Sep
07
2012
It doesn’t matter to us
“I want to tell you it can work. In L’Abri – let me keep saying, it’s far from perfect – what do we find? Many young people from evangelical circles come every year. . . . What do they do? They try us out. They come to church in their bluejeans. They see if they are going to be accepted. The next Sunday they come in bare feet. And we have to pass the test. When we pass the test we can begin to talk, but we have to pass the test. This is community. This is compassion. This is the area where we have to have freedom.
Is there any absolute reason to wear shoes, either to class or to church? I can’t find it in the norms of the New Testament. Many a time our little chapel is jammed, and these students come and there they sit. . . . They sit with their bare feet, they sit in their bluejeans, and they sit in their weird clothes, and they learn that it doesn’t matter to us. . . .
Even when the church is a little bit of what it should be, the young people will come. They will come in their own way, they will come from the ends of the earth, when the church is in some poor fashion that which God meant it to be.”
Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (Downers Grove, 1970), pages 106-107.