BETHANY SANCTUARY & Rev. PFL!

 BETHANY named for the biblical home of the sisters Martha and Mary, who according to the Gospel of Luke once received Jesus and his disciples as guests at their table. As the story continues, Mary sat and listened to the master's teachings while Martha rushed around the kitchen preparing the meal.
Christian tradition has it that the sisters are symbols of the two heights to which women may aspire: prayer and service. Jesus told Mary she'd chosen the better part, prayer, but Rev. PFL, perhaps not wanting to decide between the two, chose to name his novitiate for the place where both ideals were shown to the world was a fitting name for another reason as well: the biblical Bethany was also home to martha and Mary's brother Lazarus, whom Jesus called forth from the tomb..
For Rev. PFL, Bethany Hill was the beginning of the adjoining the noviate, He had erected many churches in
which novices took the habit and became full members of the community; connected to that stood love & peace.
Rev. PFL  failed to realize his vision. He had dreamed of running hospitals, charities, orphanages and more schools. Having died to the world when He arrived at Bethany as an old man, after forty years spent away
running the churches, the schools and orphanage of the Mission's brick and motar buiding boom, to return to die again.
That's a part of the Lazarus story that goes unmentioned in scripture, that inevitable second death.
Advertised or not, though, it would not have surprised the society.
One October Saturday 2000, the scene at Bethany Sanctuary resembled nothing so much as a funeral: a line of dark cars approaching the driveway at midday: a presence processing of families reaching the end of quiet rides from the cities, the surrounding towns and abroad. In every seat a man and a woman sat in their sunday best.