Though he died more than 20 years ago, Francis Schaeffer is still having a big influence for Christ’s kingdom on earth.

Several hundred beneficiaries of his life and ministry came to the America’s Center in St. Louis in mid-March to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the start of L’Abri. L’Abri, or shelter, was the home-based ministry that Francis and Edith Schaeffer started in Switzerland in 1955.

The ministry attracted disillusioned young people looking for answers to life’s big questions in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Schaeffers and their children opened their home to visitors, trusting the Lord to open doors of evangelism and provide the finances for the family.

Mrs. Schaeffer, who now lives in Switzerland, provided the hospitality in this ministry, later writing in several books about trusting God for His provision. Dr. Schaeffer offered answers from the Bible to what he called the basic philosophical questions, also writing several books published by InterVarsity Press in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Many young people either came to Christ or found new hope in their faith through visits to L’Abri, from a man who had himself found Christ by reading the Bible in his search for answers to life’s questions. Dr. Schaeffer had read plenty of philosophy texts in his teen years, but none of them seemed to answer his questions with satisfaction. However, when his open-mindedness led him to the Bible, he found the answers. Later, he summed up his conversion in one of his books, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, this way: “The strength of the Christian system—the acid test of it—is that everything fits under the apex of the existent, infinite-personal God, and it is the only system in the world where this is true. No other system has an apex under which everything fits. That is why I am a Christian and no longer an agnostic.”

After many years of personal ministry and some book writing, Dr. Schaeffer produced a couple of film series, with his son Franky, starting with How Should We Then Live? in 1976. The series still stands as a very useful review of Western history and offered a Christian alternative to Kenneth Clark’s Civilization series, with its more humanist leanings from earlier in that decade.

Then came the 1979 book and film series, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Dr. Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop toured the United States, showing the films and pleading with audiences to see the humanity of babies in the womb as well as the dignity of the elderly who would face pressures leading toward euthanasia. This gave rise to the evangelical pro-life movement, complementing what already had been a strong Roman Catholic protest against the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision striking down protection for unborn children in state laws.

The impact of those books and films will only be known in heaven. But a remarkable number of evangelical pro-lifers attribute their awakening on the issue to reading the book or seeing the films.

Those bold forays into the marketplace of ideas attracted both attention and controversy. Dr. Schaeffer became popularly known as an evangelical or fundamentalist intellectual—a guy who had answers and helped overcome the image of Bible-believing Christians as ignorant and uneducated. Here was a man, after all, who could match wits with Harvard professors—with personal kindness and compassion. He provided an interesting complement to the rise of the Religious Right and organizations such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. He also provided an intellectual foundation for key evangelicals who became influential in their callings in the marketplace of ideas, including Charles Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship; newspaper columnist Cal Thomas; and then U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp, who was a Cabinet member under the first President George Bush and who later ran for president.

Some observers noticed that Dr. Schaeffer didn’t smile very much. That was understandable. He was intensely concerned about the decline and fall of Western civilization and couldn’t see many other Bible-believing Christians joining him in active concern.

Occasionally he attracted criticism for his writing, and some of the criticisms seemed motivated by jealousy because of the attention he was getting. Schol- ars could quarrel with the details of his writings, but they recognized the impact of his work. Dr. Schaeffer received an interesting tribute from Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen in 1977. Bishop Sheen was a prominent spokesman for the church, as a newspaper columnist and television show host. In an interview with Christianity Today, Sheen said: “Francis Schaeffer is taking that approach and doing it extremely well. His summary of philosophical doctrines is one of the best that I have ever read, and I taught philosophy in graduate school for 25 years. The world gravely needs philosophy to set up norms outside the self as a watch needs a norm outside itself.”

Dr. Schaeffer died of cancer in 1984, but he left a very useful body of written works that are still in print. As much as any one person, humanly speaking, he helped Christians understand the importance of worldview in thinking about evangelism and understanding how people could have such different presuppositions or assumptions about life. Today there are worldview conferences all over the place, seminars, camps and institutes, including a number designed for young people. Before Dr. Schaeffer, though, the term “worldview” was hardly a part of the evangelical vocabulary.

Dr. Roy Blackwood, senior pastor of Second RPC in Indianapolis, Ind., sees Dr. Schaeffer’s life and work as an example of the doctrine of Christ’s kingdom, or what Dr. Schaeffer called the Lordship of Christ over all areas of life. “It was the unlimitedness of Christ’s kingdom that got hold of him and stretched his vision out into history and into the entire world,” said Dr. Blackwood. “He is a demonstration of the unlimitedness of Christ’s kingdom. That, coupled with his love for people, which we saw when we were at L’Abri, was a remarkable thing.”

What the L’Abri conference in St. Louis revealed was another side of Dr. Schaeffer’s ministry. It might be called discipleship or mentoring, but he used no particular systematic approach. He did not have an interest in developing the kind of systematic methods of evangelism or discipleship that ministries such as Campus Crusade for Christ or the Navigators had developed to help so many people. He listened to people and responded on an individual basis. He was reluctant to talk about his Bible reading practices for fear that other Christians would follow him too closely and miss the need to look to the Lord in their disciplines and habits. Yet, he inspired a generation of very talented Christians in a number of fields, and a number of them led workshops and seminars at the St. Louis seminar. The L’Abri ministry also multiplied in the spirit of 2 Timothy 2:2, and other ministries developed around the world, including in England, Holland, the U.S., Sweden, and Australia.

For the anniversary in St. Louis, Gene Veith spoke about art and culture, subjects he writes about for World magazine. Naturally he also wrote about the anniversary event for World. Hollywood screenwriter Brian Godowa addressed film. Steve Garber (who has an RP background) explained a new ministry he is developing in Washington, D.C., the Evermay Project, an effort to bring people together for quiet conversations about pressing political and social issues, in a style reminiscent of L’Abri. “What was it about L’Abri that made it so special?” Garber asked in reflecting on the Schaeffers’ contribution. “They took truth seriously. And they took people seriously.”

Those speakers were just a few, representing the many who benefited from the Schaeffers’ work and went on to work out implications of biblical thinking in many areas of life. Plenty of these people would likely resist being called disciples of Francis Schaeffer, unless perhaps they could define the terminology. But from him they caught a vision of a mind dedicated to Christ’s Lordship over all areas of life and learned to look to the Bible for answers to the questions of art, music, philosophy, science, journalism, politics, and literature.

Others came to the conference with a sense of gratitude to Dr. Schaeffer for his writings, which helped open their ideas to a Christian faith that was much stronger than they had originally realized. Dave Neel, for example, is a deacon at Second RPC and a chemist at Eli Lilly and Co. “Francis Schaeffer has had more infl uence in my Christian life than any other single individual,” he said after the conference. “Rather than giving in to the license of the secular culture, or reacting with the backlash of a world-denying Christianity, Schaeffer pointed me to a third way: learning to be in the world, but not of the world.”

Others have taken the vision of Lordship and are finding ways to pass it on to a younger generation. David Quine, for example, offers a three-volume review of worldview of the Western world for high school students, with a clear debt to Dr. Schaeffer’s way of thinking. A few high school students from Second RPC attended the anniversary celebration and have been part of a worldview class using David Quine’s curriculum. They were born a few years after Dr. Schaeffer died in 1984. But they will be indebted to him for helping them learn how to apply 1 Chronicles 12:32 in response to modern and postmodern thinking. “And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.”

Russ is associate editor for the Indianapolis Star and contributing editor for the Reformed Presbyterian Witness. He is a ruling elder in the Second (Indianapolis, Ind.) RPC.