Pastor frank schaeffer biography of william

Comparing them to him, Dad worked on the edge of his bed in an old rocking chair with a tea tray. The first time I ever flew first class in my life was when we were out on the road and millionaires like Richard DeVos of Amway were footing the bill for our films. Dad and I were embarrassed by that sort of thing. I never learned to love the Evangelical American God.

The God my parents served was a much more humble being. It was about my dad working in his bedroom, the fluke of his books becoming best sellers, and the documentaries I produced, directed, and distributed raising millions of dollars. It was only during the last seven or eight years of his life that everything took a political spin.

I think there are huge chunks of mythology in it. I think my dad would slit his wrists if he came back and found that I was a new Ralph Reed, for instance, leading something like the National Prayer Breakfast with Donald Trump and trying to dress him up and make him look presentable. Charles Mills interviewed Frank Schaeffer as part of the programming for the Liberty magazine weekly radio program called Life Quest Libertyusually featuring Liberty editor Lincoln Steed.

Charles writes from Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Charles Mills, a media producer, is the host of "LifeQuest Liberty" radio program. He writes from Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Getting your Trinity Audio player ready Schaeffer was convinced that there was a pronounced danger that fringe groups in America could be goaded into pursuing violence.

How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? Barry GoldwaterWilliam F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan defined the modern conservatism that used to be what the Republican Party I belonged to was about. Today no actual conservative can be a Republican. Reagan would despise today's wholly negative Republican Party. In an interview on October 23,Schaeffer said his and his father's Francis position on abortion was co-opted by people looking for an issue that could shift political power within America.

InSchaeffer criticized the Republican Party's opposition to abortion rightssomething which received criticism from Rod Dreher and other conservative Christians. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. American author and film director.

For the Dutch cinematographer and producer, see Frank Scheffer. For the Methodist minister, see Frank Schaefer minister. Schaeffer Jr. This was a constant theme in his writings, especially in his The Mark of the Christian and True Spirituality He insisted that we not only defend the truthfulness of the Gospel, but that we live the truth of the Gospel as well.

He was certainly no mere egghead. All his learning and brilliance was aimed only at one thing: to help people come to know Christ, and to make Christianity known as the sole answer to mankind's problems. He engaged pastor frank schaeffer biography of william all the important thinkers and philosophers of the day, not as a simple academic exercise, but so that he could effectively speak to them and their followers about the truth claims of Christianity.

Consider an illustration of his real heart on this: after delivering a learned lecture on a deep philosophical and apologetic topic, he said in the ensuing question time that he was 'just a plain old evangelist'. The audience broke into laughter, trying to square this with his eloquent discourse. But deep down that was what Schaeffer was all about: an evangelist.

Schaeffer was greatly concerned that the church was just not doing its job in terms of having a holistic witness to the surrounding culture: "Our culture, society, government, and law are in the condition they are in, not because of a conspiracy, but because the church has forsaken its duty to be the salt of the culture. Toward the latter part of his career he made two important series of videos dealing with contemporary issues: How Should We Then Live?

His concerns especially moved in the direction of the life issues, and he became an outspoken critic of the culture of death, taking a strong stand against abortion and euthanasia at a time when few other evangelicals were concerned about such matters. Indeed, he became increasingly concerned about the state of evangelical Christianity, and how it had in so many ways simply followed the dead-end paths of the surrounding culture.

His last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, written the year he diedwas a clarion call for the church to rouse from its slumbers, and become a true beacon of hope, truth and light in a dark and broken world. They worked, studied, dialogued, and experienced deep hospitality, largely through the ministry of Edith. From this platform, Schaeffer engaged in ministry projects that took him around the world.

Pastor frank schaeffer biography of william

He was a pastor, evangelist, apologist, and prophet. He and Edith started Children for Christ during this time, an evangelistic curriculum that was widely and successfully implemented around the world. A young and troubled black man named Sylvester Jacobs met Schaeffer after a lecture. His strengths as a profoundly pastoral man were rooted in his adherence to historic orthodoxy as he put it and in his theology and practice of the Christian life.

True SpiritualitySchaeffer wrote, was the foundation for all his other books, although it was not the first written. This small but revealing work came out of a crucible when Schaeffer, disappointed with the Christians in his denomination, went all the way back to his teenage agnosticism in order to rethink his Christian faith. After a talk, Schaeffer was once asked about apologetics.

Schaeffer: Are you a presuppositionalist or an evidentialist? I am an evangelist. William Edgar writes that Schaeffer was conversing with a woman who had an objection to Christianity. She could not endorse a religion that in the Old Testament required animal sacrifice, since this was cruel and needless. Schaeffer made no progress until he looked down at her shoes.

It can only be practiced through loving our non-Christian neighbor while depending on the Holy Spirit for wisdom. An apologist defends Christianity as objectively true, rational, and pertinent to all of life. While not an academic, Schaeffer developed an apologetic method that was adaptable to any situation. He presented Christianity as the best explanation for how we know, how we got here, who we are, and who we should be.

This approach was applied through careful observation of twentieth-century culture, both in America and Europe. Schaeffer engaged in negative apologetics by arguing that naturalism, secular philosophy, relativism, existentialism, and pantheism could not account for what mattered most. For example, the avant-garde composer John Cage created music through chance mechanisms, such as using the I Ching a Chinese divination tool.

Yet Cage was an accomplished mycologist, an expert in mushrooms. Schaeffer noted that Cage himself admitted that if he approached mycology as he did his random music, he would likely die from eating poisonous mushrooms! Schaeffer brilliantly discerned that modern people usually separate faith and reason.