Ever since the Church of the Saviour community came into existence more than 25 years ago, it has been changing and evolving. Each new stage of growth has demanded more of us, raised harder questions, and tested us at deeper levels than the one that went before. Seven years have gone by since the fateful year of 1968 when rioting in our streets tore veils from our eyes and let us see in searing ways some of the misery of the oppressed. At that time we struggled with our lifestyle and the disciplines that would help us to be a more radically committed people. We were laying the foundations for Jubilee Housing and other new missions, as well as deepening and expanding the ministries of existing groups.
When the seventh year, the year of remission, drew near in our own congregation, Gordon Cosby -- founder, leader, spiritual father and brother for the Church of the Saviour community, since its founding in 1947 -- made a statement to the Council that was to involve us in a radically new structuring of our life. His words came at the close of a long meeting:
I have just time to raise a few questions concerning my own sense of call, which is intimately related to the whole community. I have come to the place where it is not possible to carry out responsibly what I have traditionally been doing, and also to help create new structures that have to do with people at the point of oppression. Now we have 110 members and 40 intern members, and with it a tremendous proliferation of corporate structures -- legal and otherwise.
As the membership has grown and the missions have expanded, the time demand on us all has increased. The questions raised with me are, “When does a community become so large that it cannot operate on the basis of human dimensions? How big should administrative units be? Can we keep on stretching without affecting the quality of work to which we are called?”
I do not feel that it is right for me to withdraw energy from new structures that we are just beginning to develop. Have I a right to withdraw energy from these to pastor the whole, and do any of us have this right? Or can we discover ways together to move into the future without losing our richness or diversity? Is it possible that we can divide into different combinations cohering around different worship centers and, in the process of creating the new, not lose that which we value? There are many, many people in the life of this community with rare gifts of leadership that are not being used.
I think we have to raise all these questions -- bring them into full consciousness. Otherwise, we grow larger and larger and struggle to hold it all together, and what happens, happens by default.
I am sensing an inability to be faithful to my call and also faithful to the structures that we now have. I see it as a developmental thing that every institution goes through. We as an organization have been blessed, and my guess is that leadership might be developed at an even deeper level than we have known it.
The brief statement was to alter the life of the Church of the Saviour as no other event had in its history. In the days that followed, our conversation centered around “splitting up” and “dividing.” Though we strove for a more positive expression of the issues we were confronting, these words best described what many of us were feeling and were often injected into the conversation.
A few did not agree that our problem was one of either size or complexity. Though these might be contributing factors, they felt that as the groups had developed an autonomous life, we had failed to be people in dialogue with each other, failed to wait for one another, failed to keep our covenant of prayer. They called for repentance before a change in structures. Mixed with feelings of joy and adventure were ones of betrayal and hurt.
In the early days of our deliberations some even felt that they had given their lives to build a community, the nature of which they had not fully understood. Family of faith, unlimited liability, brothers and sisters, life together, bearing other’s burdens, the unity of the body, one part not held in more esteem than the other were all concepts that had nurtured and sustained our lives and given to us a sense of safety that had issued in creativity, love of change, and zest for risk taking. These qualities had flourished in us -- enabling us to embrace all kinds of holy insecurity -- because we had believed in the permanency of a community.
But now, perhaps because this New Exodus awakened old fears of abandonment, we were not as sure any more that the call to build a world of justice and caring should be taken with so much seriousness. It was one thing to talk about these things and quite another to pass over ourselves from one way of life to another.
Freud had said woe to the person who tries to replace the charismatic leader. What about this leader of ours who was trying to replace or displace himself? How did we deal with all the wild clamorings that set in motion within and around us? What did we who were no longer children do with feelings of dependency that lingered on, the need and quest for a spiritual father and mother that every soul harbors. Night and day there had walked in our midst a man who had no limits around his giving, whose outpouring of life and spirit had energized our own lives and illuminated ordinary events. Who would do this for us now? Could we do it for ourselves? Would we give up our own missions and calls and set off for the ghetto after the loved leader, or could we tap some inner strength to choose our own way, claim our own very different paths? How much of the courage and faith that we thought was ours really belonged to him?
We did not always know when we were defending what should be held to, deepened, and extended or when we were falling into the sin of wanting to perpetuate an institution that, unlike the structures of the world, could not be concerned about enduring, but only about dying and death and rebirth. We dreaded being “among those who shrink back and are lost” and longed to be with those “who have the faith to make life our own” (Hebrews 10:39). What did it mean at this stage of our corporate life to be a pilgrim people? Morton speaks about the journey of faith from the security of what is known to the insecurity of what is unknown. We recalled how Abraham was led out from a place he called home, where normalcy prevailed and structures could be counted on to give stability, to a place that was known surely only in the words of Yahweh. Gradually dark clouds began to move away for some of us, and we began to talk less about what had been and to look with expectation to what might be.
We spoke more about small liberating communities that would be less encumbered by problems of maintenance and where time usually given to maintaining the unity and healthy functioning of a large organism could flow into the building of small liberating communities of caring, in which people could easily find a place, grow and stretch and be given a new name. Ever so slowly we too began to speak of the New Land to which our Lord was calling us and to learn once more to name Abraham as the father of our faith.
