Balance of Place and Program
“The Gospel Lives by Controversy.” – Carroll Luther Hinderlie
The year 1963 was challenging. It was a cold, wet summer. No buildings were heated and electric power ended at 10 p.m. each night. Wake up times and meals were announced by fire siren. That siren was one of the few Holden “traditions.” Worship was not then the daily discipline it would become. Gil Berg the “mayor” of Holden Village, wanted the newly refurbished snack bar to remain open during Vespers. Most of the sessions, held in the schoolhouse, were lectures. There were few registrations for the summer; often people just showed up, and this drove the head cook, Bertha Pearson, to tears. In spite of everything the kitchen was just able to keep up, thanks to the food service manager, Werner Janssen. Werner was a young engineer on leave from Boeing who would replace Gil Berg and for 20 years would be Holden’s business manager.
Program plans hatched in national youth offices proved unworkable. For example, a week-long “Spiritual Boot Camp” for young draftees found no registrants. The bright weeks were the family camps. But it was not only families, but youth, single and married young adults, widowed, divorced women and men, single parents, retired, unemployed–all were welcomed. Holden couldn’t be a camp for just one segment of the population. Carroll said: “Somehow, someone said, Holden the mining camp was to be a Village. In a Village, there is a conversation and there are all kinds of people of every age. Holden Village will be a place where the Gospel liberates conversation.”
Taking their cue from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Mary and Carroll proclaimed: “The Gospel Lives by Controversy.” Holden Village has always thrived in creative tensions. It’s a place free in the Gospel of Jesus Christ displaying that freedom in rhythms of daily discipline. Holden also was a magnificent physical setting. The tension that Carroll and Mary would balance so creatively was between what Werner Janssen called “Place and Program.” Worship, the proclamation of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, was central. But there was still so much to do and so little money! The “Place” would draw people, but could the conversation, overwhelming in variety and intensity, open people and pockets to the “New Every Morning” of the Gospel? It happened. The Program—sessions, conversations and controversy—would flow from the Proclamation.
After 50 years, the tension between Holden “the place” and Holden Village, the ministry, is still evident. There is still the temptation to make an idol of this “Space of Grace.” But the conversation flows—open, wide-ranging and free. Fifty years on, “The Gospel Lives by Controversy.”
Over the next years, the Village would welcome more and more people into the wilderness. The ’60s and ’70s were turbulent decades. The young, the searching, those on the fringes of society, the counter cultured, the uncultured—all were welcome. Increasingly, people came for healing from the fractious society. In time the Village was open year-round. A public high school and then grade school were established beginning in 1969. In 1972, a very successful post high school/post college/post college dropout winter program began. Holden was a center for conversation throughout the year. Still, it remained vulnerable to the tribulations of nature (avalanches and forest fire) and humans (a fire destroyed Chalet 2 in the spring of 1969). It was stressful to be constantly raising enough money to run a place so “far out.” Still, the people kept on coming and this hilarious, healing ministry was kept afloat.