For my book report in CF526, my partner Daryl and I were assigned to read Servant Leaders, Servant Structures by Elizabeth O'Connor. It's a book about the Church of the Saviour in Washington D.C. written from the perspective of a woman who was on staff there for a number of decades.After reading this, we were assigned to present the essence of the book to the class using one of six learning styles. Some of the other groups were musical, intrapersonal, or visual learning styles but we rolled the dice and were the lucky winners of the "logical" learning style. This was tricky because this book is entirely a narrative. It rarely even reflects on why decisions were made in the church it is surveying, and it certainly doesn't lay out a "logical" reasoning for events in the book. So it took us doing some digging to logically analyze the strategy of the church and extract some logical gems of knowledge for the class.
One of the logical items we saw was how Gordon Crosby, the pastor of Church of the Saviour, used his experience of breaking soldiers into chaplaincy groups when he was an Army Chaplain as a model for the church he planted. Every person in the church was invited to be a part of a smaller group where they could be in covenant with other believers, be challenged to live missionally and develop their inner prayer and devotional life.
This model allowed each member of the church to be in contact in their daily life with the shepherd of their group and their missional project. These projects took the form of homes for at-risk people, a coffeehouse/ministry center and a retreat center.
Another logical model the church used was not taking financial offerings in centrally and then re-distributing them to the projects, but having each person tithe towards their groups own projects so that each person had a time and money investment in the project as they prayed for it and were challenged by the working community relationships needed to run the project.
Although this book isn't a nonfiction instructional type of book it does illuminate how allowing each person to be a servant leader and live within these servant structures developed the people of this church into truly committed followers of Jesus. And it doesn't take much of a leap to see how these concepts can be applied to many other churches.
