A description from Elizabeth O’Connor about the beginnings of the Servant Leadership[ School

Movable Theoblogical: SLSS Ch3: A Place of Dialogue, Reflection, and Affirmation

In the midst of our own communities a Servant Leadership School has emerged to work with all the issues involved in servant leadership. Located in the Adams Morgan area, the School is surrounded by nine of the missions of the church. The tower building is gracious in design, but the streets themselves and the missions are its extended classrooms. The deepest learnings of our church communities have come from their intermingling with the oppressed of the world, so it is natural that we would want to make that same opportunity available to other church communities.

A central understanding of the School is that participants are committed to being in ongoing relationships with oppressed people. In one sense the School is an ecumenical undertaking by Christians from many places who have awakened to the pain and oppression in their own situations, and been given a vision of a more merciful world. They want a place where they can struggle with others for the renewal of their individual lives and institutions. One can imagine that in time the School might become a think tank and a feel tank where Christians from all walks of life will come together to dream and plan and engage in the struggle of the abused and suffering of the earth, and to ask what it means to pitch our tents in their midst.

The Servant Leadership School is not unlike our own Schools of Christian Living except that it is -wider in scope and will draw upon the leadership of the larger church, as well as our nine faith communities. The core curriculum is composed of five dimensions: Servant Leadership, Community Building, Spiritual Grounding, Call or Vocation, and Personal Response to Being with the Oppressed. Other courses will help us to work with equally profound areas of our lives, concerns that we did not worry about before we became grown-ups. They include such vast and varied subjects as money, authority and power, social and economic justice, growing old, death and dying, addictions, the education of our feelings and sensibilities.

Servant Leaders, Servant Strucures, p. 91