Every once in a while do you think, “I wonder what ever happened to...”? I have wondered this about the Schaeffers, and so when this book came into my hands I thought, I must read this. Subtitled, “How I grew up as one of the elect, helped found the religious right, and lived to take all (or almost all) of it back,” I suspected the worst.

The book recounts Frank’s (the only Schaeffer son) upbringing at L’Abri, and is a good illustration of how children can fare in the pressure-pot of an intense ministry. Frank’s upbringing was in the hands of his sisters and members of L’Abri as his parents’ ministry grew in fame and they spent time away on world trips. 

He often ran wild, attracted to the more unusual characters one often encounters in Christian circles, struggling with the pressure of being one of the Schaeffers and also a teenage boy. He ended up with an interest in film-making and convinced his father to allow him to make a film series of his addresses. These become the well-known series Whatever Happened to the Human Race and How Should We Then Live. These become a great success in the United States.

But Frank became disillusioned with this movement and eventually broke his links with it, joining the Greek Orthodox Church. 

He writes, “When I left evangelicalism, it certainly wasn’t because I was disillusioned with the faith of my early childhood. I have sweet (if somewhat nutty) memories of my early days of prayer, fasting, and ‘wrestling with principalities and powers.’ We might have been deluded, but we weren’t unhappy, And there are a lot worse things than parents who keep you away from TV, grasping materialism, and hype, and let you run free and use your own imagination.” 

The book exposes the human frailties of many of the people that God uses, and reminds us that God often uses “cracked pots” to achieve his goals.

By Frank Schaeffer
Avalon, Cambridge, 2007
ISBN 978-0-7867-1891-7

– David McLeod-Jones