September 1995
Servant Leaders, Servant Structures
by Elizabeth O'Connor
There was one book that made it to our family bookshelf from my grandfather's library. It was "A Call to Commitment", witten in 1963 by Elizabeth O'Connor. It was a first in a series of books telling a storied history of one of the most remarkable Christian communities I have ever known. Other books were to follow: Journey Inward, Journey Outward, The New Community.
In the summer of 1976, when I was 20, a group of people from my high school youth group at the First Baptist Church in Owensboro, Ky. began talking about Call to Commitment. I remembered seeing this on the bookshelf in our family room, and took it up and began to read a story that was to become a story around which I would gather with many people in the future, including a couple of visits to observe and dialogue with these people in the flesh.
Servant Leaders, Servant Structures is both a look back and a look ahead. It summarizes in the first two chapters some of the earlier history since the inception of the The Church of the Saviour, and the third chapter tells some of the story of what has happened since 1975 when The New Community was published.
I approach this offering of this work with a great respect for the gift of writing and story telling that is Elizabeth O'Connor's. In my attempt to bring this story to the Internet, I hope I can effectively "link" it within the World Wide Web to related stories and activities of groups now working to bring about the same kind of community which is centered in the Christ which they proclaim and attempt to incarnate in the life of the society around them.
