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The Church of the Saviour in Washington DC

(See the text of the book Servant Leaders, Servant Structures for a more elaborate story)

Throught the writings of Elizabeth O'Connor, I was driven to more thought and reflection upon the nature of the church than via any other written works. Add to these reading experiences a couple of personal visits to this community, and the countless testimony I have shared with friends about the realities I see in this fellowship, and this people of The Church of the Saviour in its many expressions have been a key model for my own hopes for the church.

IN fact, COS has also been a source of great frustration in that I have found myself to be looking at the vast majoity of expressions of "church" in this country and found it severely lacking; even deadening, as I cannot help but see the lack of a sense of commitment to community that exists in the structure of church instititions today.

I have scanned descriptions from brochures that I got on my last visit to COS , as well as a brief but inspiring history of the community and its expereinces in Elizabeth O'Connor's Servant Leaders, Servant Structures . The story herein lies ripe with possibilities for providing a springboard for exploring here, online, what it means to be church, and how that might be experienced, and how this might be somehow enabled in some way online. I feel that there are ways to build a bit of community online, because I have been doing so in the past two years.

A little over a year ago, an online friend, whom I recently visited face to face in the DC area, tallked about starting an online support group patterned after some of the principles of the Mission Groups of the Church of the Saviour. We started the group and invited some people to join, but were uncertain as to how to proceed, as well as caught up in our own individual efforts to provide a living for our families and so found the energy for such an endeavor in too short supply to sustain us.

I wonder now if after some further forays into cyberspace by a certain band of seekers after community wherever it can be found, if we might be seeing a new set of circumstances and capabilities for interaction in the World Wide Web. I want to try to tell the story of this community which has been such a challenge and an source of renewal for me whenever I spend any siginificant amount of time considering what they have accomplished, and how they have done so.