Covenant Worldwide -- Francis A. Schaeffer: The Early Years

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Francis A. Schaeffer: The Early Years

Instructor: Professor Jerram Barrs

Audio Transcription for Lesson 23: The Ministry of L'Abri

I want to continue speaking about how the work of L'Abri runs. The work of L'Abri is the major work of Francis and Edith Schaeffer's life. Some of the other things that they have done, including speaking all over the world, producing tapes, writing books, and later, films, were really all extensions of the work of L'Abri. The work itself was their primary ministry from 1955, when the work began, until Francis' death. It is still Edith's primary work today.

In the previous lesson, I was speaking about prayer. I want to say one more thing about it. The first summer when the work began, they called for a day of fasting and prayer at the end of June. It was for the work as it began to get going. They wanted to be thankful to God for all He had done in the previous year in establishing the work. They also wanted to pray for the future of the work. Ever since that time in 1955 there has been an annual day of fasting and prayer. First it was in the Swiss branch and later in the other branches that developed.

In addition, there have been from time to time other special days of fasting and prayer. The branch of L'Abri in Switzerland and the other branches have had those when they felt times of special need before the Lord, need for their work and need for the work as a whole. That has been a central part of the work as well. They take prayer seriously, and from time to time they set aside whole days for fasting and prayer, and everything else stops. With people coming to stay with them, they do not require that everyone fast. You cannot make other people fast. There is always food provided for people who do not want to take part in the days of fasting and prayer. Often there are non-Christians present who do not spend the day praying because they do not yet believe in a God to pray to. So they do not require people to join in, but those who are staying are encouraged to join in if they so desire. There are usually simple meals prepared for those days. The normal schedule of work and study is set aside on those days, and people are encouraged to devote the whole day to going off by themselves or in groups of two or three, whatever they find most helpful to pray for the work and for their own lives and the future that God has for them.

What was the work of L'Abri? That is the topic of this lesson. In addition to the centrality of prayer, which was the heart of the work, being a faith work -- praying for God's means and God's people to come and God's people to help and God's work to do -- was seeking to be a demonstration in practice, by the way they were living as a family and then as other people came, that Christianity ought to make a difference to the way we live. If we love God and if we are saved by His Son, our lives ought to be transformed practically from day to day. Of course, that was never perfect. It is never perfect for any of us. Yet there was a genuine attempt to be a demonstration that our lives are transformed in the way we treat one another and in the way we serve one another by the Gospel of Christ.

That became a central emphasis in Schaeffer's teaching as time went by. Jesus said in John's Gospel that by the way we love one another the world ought to be able to judge whether the Father sent the Son. Our love for each other, the reality of community among Christians, is supposed to be a demonstration of the truth of the message that we proclaim. This became central in Schaeffer's teaching, and it was and is certainly central in the life of L'Abri today. There ought to be a demonstration of love. Schaeffer said, in the "Consensus for the Workers of L'Abri," that there ought to be a demonstration of supernaturally restored relationships. All our relationships with one another are affected by sin, our own sinfulness, and the general brokenness of the world. Yet in any group of Christians living together and near one another and seeking to be a community, there ought to be this demonstration of supernaturally restored relationships.

It was never perfect, but it had a profound effect on people coming to stay at the various branches. To this day it still does. Many people see a reality of relationships that they have never seen. I have mentioned before that usually at least a third of the people staying with us in the English L'Abri were from broken homes. For many of them, what began to make them open to the Gospel and to what we were saying was seeing the kind of relationships we had in our marriages and the relationships we had with our children. They were different than anything they had ever seen before. So many people's experience, even if they are not from a broken home, is with a family that leaves an enormous amount to be desired in terms of the kinds of relationships that exist. This emphasis on our life being a demonstration of the truth of what we are saying has always been important to the work of the Schaeffers and to the whole ministry of L'Abri. It made you feel that you were living in a goldfish bowl the whole time, because there were always people who were observing you. You knew that they were observing you to find out whether what you were saying was real. That could be difficult. Did the fact that people were present so much of the time act as a damper on the expression of frustration, aggression, difficulty, and pain in human relationships and the working out of those problems? Were we able to have a normal family life in that sense, in terms of people's sinfulness being able to be expressed? There is no way you can pretend to be something different than you are all the time. That is what I meant about living in a goldfish bowl.

