’ myself,” she wrote in her autobiography The Tapestry.4

That said, as her son-in-law Udo Middelmann noted in his eulogy, Edith was “in no way . . . the typical pastor’s or missionary wife.” She supported her husband through three years of seminary by working as a seamstress, tailoring men’s suits, sewing ball gowns and wedding dresses, and fashioning cowhide belts that were sold in high-end New York City boutiques. She also, as Middelmann noted, “turned her active mind to work with her husband . . . teaching seminary wives to think and to question, to create and make of life something of integrity, as her husband so wanted her to do.”5

In 1948, when the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions sent Francis, Edith, and their two young children to Europe, they never anticipated that a six-month trip would turn into the rest of their lives. Edith described that time as living in a fog, yet they persevered in trying to determine God’s will. “I am impressed by the constantly repeated opportunity in life to trust the Lord in a fog,” Edith wrote, “or to go from a secure place in what seems a sunny garden into a fog-covered path leading to the unknown!”6

Perseverance and trust continued to play key roles in the Schaeffers’ missionary work overseas. When Edith and Francis were accused of exerting too much religious influence and were asked by the Swiss government to leave their post in Champéry, Switzerland, they did not forfeit their mission. While Edith struggled to reconcile this staggering blow with her understanding of God’s will, she was also more determined than ever to trust God. “Rather than trying to get human help, we could simply ask God to help us,” she suggested to her family at the time. “We have been saying that we want to have a greater reality of the supernatural power of God in our lives and in our work. It seems to me we are being given an opportunity right now to demonstrate God’s power.”7 Edith, Francis, and their children (they had four now: Priscilla, Susan, Deborah, and Frank, who was two) knelt on the floor and prayed for guidance and direction. Two months later, an available chalet was found in the Alpine village of Huemoz, Switzerland. The Schaeffers made the down payment, and L’Abri was born.

A Spiritual Shelter

Francis and Edith founded L’Abri, which is the French word for “shelter,” as a safe, comfortable place where questions could be asked and answers might be found. They saw their home as a spiritual shelter where people could come for help. Today the L’Abri International Fellowship is comprised of multiple branches in eleven countries serving thousands of visitors each year. But back in May of 1955, L’Abri began with one questioning college student, a friend of the Schaeffers’ oldest daughter, Priscilla.

When Priscilla telephoned her mother to ask if her friend, a young cosmopolitan girl brimming with questions about faith, spirituality, and life, could visit for the weekend, Edith hesitated. They’d been in the chalet only one month. The hot-water boiler was broken, the furnace wasn’t working, and the wood stoves smoked terribly. “In other words,” Edith admitted, “I felt things were too ‘messy’ to have a society girl who had been described as beautiful and impeccably dressed. Pride nearly brought a negative answer. Then—compassion and the realization that there might not be another weekend made me say, ‘Of course, just explain our circumstances.’”8

That weekend, questions were discussed into the late hours of the evening as the family and a few college-age guests roasted hot dogs around the fire and read from the Bible by the light of an oil lantern. “Did we have a sense of having ‘arrived’? No, a million times no,” Edith said. In fact, according to her, she and Francis never felt like they had achieved their mission. They always lived moment to moment, “having things to be thankful for, things to rejoice about with excitement, things to regret and ask forgiveness for.”9

L’Abri was conceived as an open Christian community where visitors, Christian and non-Christian, could stay as long as they wished, attend Francis’s lectures—many of which were the basis for his subsequent books—and discuss life’s ultimate questions with fellow seekers. There was only one rule: conversation should revolve around ideas rather than organizations or people. Discussion was not categorized by subject matter or discipline, so conversation meandered over many topics, including art, music, literature, science, philosophy, medicine, law, current events, and religions.

Word of L’Abri spread slowly, but by the 1960s guests numbered more than one hundred at a time. Edith was known for her Sunday afternoon high tea and for maintaining a seamless five-star-hotel level of comfort for their guests, but graceful hospitality was not her only claim to fame. In addition to her work at L’Abri, she also published seventeen books between 1969 and 2000, including her autobiography The Tapestry, as well as What Is a Family? and The Hidden Art of Homemaking, which have been influential in the Christian patriarchy and biblical womanhood movements.

In an essay published in the Huffington Post the day his mother died, Frank Schaeffer described Edith as “a wonderful paradox . . . an evangelical conservative fundamentalist who treated people as if she was an all-forgiving progressive liberal of the most tolerant variety.”10 Barry Hankins, professor of religion and history at Baylor University and author of the biography Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America, described Edith similarly. “On one hand, she held a very traditional, biblical view about women’s subservient role,” Hankins said in Edith Schaeffer’s New York Times obituary. “On the other . . . she embodied marriage equality. She would never use the term, of course, but in some ways she was the model of a sort of evangelical feminism.”11

Edith Schaeffer made a tremendous contribution to Christian history as both an author and a founding partner of the L’Abri International Fellowship. Her perseverance amid hardship, her unwavering trust in God, and her personal faith leave the most lasting and inspiring impression. She was the first to admit that she and her husband never planned anything like L’Abri. Nor did they ever expect to write three dozen books between them or minister to thousands around the globe. She always claimed they took only one step at a time, asking God each step of the way for honesty and sincerity in desiring his will. Living one moment at a time, trusting God’s will, and persevering to the best of her ability were the basic tenets of Edith Schaeffer’s faith. She offered these guideposts, these spiritual stepping-stones, to the thousands who read her words and crossed the threshold of her Swiss chalet. And she continues to offer them to us as well.