Newsletter

Autumn 2001: Notes from a Board Member

Origins

By Bert Froysland

In 1996 my dad, then 96 years old, and my wife Mae and I went to Norway to visit the homeland he left in 1922. It was such a thrill for him to show me, his son, the actual farmhouse where he was born, to recall events of his youth, to show me his parents' burial place in a country churchyard. The trip was all about origins.

Origins are important, yet easily lost as years, well, decades, pass. The dying King Arthur in Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" says, "The old order changeth, yielding place to new/And God fulfills himself in many ways." As the only active original Au Sable board member, I find myself increasingly conscious of the inevitability of change, the passing of the "old order" as it yields "place to new." It is important that in this process, we don't lose sight of our origins.

Dr. Harold Snyder, the first director of Au Sable Trails Camp for Youth (as it was then known) and currently an emeritus member of the Au Sable board, had a vision of a camp which would unite the study of God's creation with Christian principles. Along with fellow graduate students at Michigan State University, John Olmstead and Eldon White- man, and Michigan State University professor G.W. Mouser, Harold secured the funds to purchase the property which is now the Au Sable Great Lakes campus. Shortly thereafter, I was invited to join the effort, little realizing that we were, actually, setting in motion the movement now, forty years later, often referred to as Christian environmental stewardship. My role was both that of board member and business manager.

For several years Au Sable was a summer camp for boys ages 10-16. Then, when Dr. Snyder joined the faculty of Taylor University, he conceived the idea of bringing college students to study at Au Sable, and Au Sable began a transition from a summer camp to a college biology field station, with students coming from not only Taylor but also Greenville College and Spring Arbor College. In retrospect, what we can see is a continuum culminating in the current and, of course, much expanded Au Sable Institute as we now know it.

The current bulletin describes the mission of Au Sable as "the integration of knowledge of Creation with biblical principles for the purpose of bringing the Christian community and the general public to a better understanding of the Creator and the stewardship of God's creation." while the early Au Sable literature didn't articulate it quite this way, that is exactly what the founders of Au Sable had in mind.

Christian writer Eugene Peterson speaks of the Christian walk as a "long obedience in the same direction." That phrase, I believe, is a apt description of the history of Au Sable and of the lives of those who started it as well as those who have joined it to carry on the work into the future. And that brings us to the second half of the dying words of King Arthur in Tennyson's poem: "And God fulfills himself in many ways." Au Sable has changed immensely in many ways, and for some of the "old-timers" like me, that change has not always been comfortable. But we can rest in the assurance that God is sovereign and will continue to fulfill himself, albeit in new and unforeseen ways. At the same time, we should remember our origins.

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