The following is a “selected reading” of sorts, from the below link, which is from Servant Leaders, Servant Structures. This narrative describes the struggle to reorganize the Church of the Saviour when they realized that they may be getting too large (an almost alien notion to us in the age of the “mega-church”, especially since this came when they had reached a whopping 110 members).
The following section describes the overarching call the church feels as a community; the overarching narrative from which this community has built an identitiy for itself.
Our call must be our starting point. That call is to be a community centered in resolute faithfulness to Jesus Christ. It is to be s new community-those who are his body, molded by his Spirit. To build such a community of faith is our abiding call and revolutionary action.
That call encompasses the marks which our community has discovered through its history to be true and essential to its identity as God’s people: the corporate commitments of spiritual discipline, the nurture of mission groups as primary crucibles of community, inner healing, growth and transformation of our lives into true maturity in Christ, and the sacrificial outpouring of our life together in mission to the brokenness of the world.
We believe that our call as a community has four directions: First, to Christ’s church throughout the world; we are part of the ecumenical church, and want to give ourselves to its life. Second, to the stranger in our midst; we are called to bring Christ’s love to all those whose lives intersect at any point with ours. Third, to the poor and oppressed of this world. Fourth, to the building of our own common life; all else must flow from our call to be God’s people, celebrating and nurturing ourselves as Christ’s Body.
It’s hard to know how to begin to desctibe a church like this. The above sense of call has defined this community since 1947, and even prior to that as the seeds of such a vision began to plant themselves in Gordon Cosby as he couseled soldiers as a chaplain in World War II prior to their “going out” and never knowing if they will return. These experiences began to pur themselves into Gordon’s growing awareness that there was a pressing need to provide a supportive, alternative community with which people can face the world as it is, and yet be associated with a people who see a world that IS as falling under the lordship of Christ, and being called to represent that difference. To define what the “darkness” is by being light. To dilineate what “separation” is by being a reconciling people.
The above descriptions of call– as recalled by a “New Land” committee charged with exploring alternative and reformative structures in order to move on and grow— is one that had been hammered out over the 30 years previous to 1976. The three books by Elizabeth O’Connor that represent a spirtual journey of this people over those years (Call to Commitment, JOurney Inward, Journey Outward, and The New Community explore in depth several of the turning points and new callings, and also the process of discovering how to wait for call. The beginnings of a School of Christian Living which evolved into the Servant Leadership School was also established in the first years to provide a nessessary structure to hold one another to being formed by the Scriptures, and by the community reading those Scriptures. Structures of accountability developed which placed before them the expectation of MUTUAL ACCOUNTABILITY, and was the underlying impetus for the Journey Inward , the neccessary support and enabling structure for the Journey Outward, the mission that resulted from the response to call, which came about as a community on a Journey Inward together, committed to enabling one another to recognize their gifts, which finds one ready to “plug in” to sdome mission at the point of need in the world; envisioned as a CALL to respond to the world at that point. There have been over the years, many a “call sounded”, when a member of the community feels a call to act on some need, and puts this before the community as a “sounding the call”. If this call sounds like good news to one or more, then a mission group is begun. “Sounding like good news” is an experience of “feeling the same call”; that this activity was called into being because there is a “set” of people with particular gifts without whom this mission would not be the call that it is. This is the “format” in which an awesome number of misisons , incredible in their impact by such a relatively small organization, have come into being. Gordon describes it as simply as this: “There were people out on the street, freezing to death, and so came into being Jubilee Housing. There was a pressing need for work, a nd so came into being Jubilee Jobs. There were pressing health care needs, and so came into being Columbia Road Health Services. These missions continued coming. A “Potter’s House” group began a coffeehouse that was the become the inspiration for one at my church when I was in high school, and I had MANY MANY formative experiences there my 4 years in high school. There is now a “Potter’s House Church” that is one of the sister communities that came about in the “reoganization” that I mentioned at the outset of this post.
The theme is simply put, but very rarely do we see such a mechanism of response to the call which is surely sounded from the edges of the Kingdom of God upon which the people of God move from that which comes to them from the life of the Kingdom out into the world where the Kingdom is leaven.
This is a great post, thanks. Hearing about how the Church of the Saviour was faithful in enacting the works of mercy in their locale is a joyous, woundrous thing!