From the Rabbit Room to North Wind Manor – A Twenty-Year Story (and a Weekend I’ll Never Forget)
Hello, Praying Friend!
This story has a bit of a backstory, so grab a coffee — I’ll wait.
Ready? Okay, here we go.
In Oxford, England, beginning in the early 1930s, a loose-knit group of writers and Oxford professors began meeting weekly — first in formal sessions at Magdalen College, and eventually in the more relaxed setting of a pub called The Eagle and Child, known affectionately to locals as “the Bird and Baby.” They called themselves the Inklings. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were the most famous among them, but the circle also included Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, and others — friends who gathered not for fame, but for fellowship.
Tucked at the back of that pub was a small, private lounge with worn leather chairs and a fireplace that had clearly heard a few centuries of stories. Over the doorway hung a modest sign: The Rabbit Room.
It was there, on Monday or Tuesday lunchtimes, that these men read their unfinished manuscripts aloud to one another — and didn’t always like what they heard. Tolkien was famously blunt about Lewis’s drafts. Lewis gave as good as he got. But out of that honest, sometimes brutal critique came two of the most beloved bodies of fantasy literature ever written — The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. In June of 1950, in that same back room, Lewis handed out the proofs for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for his friends to read.
A Wish Twenty Years in the Making
In February of 2020 — just weeks before the world as we knew it shut down — a lifelong wish of mine came true. Debi and I sat down for a proper English lunch in that very room. I still pinch myself thinking about it. To sit where Lewis and Tolkien once argued, laughed, and shaped stories that would outlive them by a century — there’s nothing quite like it.
An Idea Crosses the Atlantic
In 2006, singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson made his own pilgrimage to that same Rabbit Room. He came home with more than a good memory — he came home with a question: What if there was a place like this here, in the States? A gathering spot for Christian artists, writers, and musicians to do the same kind of work — encouraging, critiquing, creating together?
That question became a vision. And over the next two decades, God assembled the pieces — the right people, the right place, and a growing community of artists hungry for exactly this kind of fellowship. The Rabbit Room was born in 2006 — twenty years ago this year.
Their mission, simply put: cultivating and curating story, music, and art to nourish Christ-centered communities for the life of the world.
From an Idea to a Movement
What started as a vision has become something much bigger:
- Hutchmoot — an annual gathering in Nashville where artists and audiences come together for teaching, music, and community — eventually grew large enough to spawn a UK version as well.
- North Wind Manor — a permanent home in Nashville, built to house the growing ministry and give it roots.
- A community of more than 2,000 Christ-centered who support the Rabbit Room monthly.
- Over 18,000 members connected through their Facebook group, and more than 32,000 followers on Facebook alone.
All of it traces back to one small room, behind one pub, in one corner of Oxford — and a question one songwriter brought home with him.
Ten Days Before the Wedding
Twenty years after that first vision took shape, my son Nate and I found ourselves walking into the middle of it — less than ten days before he gets married. (Can I throw a bachelor party for two, or what?)
As a member of the online Rabbit Room community, I’d been invited to take part in two things: an open house at North Wind Manor, and an invite-only members’ gathering the following day. Nate came along for what turned into a full weekend. We started with the open house, wandering through the space that’s become the physical heart of this whole movement.
One moment was just mind boggling: In the library at North Wind Manor sits a fireplace — the actual fireplace, hauled out of Tolkien’s bedroom in England and reassembled here in Nashville. The fire was lit when I saw it. I just stood there for few minutes. The same hearth that once warmed the room where Middle-earth was dreamed up is now warming a library full of people still telling stories because of him. Twenty years and an ocean apart, and somehow it all connects back to the same fire.
Tolkien's bedroom fireplace from England, now in the library at North Wind Manor.
That evening we caught an Andrew Peterson concert at the Ryman — open to the public, and packed with people who clearly loved his music as much as we did. I wasn't prepared for how moving it was. Over the years I've caught a couple of shows at the Ryman, and the room has a way of holding sound that no other room quite does — that old wooden church-turned-theater seems built for exactly this kind of night. Andrew sang the songs that have shaped so much of the Rabbit Room's story, and at the end of the concert the whole room — close to two thousand people — sang the doxology together. It wasn't a performance so much as a shared exhale.
I looked over at Nate at one point and just felt grateful — grateful for the music, grateful for the room, grateful to be sitting next to my son less than ten days before he started a whole new chapter of his life. There are concerts you attend, and there are concerts that put something back into you. This was the second kind.
Saturday was the members’ gathering: a full day of speakers, musicians, and conversations with people who’d traveled from all over to be part of it. Sunday morning we grabbed breakfast at Proper Bagel before heading to services at Church of the Redeemer.
It was, without exaggeration, one of the best weekends I’ve had with my son. Quiet, full, unhurried — the kind of time together that doesn’t need anything dramatic to happen to matter.
The Takeaway
I almost didn’t write this part, because it’s tempting to end a story like this with “and that’s how Dad and Nate spent a great weekend together” — but that’s not really the point, and it’s not why I’m telling you any of this.
Here’s what I actually want you to walk away with: this entire twenty-year story started with one person noticing something good, and asking, “What if this existed somewhere else, for other people?”
Andrew Peterson didn’t sit in that Rabbit Room and think about himself. He thought about the writers, musicians, and artists who didn’t have a place like it — and he spent the next two decades helping build one. He couldn’t have known it would become Hutchmoot, or North Wind Manor, or a community of thousands. He just knew the question was worth chasing…
That’s the invitation here, for you and for me. Most of us aren’t going to start a ministry that reaches tens of thousands of people. But all of us have a “what if” sitting somewhere — a gathering that doesn’t exist yet, a person who needs encouragement, a small thing we could build or start or simply show up for, that might ripple farther than we’ll ever see.
The Rabbit Room didn’t start as a strategy. It started as a question, asked by just one ordinary person paying attention and asking…
What’s your “What If?”
Sharing Wonder,