People were not in our house 24 hours of the day. There was a patch of time every day, for two or three hours, when there would not be anybody there because other people would take care of them. All of us had situations in which people saw us losing our cool or getting upset with one another. We always made a point of not disciplining our children in front of other people. That would not be fair to the children. Children are not going to cease being naughty just because there are other people present. They do not have those kinds of restraints, especially when they are little. Any problems that were there were evident to other people. We did not seek to hide that. At the same time, people could see you working through the problems that you had in a healthy kind of way.

All of us had situations in which we found our work extremely difficult. We went through a patch when my wife had such serious back problems that she was flat on her back for nearly six months. I carried on cooking meals for people the whole of that time. I was taking care of our children and trying to take care of her. It was an enormous pressure. I was not well myself at the time. For much of that time we felt that we were going through a tunnel and there was not any light at the end of it. There was no letup of the pressure of having so many people around all the time. There simply were not enough of us to set us free from the constraints of the work. Everyone else was extraordinarily helpful and took an extra load, and that was part of our commitment to one another in the work, to bear one another's burdens in that kind of situation. Yet there were not enough people to leave somebody with no burden at all. That was difficult, and I am sure that it was obvious to everyone who came through the place that I was under enormous pressure. Yet I think that when people see you coping with the realities of life and the stresses that do happen to people in life, and when they see God giving you the grace to deal with them, even imperfectly, that in itself can have a profound effect on people. You are not in some kind of idealized situation in which you never have problems or disagreements with your wife or your children never misbehave. There is no way you can be like that with people around you all the time, and there is no way you can be like that and live any kind of normal life. Our life was not normal. It was an incredibly pressured life.

When we first went to work at the English branch, I remember an occasion in which we were serving meals and our kitchen was being redone at the same time. So our bedroom was filled with food and china and everything else. It was in piles around the bed. They came in, and we had a meeting around our dining room table, with Francis and Edith, another couple we were working with, Vicki and myself, and a single girl named Becky who was with us at the time. Francis looked at our little home, which was quite cramped, and he said, "What we are trying to do is not difficult. It is impossible." He repeated that line many times in the work. We all felt that way. What we were trying to do was something that in some ways was impossible.

As time went by, we learned that we had to draw more lines. When the work began, the Schaeffers did not have masses of people there all the time. There were patches when there were no people and the work was much quieter. By the time I became full time in the work in 1967 for a year and then when we went back to the work as a couple in 1971 and had all three of our children in that situation, there were no quiet patches. There were always masses of people all the time. It was not until 1984 that L'Abri adopted a term system. That was to stop everybody from having a nervous breakdown. At that point there were no times when there were no people or even a few people there. There were many people there all the time every day. We always closed for a week at Christmas, but apart from that we were basically open all year around. You might go away for a family holiday for three weeks, and then you came back, but everybody had been carrying an extra load while you were away. Then they went off and you carried an extra load. So your holiday was completely dissipated after the first few days. Finally in about 1984, one of our colleagues in the English branch suggested that we start having closed patches in the work. It was more like what the Schaeffers had when they first started. There would be patches throughout the year when there were very few people apart from the workers and their families and maybe one or two people staying with them. That gave us an enormous relief to have that, and now every branch has that system. They close for a couple of weeks and then open for three months, and the cycle repeats. I think everybody would have died if we had not made that change. We nearly did anyway. It was a tremendously pressured life.

People certainly saw us having our struggles, but I think that was healthy for them. Most families have no idea how to deal with conflict. That includes many Christian families. It was good to have a living example of how to deal with it, such as not shouting or hitting your children in front of other people. You take them quietly out or upstairs and you work the issue through, whatever it is, and it can be resolved. That kind of thing was helpful for people to see. It was helpful to see one of the wives so overwhelmed by the pressure that was on her to cook a meal for 20 or more people every day that she had to rush out of the kitchen in tears once in a while. I do not think it hurt anybody to see that. These are real people having real struggles.

I remember one girl from South Africa saying to one of the women working there, "I am so thankful that you are so normal. A Christian does not have to be some kind of superhero. You are struggling with all the same things that we all struggle with." People began to develop a romanticized notion of L'Abri as a kind of perfect place. It never claimed to be that. It was certainly never perfect for those of us working in it. It was always a situation filled with enormous difficulties, tensions, and tremendously hard work. We did not try to have arguments in front of other people. Yet there were always difficulties.

