Mission
“But what does it all mean?” - Oscar Hammerstein II (with help from Luther’s “Small Catechism”)
By the end of 1962, the Village had emerged as a place of excitement for Lutheran youth: a place apart. But was Holden Village to become more than that?
The Youth Offices of the three Lutheran Churches helped out with program and, especially from The American Lutheran Church, money. There were questions. Many asked whether one more youth camp was needed, however spectacular its setting. Was Holden, in order to survive, to become another retreat and conference center hosting groups? The program for 1963 was youth and young adult centered with the exception of two family weeks in July. Holden Village had been without a permanent executive director since its inception. The Board had hoped that the Bergstrands would take the Village mission. In 1963, it turned to a visiting lecturer at Luther Seminary, who was considered too radical to be a tenured professor.
Carroll Hinderlie had been studying in Denmark on a Fulbright scholarship with his spouse, Mary, and many children when Holden Village was given to the Church. Carroll and Mary’s life was adventure. For example, they escaped from occupied Norway in 1940 only to be imprisoned for three and a half years by the Japanese (a Chicago paper called them “America’s most captured couple”). Carroll had been National Youth Director of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. The family had also spent several summers in Europe leading volunteers in rebuilding war-damaged retreat centers that could help give life to a post-Christian culture.
Carroll and Mary felt that Holden Village needed to reach out in its mission to more than youth and to more than Lutherans. They also felt that, in an impersonal culture, Holden’s mission would be renewing congregations. In June of 1963, they came to Holden Village with the prayer that God was calling the Village “to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown,” words from a prayer by Eric Milner-White that for years accompanied Carroll and Mary’s pilgrimage and would become known as the Holden Village Prayer. If the Cross was at the center of Village proclamation, then all would be welcomed, equipped and sent out with “faith to go out with good courage not knowing whither we go…” Carroll and Mary came to Holden Village with the laughter that only those who have lost everything and yet own the world can enjoy: Holy Hilarity.
