Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith are remembered for their ministry L'Abri (French for ‘shelter’) Fellowship, in Huemoz zur Allon, Switzerland. They made their home in Champery, Switzerland, and established the center, which became an international spiritual retreat for thousands of travelers.
On January 30, 1912, Francis August Schaeffer IV was born in Germantown, PA, to Bessie (Williamson) and Francis (Frank) August Schaeffer III. They raised their only son in a Christian home, but he chose to be an agnostic during his youth. In 1930, in his senior year of high school, he converted to Christianity during a tent meeting of Anthony Zeoli.
Schaeffer intended to become a mechanical engineer, but instead enrolled at Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia, as a ministerial student. He was awarded the Algernon Sydney medallion for outstanding Christian student in 1935.
He met Edith Rachel Merritt Seville in college, and they married on July 6, 1935. Schaeffer began his seminary studies as the first student to enroll in the newly-formed Faith Seminary. He graduated in June, 1938, the same month their first daughter, Janet Priscilla, was born.
Schaeffer served pastorates at Bible Presbyterian Church and then Covenant Presbyterian Church in Grove City, PA, where their second daughter, Susan, was born on May 28, 1941. He pastored at the Bible Presbyterian Church, Chester, PA, and Bible Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, Missouri, where Deborah, their third daughter, was born on May 3, 1945.
In the summer of 1947, Schaeffer traveled to Europe to represent the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. He was to check on the state of the war-affected churches.
The Schaeffer family decided to leave his St. Louis church to make their home in Champery, Switzerland. Their fourth child and only son, Franky (Francis August Schaeffer V), was born August 3, 1952.
Schaeffer was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree and returned to America to receive it in May, 1954. During that time, Schaeffer and the Independent Board severed ties.
In 1955 Schaffer returned to Switzerland to purchase a chalet for his shelter home, L’Abri. During the late 60s and early 70s when people questioned whether God was dead or alive, he taught and showed through his life that God is alive and is not silent. He placed a high value on a person’s creativity as an expression of God’s image. Many travelers visited his Swiss home. Additional L'Abri-type centers were formed in Greatham, England; Eck en Weil, the Netherlands; Southborough, Massachusetts; and Rochester, Minnesota.
From there, Schaeffer lectured and wrote books. He became known internationally known as a defender of Biblical infallibility and authority. He wrote 23 books, translated into 21 languages. Some are The Great Evangelical Disaster, The God Who Is There, True Spirituality, and A Christian Manifesto.
An online Francis A. Schaeffer site wrote, “Perhaps no other Christian thinker of the 20th century, besides C.S. Lewis, has had more influence on people.” President Ronald Reagan said of Schaeffer, “His life touched millions of souls and brought them to the truth of their Creator.”
Schaeffer died of cancer on May 15, 1984, in Rochester, Minnesota.
Below is an excerpt from Pollution and the Death of Man:
“. . . the hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too . . . More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture—modern, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class—is poor in its sensitivity to nature. . . As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man’s concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side.” –Francis A. Schaeffer.
"Redeemed"