From, The Layman, Volume 35, Number 1
Board member follows in father’s footsteps
Paula R. Kincaid , Posted Friday, Feb 8, 2002
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.
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 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.”