Greg & Mary Jane Grooms: Time to think

Congratulations to all the college students graduating in May, but here’s a question: Have you spent four years (or six) piling up credits but not dealing with hard questions of life’s purpose?

Many graduates-to-be acknowledge that, and that’s one reason Christian study centers are springing up across the United States. I interviewed recently Greg and Mary Jane Grooms, the couple who run one such center, Hill House, which is adjacent to The University of Texas at Austin.

Greg, you grew up Baptist in Alabama, studied biochemistry at Tulane, and in 1978 headed off for six months in Europe. Why did you visit Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri? I was in Germany and met a couple of young women who were attractive and spoke English. They were going to this place called L’Abri. They made it sound really interesting and gave me directions.

How did they make it sound interesting—and did they say it was a Christian place? They said weird people there talk about a lot of things, but they’ll let you sleep in a bed and feed you three times a day. That part was really, really attractive to me. The Christian part had very little to do with why I went.

Why did you stay more than a few days? My first impression: These people are weird and I need to get out. Then I discovered a lot of people there like me. Our questions were encouraged, and they didn’t try to cram easy answers down my throat. I very quickly realized my need to stay there for a while. For three or four years I had struggled with a sense that God is absent, but I now saw He had been patient and gracious with me, bringing me to where I needed to be to deal with what I needed to deal with.

‘All too often the students who come into Hill House don’t come with questions. Even when they become convinced they need to be asking key questions, they have less of an understanding of what a good answer to those questions would be, and how they would recognize it if they saw it.’

Mary Jane, you grew up in Alberta, Canada, with a different kind of family background. Conservative Catholic home. My parents were both lawyers, and I’m one of nine children. Dinner every night was around the table with my parents at either end. My dad and mom believed in talking about what was going on in the world and analyzing it, and my father’s burden in particular was to make sure we learned how to think critically. So I entered the University of Alberta looking for the meaning of life.

What did you find? One class was in environmental biology. I remember very clearly looking at drops of pond water under the microscope and having the professor tell us about intricate biological systems. After a few months I thought, there is no way this is by chance. It was pretty sassy of me, I realize, but I ditched evolution. I decided there is too much order here.

And did you get any blowback from professors? Not in that class. My philosophy class had only six students, and we would read a portion of Plato or Aristotle and demonstrate through our writing that we had read it. My purpose was to look for truth, so I would critique what I was reading. The professor, a Catholic priest, said he’d give me a failing grade because my job was to demonstrate that I had read the material. I told him, “Father Fuerth, I’m not here for the grade. I’m here to learn.” He did give me a failing grade, but 20 years later he sought me out and said, “They call me the renegade priest. … I started reading Francis Schaeffer, and it has transformed my thinking.”

How did you go to L’Abri? I didn’t grow up reading the Bible at all. In February of my freshman year I was in an existential mess and pretty much stopped going to classes. I was sitting in the student union building, just miserable. Two Campus Crusade girls sat down beside me and read me the Four Spiritual Laws. I realized I needed special revelation. I went to the Christian bookstore in town and started buying books and reading them. Schaeffer books were the only ones that made sense to me. He didn’t talk in Christianese. In 1976 I went to L’Abri and stayed four years.

You didn’t go back to college, but became an assistant to Edith Schaeffer? That was my education. It was fantastic.

Greg, let’s jump from there to Hill House, which is not a haven for travelers like L’Abri but otherwise seems Schaeffer-like. We want to emphasize the same kind of things that the Schaeffers did. The questions are good things, and pursuing questions in faith before the Lord is the way we actually grow in wisdom. And as they learn to trust you and learn that you’ve actually got something they can learn, I find them more than willing to take advantage of the opportunity.

It’s an information center, but it also seems like Mary Jane’s family table. We try to provide gracious warmth and hospitality. This was a central part of what happened at L’Abri. If it merely meant Francis Schaeffer writing books and giving lectures, it wouldn’t have been nearly so effective as it was in the Schaeffers and their friends opening their homes and making you part of the family and encouraged to deal with these questions that were really frightening to deal with.

Mary Jane, hospitality with real china rather than paper plates? Well, yes. I don’t use disposal anything. It’s a subversive message that I am trying to send. This generation comes from a time when their parents’ marriages are disposable. So many of them come from a divorced background. Their siblings are disposable. My son dated a girl whose parents told her, “We aborted the one before you, and we could have aborted you.” Just everything is disposable. Nobody invests time. Nobody takes time on the front end. Nobody takes time on the back end to wash the dishes.

You emphasize continuity? You are going to eat off these dishes. You are going to sit at this table over and over again. We are not part of the fast food culture, shall we say. The other thing I want to add is, our son when he was in second grade said to me, “Mommy, I don’t like school.” I said, “Why?” He said, “They don’t give you any time to think.” That’s a gift that L’Abri gave us. Time to think. We cultivate that at Hill House as well.

Greg, what kinds of questions do students ask? All too often the students who come into Hill House don’t come with questions. Even when they become convinced they need to be asking key questions, they have less of an understanding of what a good answer to those questions would be, and how they would recognize it if they saw it. When they do embrace certain answers, they have less of an ability to think of what the practical consequences should be.

Postmodernism has consequences? They’re trained not to believe that Truth exists and that ideas really do have consequences. That makes this work more difficult in some ways than what we used to do at L’Abri.