What was the work? There was the attempt to be a demonstration that Christianity ought to make a difference in our relationships. Of course, it did. To anybody who lived near Francis and Edith, as Vicki and I did in their home, the problems in their relationship were obvious to everyone. There was no way they could not be. I was working for Edith in the kitchen as a cook. Vicki was working in the office as Francis' secretary. Their house was tiny. He did all of his work in his bedroom. She would go up to his bedroom to receive dictation. He had a tiny chair and table at the end of the bed, and that was where he did all his work. That was where he wrote his books, talked to people, and dictated his letters. That was just up the stairs from where I was working in the kitchen below. There was always a stream of people coming in and out. There was no way you could not be aware of the problems they struggled with as a couple.

Francis could be short tempered. Edith would be late frequently, for most things. She was so committed to doing whatever she was doing in the moment that time seemed to escape her, whether it was talking to somebody or whatever. That was frustrating for anybody who worked with her. As somebody who cooked for her for a year, one would have a situation in which you would get the meal ready and she would come in to serve it, because she always liked to serve it herself. Then somebody would come to talk to her just as you were going to serve it. She would stand there for 45 minutes with a soup spoon in her hand while the person asked her serious questions. Meanwhile, everybody was sitting in the next room waiting to eat and you would be trying to keep the food hot.

So everybody was aware of the lack of perfection of the situation and the people involved. It was not an ideal situation in any way. Yet I do not think that hurt at all. It simply underlined that Francis and Edith Schaeffer and the other people who worked with them were perfectly normal people who desired to serve God in this way. They were prepared to put their lives on the line and even live in a goldfish bowl. People could see quite evidently that God was doing things through them. He had helped them to deal with their weaknesses and the struggles that came up. They were not hidden in a corner. Nobody who ever went through that situation could have said they were perfect people who were able to hide their weaknesses from other people. They never made any real attempt to do so. You cannot do it anyway when people are around you all the time. Nobody can live as though he is a perfect person and then let his guard down in the evening for two hours when nobody is around. You simply cannot do it. You are totally aware of what other people are like, just as in a family. You cannot pretend about who you are.

The third circle of the work was helping the people who came with the questions that they had. They sought to be a demonstration that Christianity is true, in the sense that it answers questions and that it deals with issues. It is true, and therefore it touches the whole of life. You could say that there were two aspects to this. One was that because Christianity is true, then it ought to affect everything that we think. That includes everything that we think about what is going on in our culture and what Christians ought to be doing in our culture. Therefore there are no sacred subjects and secular subjects. Everything is a Christian subject in that sense, because it is God's world. We ought to be able to ask what God's mind is about everything that happens in our own lives, the life of the church, or the life of the culture. The second aspect is that because Christianity is true, we ought to be able to answer people's questions. We ought to be able to show that it is true. We ought to be able to give reasons for faith. We ought to be able to give a defense of the faith that we have.

One of the rules that the Schaeffers made in this area from the beginning was that they would not answer questions about persons, but rather they would discuss issues. That was a result of Schaeffer's own experience in being with the Separated Movement, in which people were constantly being named, in the sense of "these are persons we should separate from." At L'Abri, however, there was a strong commitment to deal with issues rather than talk about persons. Apart from that, any subject could be discussed, because Christianity is true.

This is tremendously important. In most of our churches and in most people's Christian experience, discussion is not possible. Yet that is not the New Testament pattern. In the New Testament, it says that when Paul was in Ephesus he had discussions daily in the hall of Tyrannus for more than two years. It was very clear, as you read through the book of Acts, that Paul was constantly discussing things and reasoning with people. He was asking and answering questions. As you read through the Gospels, that was clearly the way Jesus taught. He taught much of the time by discussion, by asking questions and answering questions. I think that has disappeared in many of our churches.

Working in L'Abri, we repeatedly had people who were from Christian backgrounds who never had the opportunity to ask a question of their parents or of anyone else. I remember one girl whose father was a professor at a Christian college. She was sitting at our table -- this was just two years ago -- and she was asking her first questions extremely hesitantly. She had just graduated from a Christian college herself. She asked if it was all right to ask questions. She had always been told it was liberal to ask questions. I remember another girl from a German home whose father was a pastor. When her parents read her diary and saw that she had questions about her faith, they decided she was reprobate and they would have nothing to do with her. She was 16 years old at the time. She had expressed some of her doubts and problems with Christianity in her secret diary, which her mother had read one day when she was out at school. They basically put her out of their family completely at that point. That may sound horrendous, and it is horrendous. Yet that is a kind of caricature of what is often normal, which is that questions are not allowed to be asked, doubts are not allowed to be expressed, and problems are not allowed to be raised. There is no opportunity for discussion.

