A Table in the Wilderness

In 1964, Archer and Jane Torrey left seven years of seminary teaching in Seoul and walked into the mountains of Kangwon Province with a question that would shape the next four decades: Could the Christian life be taught not from textbooks, but from the lived reality of community, prayer, and shared labor?

The answer became Jesus Abbey—a community built on rock, sustained by providence, and tested by wilderness.

Archer Torrey had spent years developing a curriculum he called “The Three Laboratories of the Christian Life,” a framework for understanding the Christian's relationship to God, to fellow believers, and to the world. But in the classrooms of St. Michael's Seminary, theory outpaced experience. The students, Archer and Jane both came to realize, had goals that diverged from the curriculum's intent. The laboratories existed on paper. What was needed was a place where they could exist in practice.

We should go out into the wilderness, far from the cities, and develop a farm and a community of Christians and have the laboratory we had only talked about at the seminary.

— Archer Torrey, as recorded by Jane Grey Torrey

On May 10, 1964, a plot of mountainous land was acquired near the village of Hasami in Kangwon Province. A six-week tent camp followed, with volunteers clearing ground, cutting timber, and laying foundations. When the Torrey family moved into the first completed level of their mountainside house on December 21, 1965, they arrived to a structure anchored—quite literally—on an immovable rock that the builders had tried and failed to remove. The rock, too large to excavate, became the building's foundation. During the rainy season that followed, the side of the house not attached to rock shifted six inches. The side anchored to it held firm.

The metaphor was not lost on anyone.

From the beginning, Jesus Abbey operated on a single financial principle: “If we want to do something, and there is money to do it, we will go ahead. If there is no money, we will back off and seek His will again.” No fundraising campaigns. No endowment. The community would depend entirely on God's provision, using the presence or absence of resources as a gauge of divine direction. Over the decades, this principle was tested repeatedly—and repeatedly confirmed. As inflation in Korea rose at ten percent annually, provision for the Abbey increased by twenty percent or more each year.

Daily life at the Abbey established a rhythm that has continued for over forty years: Holy Communion each morning, intercessory prayer at noon, and evening prayer with Bible study. These three daily services, totaling approximately two and a half hours, constitute a tithe of the community's waking time—a practice the founders considered non-negotiable. Between services, the community engaged in farming, construction, dairying, cooking, and the constant physical maintenance that mountain living demands.

The Abbey's history is not a story of unbroken tranquility. A tent fire destroyed supplies and living quarters on February 14, 1966. A carpenter hired to help build the house attacked the community with a gang. Police investigations, village hostility, and internal conflicts tested the experiment at every stage. In 1968, 120 North Korean guerrillas landed at Uljin and followed the Partisan Trail through the mountains surrounding the Abbey, bringing the ROK Army to camp on the common room floor for six weeks. Through each crisis, the community discovered what Jane Torrey would later describe as God's faithfulness to “not let his children be tempted beyond what they are able to bear.”

By 2005, four decades after the first tent was pitched on a mountainside, Jesus Abbey had grown to thirty-five regular members, fifteen novices, and thirty-five children. Its fortieth postulants' class enrolled seventeen people. Self-support projects—farming, dairy operations, and light industry—provided sixty percent of the community's income, with the remaining forty percent arriving as what Jane Torrey called “manna from heaven.” Up to ten thousand visitors came each year to pray, study, receive counsel, and experience life in community.

The Watershed Grange, a 160-acre detached farm acquired in 1976 at the three-way watershed divide between the Naktong River, the Han River, and the Fifty Creeks drainage, extended the Abbey's agricultural and training vision across the mountain landscape. Villages between the Abbey and its affiliated Kaljon Priory, once without any churches, now had congregations.

We have lived by miracles all these years. This is God's table in the wilderness.

— Jane Grey Torrey

Jesus Abbey remains what it was intended to be from its founding: a laboratory of Christian community, a place of intercession, and a demonstration that radical dependence on God is not merely a theological proposition but a way of life that can be sustained across generations. The story recorded here, drawn from Jane Grey Torrey's documentary account, is offered not as hagiography but as historical testimony—an institutional record of what happened when a small community chose to build on rock and trust the Provider.