A passage from Chapter 2 of Call to Commitment, on “the integrity of Church membership”

The Church of the Saviour is an attempt to recover in one local expression of the Church Universal something of the vitality and life, vigor and power of the early Christian community. It was founded on the conviction that the greatest contribution the church can make in any time is in being the church-” a community of reconciled and reconciling persons,” a community of the Holy Spirit, a people in which Christ dwells, a people who have a newness of life and who are transmitters of this newness.

We understand the Christian Church as the gathering of those who are committed to Christ and to one another in the living of a common life. We am to be pioneers, missionaries, evangelists, teachers, and prophets-represematives of the new humanity. The proclamation of the gospel is not alone for a little official group of people which is called clergy. It is for ail who have met the Pioneer and Perfecter of our faith, who know that Christ is on the march. The world may be fearful and anxious and weary, but we am not weighted by that world. We are following One who has unfathomable resources and One who makes them available to us and who says, “You must set new norms for life so that people can see what life can be. This is your task. Your primary vocation is to enter into covenant relationships with others who have also met this Christ — to be that new society into which others can be drawn.”

Call to Commitment, Elizabeth O’Connor, 1963 p.23