I remember speaking at a Christian university in Britain, and a girl came up to me afterward and said that was the first time in the three years she had been a student there that a speaker had encouraged them to ask questions. She said that normally they were preached at and then the person leaves. That has become the pattern of much of our Christian work today. The preaching is regarded as almost the only means of communicating the Gospel. People very rarely have the opportunity to come back and say, "I have problems. I do not agree. I have questions. I have doubts. Can I let them out?" It is tremendously important that we do that. We do not need to be afraid of people's questions, because Christianity is true.

Often that problem is that people are afraid of others' questions. They are afraid they will not be able to answer the questions themselves. They are afraid there may not be any answers at all. So it is safer to proclaim and never to let people question. Yet God's Word is true, and it can deal with any question that comes up. That was the Schaeffers' conviction. It arose out of Francis' own conversion and his wrestling again. It was also a deep commitment that it was true and therefore we ought to be able to discuss anything. So people started coming in answer to their prayers. They started coming to Switzerland to their home. First it was just on weekends. Then it was during the week as well with more people coming on the weekends. People started coming from all over the world, just as Edith had seen when the Lord had given her those verses from Isaiah that said, "It shall come to pass that people will come from every nation to the mountain of the house of the Lord and find His truth there." It began to come true.

People started coming from all over the world to their home to ask questions. There were many different kinds of people. There were many young people, many students, and many people who were already professionals. There were families with their children. There were people in trouble and people with all kinds of different needs. There were Christians, those who were struggling and those who were growing. There were also non-Christians who were searching.

At first there were simply discussions around the table and discussions on Saturday evenings. There were also individual times together with people. That could happen while going for a walk in the beautiful mountains and forests or sitting around the fire in the living room or preparing a meal in the kitchen. Gradually over time, however, the work began to become more structured as more people started coming and staying for longer periods of time.

At some point in the 1960s, lectures began to be given and recorded. There had been Bible studies all the way along. There had also been Sunday services in the International Presbyterian Church, which started to grow, too, because there were people from around Switzerland who were coming to those services as well as the people who were staying there at L'Abri. In addition to those Sunday services and Bible studies, Schaeffer started giving lectures as well as having the discussions. Those lectures began to be recorded, and the tapes were kept. So people had the opportunity to listen to tapes. They could also read. There was an extensive library, and they could study through questions themselves as well as ask their questions individually in discussions or to Schaeffer personally. What was called Farel House developed. It was named after the Swiss Reformer, Farel, who went all over those villages like Huemoz and Villars and that whole area. He was a Reformer at the time of Calvin, and he preached the Gospel all over that mountainous area of Switzerland. So they called their study house Farel House after him.

The pattern developed of people studying half the day and working half the day. That pattern has continued in the work of L'Abri until the present time. Everyone who comes studies half the day and works half the day. From the beginning, studies were individual. People would talk to Schaeffer or one of the other people who joined them in the work. They would say what their questions were, the areas they were struggling in or the areas they needed to grow in. Then tapes or books would be suggested that would be helpful to that individual. That is still how the work goes. Whenever anybody comes, somebody sits down with him or her right away and finds out where they are and suggests some things for them to study. Then there is an ongoing relationship with that person, getting together with that person from time to time and finding out how things are going. The person will be given other things to study and other questions to think about. There is a tremendous amount of freedom. They can listen to and study anything they want. They can also follow a particular course. They could also always raise their questions at meal times or personally to the Schaeffers or any of the other workers. So the work began to grow like that. More people began to come. Over the years, thousands of people have come to Switzerland and the different branches. Many of them were Christians, and there were many non-Christians as well.