Eight of our members were chosen by the community and sent out to explore the New Land. They were asked to report back to the Council on what its shape might be and how the New Exodus might be made.
One option included selling all the properties of the church, letting the staff go, and centering our entire focus on building small groups, such as our own mission groups. Our purpose would be to form small communities of the people of God which would come out from the whole of society and culture in which we live and form the nuclei of the new society. Like the Assisi community begun by St. Francis and many others, we would endeavor to be sources of light and hope and to live in faithfulness to God’s call with values and a style of life which bore witness to our society of the gospel’s power. We would not only give up church property, we would share our own personal material wealth with the oppressed. We would do so because there had grown in us the confidence that therein lay the path of our own peace and our own experience of the community for which we were yearning. Hopefully, we might become a model for the world showing by the style of our life together a way that might ensure survival for all humankind in the decades ahead, as well as the way of human fulfillment and true liberation.
Such a fantasy was too threatening for some of us to live with for too long.
We put it aside, yet knowing in our hearts that whatever the way we chose as a community, issues had been raised that we would have to return to in the future.
After months of meeting, the New Land Servant Group was sent on a two-day retreat. At our Dayspring retreat farm, amid the surrounding which had so often opened our lives and hearts at new levels to God’s word for our individual pilgrimage, we began to sense together beckonings for our corporate way to the New Land.
Wes Michaelson, who had been the scribe of all of our meetings, penned the following report, which was read aloud at the next meeting of the Council. In part it read:
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 his new community -- those who are his body, molded by his Spirit. To build such a community of faith is our abiding call and a 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 transformations of our lives into our 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 focused us toward these four dimensions: 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.
Throughout our times together, the Servant Group for the New Land has repeatedly focused on three elements which describe our community’s current situation: the size and complexity of our present corporate structures, the over-burdening of our pastoral leadership, and the lack of full faithfulness to our covenant. Our problem is one of the multiplicity of demands, resulting in confusion, the dissipation of energy, and erosion of our sense of community.
Our task, then, is to discover structures which will better enable us to live out our corporate call. These structures should provide us with a sense of clarity, new and focused energy for outward mission and inward growth, and a deeper sense of Christian community.
We believe that those structures can best be created by the formation of sister communities, which will each function as separate congregations, comprised out of various clusters of the 22 existing mission groups in the Church of the Saviour. These congregations would be bound by deep spiritual ties because of their common parentage, but would be legally and organizationally independent. They would be separate churches, closely linked by history, ongoing fellowship, potentially inter-linking missions, and other factors.
We would expect that all mission groups, and thus the entire church membership, would find their lives lived out in the context of one of these communities.
We would advise, then, that the existing Church of the Saviour be reconstituted into at least three or more sister communities of faith, with separate leadership, council, budget, organization, worship, and membership.
We believe that such an action will restore clarity to our structures and purposes of corporate life, will enable new energies and creativity to be released for the work of the kingdom and the deepening of our life in Christ, and will foster the context for us all to experience and build deeper Christian community. The bonds of spiritual kinship and cooperative mission which would be nurtured between these sister communities could and we hope would also be extended toward other communities of Christ’s people all over the country and all over the world.
It is our conviction that these directions will enable us to live out more fully our call to be faithful members of Christ’s body.
In the congregation our members began to sound calls for the formation of new sister communities, or faith communities as we sometimes called them. Everyone listened attentively to hear if in these calls they were being addressed by an inner Voice. One community began to form around Jubilee Housing, another around the Potter’s House, and another around Dunamis, whose members are called to be in a prophet/pastor relationship with those in government. A small “tribe” set out to explore the possibility of founding a community on 52 acres of land on the Shenandoah River. They have named the community Riverwind Farm and promise that they will bring fresh vegetables into the inner-city missions and provide a way-station for weary workers. Nine adults and four children have made the down payment on a six unit apartment house in the inner-city. This group, of which I am a member, calls itself The Eighth Day Community. We are turning the basement into an inner-city retreat room, and planning ways that we might provide educational programs for all the sister communities, as well as for other faith communities who struggle for their place in the liberation movement.
As these calls are issued, others, with a kind of fervent waiting on God, are struggling to know what their places are. No one is left sitting on the sidelines. Everyone is engaged in a passionate way. Each of us is looking at our present missions with a critical absorption, trying to think what are the structures and forms for the years ahead. In this search we reach for the themes that have run through our lives, knowing that if we can discover where our energies have flowed, where we have felt most alive, we may discover hints of where our God is calling us.
More and more of our number begin to know that, despite the changes in organization and geography, we will have forever the love of one another. As we take the risk of choosing, take the risk of acting, take the risk of new commitments, we are beginning to know a new sense of freedom. We are even beginning to believe that we may belong more deeply to each other, and be more available for dialogue with our brothers and sisters across the world.
This article is excerpted from Elizabeth O'Connor's then-latest book, The New Community, published in the fall of 1976 by Harper and Row.
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