Growing Up Gothard

"You may run from sorrow, as we have. Sorrow will find you." — August Nicholson in The Village

My wife and I (Ted) were in the mood for a '90s movie, so we rented M. Night Shayamalan's The Village, which actually came out in 2004 but is still a '90s movie in terms of its earnestness and desire to be deep. It succeeds (in being deep) inasmuch as it always makes me think about the church, and about trends in the church.

In a nutshell, it's about a group of academics—all of whom have been deeply wounded by life in a fallen, sinful world—who decide to follow one charismatic leader (William Hurt) into forming an 1800s-style commune on a nature preserve. The idea is that if you take away everything modern and broken and hurtful about the world and replace it with floor-length skirts, suspenders, chickens, and primitive farm equipment, then nothing can hurt you. The movie then spins out a wonderful narrative that illustrates how there is no fleeing from total depravity. It finds us because it is in our hearts to begin with.

Utopia will elude humans, because sin causes the dystopia. Yet we still long for utopia and sometimes try like crazy to create it.

Recently, my friend Derek shared about what life was like growing up inside the Bill Gothard movement in the 1980s and '90s. His account was utterly fascinating both in terms of how weird it was, and also how eerily similar it sounds (in some ways) to how some Midwestern Reformed families are rolling today with the homeschooling, chicken-raising, huge-family-having, government-disdaining, and so on. The Gothard movement, as far as I can tell, was part life-coaching, part para-church organization, part-homeschool curriculum, part-subculture, and part-arena show.   Continue at Ted Kluck and Derek Lounds