Connie Elliott of San Francisco cites Eugene Peterson’s
A Long Obedience in the Same Direction as particularly apropos
for the way she endeavors to live her life and for the way in which God
faithfully sought her and loved her.
Constance K. Elliott
And as the newest member of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, she sees
the Lay Committee’s same obedience to faithfully serve Jesus and
the Presbyterian Church as a place where she is privileged to be.
Elliott’s relationship with the Lay Committee began at an early
age. Her father, Bill Kiesewetter, was an original member of the Lay
Committee in 1965 and she remembers conversations with him about why the
group was even necessary.
“Where I was in my lack of understanding of what was going on in
the Presbyterian Church at large those 36 years ago is strikingly close
to what I see in the lives of numbers of young Presbyterians today,”
she said.
Elliott’s own role with the Lay Committee began to emerge 18 months
ago during a chance meeting with Parker Williamson, editor in chief of
The Layman, on a ship in Greece filled with friends of Chuck
Colson and Prison Fellowship.
Elliott said she was startled to notice the name tag of the man beside
her. She introduced herself “in somewhat groupie fashion”
saying, “I just want you to know that not only have I always wanted
to meet you, but you and
The Layman are the main, maybe the
only, reasons I have stayed a Presbyterian for these many years.”
When asked six months later to join the board, “no one could have
been more surprised than I,” she said. “The work of the Lay
Committee is seldom revered among San Francisco churches but I believe
that it is crucial to the survival of a Christ-centered PCUSA.”
Elliott called finding a strong, evangelical Presbyterian church in San
Francisco proper “a long journey.” She and her husband Tom
joined First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley when they first moved to
the Bay Area. “When we finally concluded that God had planted us in
San Francisco for the foreseeable future, we felt called to worship in
the city where he had put us,” she said. The Elliotts have been
elders and deacons and have taught Sunday school at Calvary Presbyterian
and now at St. John’s Presbyterian Church. He owns and runs
Research Data Group, Inc. a small technology company that supplies
financial information over the Internet, and it was this company in
different form,
Research Magazine, for which Connie was a
business editor for nearly twenty years. They have three sons.
“We are thoroughly committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ and
renewal within the denomination,” she said, adding that what has
been most challenging in pursuing that end has been seeing that the
average Presbyterian churchgoer knows and understands what is
transpiring in the church both on the local and national level.
The eldest of three children, Elliott calls herself “straight-arrow,
accomplishment oriented, and one who seldom strayed far from family
expectations. I understood from my parents that though I had had the
privilege of growing up in a Christian home, there are no grandchildren
in the kingdom of God.”
She has a bachelor’s degree from Smith College and a master’s
from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
She spent several summers at Inter Varsity’s Pioneer Camp in
Ontario, Canada and it was there in 1955 that she asked Christ into her
life. “He heard my prayer without a doubt that summer,” she
said, “but allowing him to become Lord in the corners of my life
that I thought I could handle quite well myself has been a lifelong
battle.”