Art Within's First Documentary: A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers!

Brief Lil’ Update

Hi there, lovely Art Within Pod listeners!

If you’ve listened to much of Season One, you’ll know that Nate and I talk often about the community that brought us together called L’Abri in England—and about the documentary we’re making about it, called A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers.

Season Two of The Art Within Podcast is in the works right now—we’ve got several guests locked in already!—but since last week, we’ve also been running a Kickstarter to complete A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers and release it in early summer 2024.

Our all-or-nothing goal is $28,000 by December 1st, which will go toward finishing and releasing the film next year. We’re already at $10,000 raised, and it’s been a nice opportunity to invite people into the process and dream up some rewards, like a physical release of the film, tickets to the premiere in Nashville, the tie-in album we’re producing, and even some linocut art by a former L’Abri student. We’d be honored if you’d consider donating!

Here’s a little more of the backstory on the film, published originally as an essay for The Rabbit Room.

---

Last summer, my wife Debbie and I spent three months at L’Abri Fellowship in Greatham, England. The two of us met there, so in many ways, it was like coming home. This time, though, we had a mission beyond the usual: we were making a feature documentary called A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers.

If you don’t know much about L’Abri, it may be because they deliberately avoid advertising themselves; in fact, when the staff of the English branch of L’Abri agreed to allow us to make a documentary, they did it under the condition that it would not be a commercial trying to get people to attend L’Abri. Hopefully, rather than putting the particulars of this place on a pedestal to market to the world, the film awakens spiritual imagination about a “way of being” that can also be embodied elsewhere.

L’Abri Fellowship was founded in 1955 by Francis and Edith Schaeffer in the Swiss Alps, with the second (and now, largest) branch opening in the rolling downs of South England in 1971. Among people who have been to L’Abri, it is infamously difficult to describe with one tidy label. I think the truest comparison might be Rivendell from The Lord of The Rings: a place for weary and wounded travelers to stop on their journey, to rest and engage with beauty and reality, to try and prepare themselves to head back out on their quest. Tolkien said, “Rivendell was the perfect house, whether you liked food or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.” For the many people who pass through the creaky front door at English L’Abri, it can feel much the same.

English L’Abri is located in a 16th-century manor house in Hampshire, and students of all ages, backgrounds, and nationalities come to stay during three-month terms—some for a day, some for a weekend, others for the entire term. A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers, the film that my wife Debbie and I shot last year, is a feature documentary chronicling one summer at English L'Abri. The film follows a group of students as they look for belonging, wrestle with doubts & uncertainty, and grapple with finding spirituality and community in their ordinary lives back home.

Making a Film About Community in Community

During the first month, one fact became clear: making a documentary about community while living in community was going to be a far more complicated task than we’d anticipated.

In French, L’Abri means “the shelter,” and as such, many of the people who come to L’Abri are seeking refuge from the busyness, distraction, trauma, or hardship of their normal lives; to make matters more complex, most of the students who were coming for this term did not know that we would be attempting to make a documentary during their stay.

Many of the great cinema-veritè documentaries involve a filmmaker becoming so invisible that they’re able to exist as a fly on the wall. In the early weeks of our time at L’Abri, our experience could not have been further from that one; every time the cameras came out, people seemed tense and uncomfortable. At L’Abri, students are encouraged to keep most media technology (computers, smartphones, etc.) out-of-sight in their room, except on Thursdays, the weekly day off. To some, our cameras often felt like a breach of the commitment that L’Abri would become a shelter for those who came through its doors.

Despite all of this, in the first few days of our stay, we attempted to be resolute. We were determined not to let a day go to waste without capturing something worthwhile on film; after all, we had two months ahead of us, but every day felt like a ticking clock of precious time (and potentially profound moments) going undocumented and unobserved.

Very quickly, however, the workers at L’Abri gave us some pointed and deliberate advice: they encouraged us to spend the first three weeks of the term without filming at all, using that time to be present with the community and get to know the students around us. It was difficult wisdom to hear, but we heeded it nonetheless. Slowly, gradually, we accepted that these early weeks would be for sewing seeds, not harvesting. Fighting our fast-paced productivity-driven inclinations, it felt like God was directing our attention toward “people” over “project.” We needed to work to preserve the sacred shelter of L’Abri that had made us want to make our film in the first place—and as we slowed down, we started to get closer to the community around us outside the context of filming.

As artists, it can be hard for us—all of us—to allow ourselves to be known without our cameras, paintbrushes, guitars, microphones, or the other instruments of our trades that can serve to give us a sense of purpose and identity in the face of a strange new community of strange new faces. But knowing a person’s art or knowing their skill with a guitar is not the same as knowing the person. For Debbie and I to gain trust, we first needed to be known also as dishwashers, as gardeners, as carrot-choppers, as guests at a lunch table, as volleyball players, as quiet listeners, and as friends.

About three weeks into the term, the workers at L’Abri allowed us to have one of the weekly film discussion nights to show the students our previous documentary, Love In The Time of Corona, and our concept short film for the L’Abri documentary featuring former L’Abri workers Andy and Lindsey Patton. It was the first time we’d ever shown any of our films to an audience of more than one—and both seemed to resonate deeply. After showing both films, we had an open discussion with the community about our documentary plans, engaged with questions and logistics of when not to film, and ended with prayer.

Going into the term, our clumsy approach to making the documentary had been to assume everyone was okay with being filmed unless they told us otherwise. In those early weeks of waiting, as we’d walked through the tunnel of overhanging trees on nearby Church Lane every day, it had become very clear that the more integral approach would be to assume no one was okay with being filmed unless they agreed to participate. As filmmakers, it was a difficult change of mindset to make, but one that would ultimately produce more fruit and personal trust in the long term. After our screening night, we requested that everyone come to speak with us personally in the next few days to tell us how they felt about being filmed, either in the background or in more focused interviews. What a huge answer to prayer it was when nearly everyone told us that they were okay with being onscreen!

Filming throughout the remainder of the summer remained a bumpy road; some who were usually at ease with cameras could change their mind from day to day, new students continued to arrive from week to week, and the advance scheduling of our filming times meant that spontaneous moments were more difficult to capture. Even so, with every passing week, relationships and dynamics—both in front of the camera and behind it—only became more natural, more trusting, and more full of grace and understanding. As trust increased, our opportunities to capture spontaneous moments became more possible.

As the summer drew to a close, there was more vulnerability in everything we shot—and a stronger dramatic question in every interview about returning to the “world outside.” Slowly, that question arose as one of the central questions of the documentary. Increasingly, the students were concerned about the challenges involved in leaving L’Abri to return home and try to embody it elsewhere. I don’t think we would have been able to capture these questions in the same way if we’d started shooting in the early weeks of term. It was because we’d been forced to slow down that our relationships were strong enough for our central idea to emerge.

We walked away unsure of exactly what story we had, but certain there was something powerful in it.

Read the rest of this essay over on The Rabbit Room.