Each day was structured into two halves. Some studied in the morning, and some in the afternoon, while others were working. The work was helping with whatever needed to be done. They could help with the house, the cooking or cleaning, or in the garden, chopping wood or whatever the need was. They could help with decorating, in the carpentry shop, or whatever. It made the work seem like part of an extended family, because the meals were with the families and single people working and living there, and there was the studying. It was a cross between an extended family and a study center. L'Abri is not a commune. It is centered on the people who work there, who are there permanently. Those who come have a part in their family life. They can go to their homes for family meals, be around their children, and help with the work that needs to be done around their homes or in their gardens. At the same time, there is this formal study. That has been part of the work for many years, going back into the 1960s or even the late 1950s since Farel House was formally begun.

One of the things that makes the work so intense for those who are working there is that many of the people who come arrive with a sense of tremendous need. As soon as they decide they can trust you, which in the context of an extended family like that where you are caring for them practically quite quickly, then people will pour their hearts out very quickly. What may take several months in a normal church situation, in terms of getting close enough to a person that he will open up to you, could happen in a day in that kind of context. That is particularly so because a person may have come halfway across the world feeling that he must get some things sorted out and feeling this is the last chance. Therefore as a worker you were repeatedly in a situation in which people would tell you things about themselves that they never told their own parents, their pastor if they were members of a church, or anybody else. That made the work quite intense. You would get to know people very deeply very quickly.

That group of people was also constantly changing. As the work developed, perhaps half the people at the English branch -- and this would be true of the other branches as well -- would be there for a period of up to three months. The other half would be there for anywhere from a few days to two or three weeks. There was a constant turnover of people. They were sharing the deepest needs of their lives with you and the deepest questions they struggled with. That is tremendously emotionally draining and spiritually demanding. Yet it has wonderful rewards as well. I do not want to suggest that it is simply demanding. It was also tremendously rewarding. I feel that I have people who are family all over the world now. They are people I have become very close to. Vicki and I have a whole series of people who are like elder brothers and sisters to our children from all over the world. There are people who are like brothers and sisters to us. There are hundreds of them in many places whose lives we have become so bound up with. That is a wonderful thing. Even though people would leave after three months, we are still in contact with them. We feel a part of their lives.

This was another element of the work that Schaeffer used to think about. He would speak about a wider and a narrower L'Abri. There was a narrower L'Abri in the sense of the particular branches of the work, with the people coming to stay there at the time. There was also the wider work of all the people who had come through. Many had been there for a considerable time who had been deeply helped by the work. They went back to wherever their place was and served God there and tried to put into practice some of the things they learned. It could be a teacher in a school or a nurse or farmer or whatever it happened to be wherever they were. They were seeking to put those things into practice in their family life and work situation, in their teaching or whatever. Schaeffer referred to that as the wider L'Abri. They were the people who were wrapped up in the same bundle of life who were appreciative of what they learned, and their lives were transformed rather dramatically. It was a wonderful privilege to be a part of that kind of work. You saw many people's lives changed, deeply changed. They would then keep contact with you afterward, when they got settled into a church somewhere, into their lives. They carried on being changed more and more by the grace of God. It was wonderful to be a part of what God was doing in people's lives.

Another important thing to say is that for all of us who were in the work, including the Schaeffers themselves and everyone who joined them later on, there was always a tremendous sense of having to depend on God daily. It was precisely because what we were doing seemed so humanly impossible in terms of the energy it took. There was great tension and pressure created by living in a goldfish bowl and of people sharing their lives so intimately so quickly. We all had a tremendous sense all the time that was similar to Peter. When Jesus asked him if he wanted to go too, he said, "To whom shall we go for the words of eternal life? We cannot possibly leave you." We all felt like that every day. We desperately needed God's grace to work in these people's lives and to sustain us, to give us patience, spirituality, love for our families and these people and to cope with these kinds of pressures and really help people. Any person who is in any kind of pressured Christian work, or any kind of work, will understand that the greater the pressures become the more desperately aware you become of your need for God's grace to work in your own heart and the lives of the people if you are going to do anything useful at all. That was a daily sense of our lives. If God did not help us, we would fold. If He did not help us, then nobody would be helped. You cannot change somebody's heart, only God can. You can seek to love them and answer their questions. You can seek to be a demonstration of the truth in front of them. Yet in the end, only God can touch people and change them and make them new. You are really dependent on Him to do that.

You could say it is developed "battle faith." In the intensity of your battle, you realize your need. As Paul said, "When we are weak, then we are strong." In that kind of work you feel weak all the time, every moment of the day. You wake up saying, "How can I possibly do this again today?" I am quite serious. Why are we doing this? This seems crazy. Vicki and I said that to each other repeatedly. How can we possibly carry on doing this? The only answer is to ask God to help us, because we cannot carry on.

