Francis Schaeffer has made an enormous impact on me. While some value his intellectual contributions most, I prize most the way he communicated his intellectual contributions—pastorally. He unusually dignified all people he encountered by the way he treated them. This is rare among Reformed intellectuals, even Reformed pastors. Dr. Schaeffer understood that sincere love and keen pastoral skills were foundational to every truth he offered to every person. Anytime I read something he’s written (or something written about him), these noble virtues in his ministry always seem to seep out of the pages. He was as skilled at caring for people as he was at knowing truth, because he believed—as a point of orthodoxy— that both live together in true spirituality. Below are some quotes that exemplify the manner in which Dr. Schaeffer engaged people. They reflect a pastoral paradigm that is worthy of emulation.Dorothy Woodson (a L’Abri worker) wrote (recorded in the book Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life):
“When Mr. Schaeffer would talk to you, there was nothing else in the world that was going on. He was totally focused on you and what you were talking about and was very involved, very interested. It wouldn’t matter who the person was. It could be from the most simple person to the most intellectual—that focus and interest and involvement was the same. I saw it time and time again. I experienced it myself, and it wasn’t anything false. He was really interested in people, and it was something that was very, very striking. I’d never seen that degree of concentration and having that kind of attention, I don’t think, with anybody else. That enormous personality that he had, it would be all focused on you. And he never forgot anything that you ever told him. For instance, he went way back with my family. He would remember all the little details of the family and my brother and my sister—various things over the years that he had learned. It was part, obviously, of that phenomenal memory he had for everything. But it was his memory for these personal details that made his talking with people enormously effective.”
Edith Schaeffer (Francis’s wife) wrote in her book L’Abri:
“Rather than studying volumes in an ivory tower separated from life, and developing a theory separated from the thinking and struggling of men, [Dr. Schaeffer talked for years] to men and women in the very midst of their struggles. He has talked to existentialists, logical positivists, Hindus, Buddhists, liberal Protestants, liberal Roman Catholics, Reformed Jews and atheistic Jews, Muslims, members of occult cults, and people of a wide variety of religions and philosophies, as well as atheist of a variety of types. He has talked to brilliant professors, brilliant students, and brilliant dropouts! He has talked to beatniks, hippies, drug addicts, homosexuals and psychologically disturbed people. He has talked to Africans, Indians, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, South Americans, people from the islands of the sea, from Australia, and New Zealand and from all the European countries as well from America and Canada. He has talked to people of many different political colors. He has talked to doctors, lawyers, scientist, artists, writers, engineers, research men in many fields, philosophers, businessmen, newspapermen and actors, famous people and peasants. . . .
In it all God has been giving him an education which it is not possible for many people to have. The answers have been given, not out of academic research (although he does volumes of reading constantly to keep up) but out of this arena of live conversation. He answers real questions with carefully thought out answers which are the real answers. He gets excited himself as he comes to me often saying, ‘It [Christianity] really is the answer, Edith; it fits, it really fits. It really is truth, and because it is true it fits what is really there.’”
See this link to read additional thoughts Francis Schaeffer had on these matters: Truth and Love
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