There is a particular difficulty for single people in that situation. As a couple, you have each other to turn to and support when you feel completely overwhelmed by the situation and its pressures or your health. What happened in the English branch was that several of our single workers left when they got married. That happened to quite a few of them. They were perceived to be eligible people by the people coming through. That was partly because of the furnace effect of the situation, rather than a greenhouse effect. A greenhouse suggests the development of a tender plant that could not handle the pressures of the outside. The furnace is a more appropriate image. People were purified by fire in this situation. Many of our single workers who left went off to get married.

Many people who came did not intend to stay for long. There have always been people in the work who came to work for two or three years. They knew that it was short term and so did everyone else in the work. There have also been those who came and saw it as their calling in the long term. There are some single people and some couples who stayed long term. There are also many couples and single people who have stayed short term. There have probably been a higher percentage of single people who have been short term. There are several reasons for that. One is because many of them have married. Their status has changed. Some of those have stayed in the work, but more have left because the person they married did not necessarily feel called to L'Abri. There were special pressures on the single person in the work. Yet we always tried to do what we could to help with that.

What tended to happen in our branch was that each of the single people would make a special relationship with one of the couples. We had a series of single men in the work who became very close to Vicki and me and our boys. They spent a great deal of time with us. It was one of the other couples who did the same with the single women who were there in the work. We would make a serious effort to make sure that a single person in the work was not alone, humanly speaking, in the work. The other thing that helped in our situation in England was that, as the branch of the International Presbyterian Church developed there, it became a tremendous source of support for all the workers in the branch, both single and married, in a way that was never quite true to the same degree in Switzerland and some of the other branches. In Sweden and Southborough there is not the support from a local community that is committed as a church to loving, caring for, and serving you. For us in the work, that was the greatest strength in the situation, our relationship with one another among the four couples and one single person we had working there, and at times two or three single people. The relationship with the people in our church that was growing all the time was important, too. That was a tremendous support to us all. The single people especially would have said that was their lifeline, humanly speaking, the church and the support it gave them. In some of the branches there has not been the same kind of reality of support from a church.

At the end I should say a little bit about the different branches that have developed over the years. That takes us out of the early years, but perhaps it will summarize. The work in Switzerland steadily grew from the beginning. After a time, other houses were added to the work. First the other houses were rented. Then a couple of other houses were bought because of gifts to the work until there were half a dozen houses scattered around the village of Huemoz that made up the work of the branch in Switzerland. Later on there was a house up the road in the next village in Chesieres.

The work in England began originally with somebody hosting occasional studies and discussions in their flat in London. Then a home was purchased in the west of London, in Ealing, in 1964. That never became a residential branch, but many people came in and out of that house, listening to tapes or coming for discussions and Bible studies. Later an International Presbyterian Church grew up there and is still flourishing today, even though there is no longer a work of L'Abri there at all in Ealing in west London. In 1971, L'Abri was given a large country property in Hampshire, about 60 miles west of London in the village of Greatham. L'Abri was given a large manor house with about seven acres of ground. That was the place I worked from 1971 until 1989.

The work in Holland began in the home of Hans and Anky Rookmaaker. That was in the 1950s. It became a residential branch also in 1971 in the village of Eck en Wiel. L'Abri was again given the money to buy a property. A few years later, the center of the work in Holland was in the city of Utrecht, and then they have weekends and several weeks in the summer out in the property at Eck en Wiel.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s there were Bible studies and discussions that took place from time to time down in Milan, Italy. Those Bible studies eventually developed into a branch of the International Presbyterian Church. It is an Italian-speaking church.

Then a work started in Sweden in the early 1980s in the little village of Molle, which is on the west coast of Sweden, just across from Denmark.

A branch started in Southborough, Massachusetts in the United States in the late 1970s. It is bout 50 miles west of Boston. When the Schaeffers had to go to Rochester, Minnesota for Schaeffer's treatment for cancer at the Mayo Clinic, another branch developed around their home in Rochester. That is where Edith still lives today. There is a small branch there, although it is not at the present a residential branch.

So at the present time there are branches in Huemoz, Greatham, Utrecht, Molle, Southborough, and in Rochester.

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