The Move to Washington, D.C.

As some of you have no doubt already heard, the Post American and our entire community will be moving, in early September, from Chicago to Washington, D.C. When we begin our journey eastward next month, it will have been five years that we have lived and worked in and around Chicago. They have been very full years in which each of our lives has been shaped in decisive ways. These next years of our life together in Washington hold the promise of new beginnings, new growth and development, new visions and ministries, new directions.

Five years ago, many of us met for the first time as students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, a seminary just north of Chicago. The life in community that we now share together began at that point. What started as a fellowship of a handful of single, male seminarians has grown into the embryonic community that will be learning to share a common life together in Washington and is a group of 12 married adults, five single adults, four children, and others who are exploring their relationship to the community. The Post American, first published in late 1971, began as a quarterly tabloid and has developed into a monthly magazine with a broadly ecumenical, national, and international readership.

Our initial attempts at community came to failure and despair. We slowly began to see that we had been seeking to build community ourselves, with our own human hands and good intentions, and with our own conceptions of what community was supposed to be. It was out of our inability to bring about the community that we so desperately desired that we were driven to a growing dependence upon prayer, worship, and the action of the Holy Spirit to create community among us. Only as we are being freed to set aside our own agendas and conceptions of community by receiving community as a gift from God have we begun to see our relationships healed and our love and trust for one another grow. The confidence and expectation of God’s active presence among us is now the enabling power that is slowly creating a common shared life among us. The new people that have come have brought new life and gifts that strengthen us deeply.

For some time, we have shared a commitment to live and work in a poor urban neighborhood. We have wanted such a neighborhood to settle into and call home, to share the life of the people there, to raise our children, to serve in ways that would enable human and community development to take place, to help create new alternatives in the city, to begin to learn to live the common life of the church in a situation of poverty and violence. A little over a year ago, we moved into Uptown, a poor, racially mixed community on the north side of Chicago, because it seemed to be a place that provided the opportunities we sought. However, it has become clear during our short stay in Uptown that the pace of economic development and speculation is moving so quickly that, in a few short years, the poor will no longer be able to live in Uptown and will be replaced by affluent young whites whose presence will transform the area into another lucrative center for Chicago’s young hip culture. Condominiums, shopping and apartment complexes, new businesses, and a new city college are all underway. The entire area has been bought up by a few wealthy bankers and speculators. By the time we came, it was already too late to turn the tide and the poor had lost their homes again. We felt that we needed to find somewhere else to establish our community.

The question of where to go became a very open one as most of us no longer had educational or vocational ties to Chicago and none of us had any roots here. For about six months, we entered into a process of discernment about the question, characterized by much prayer and reflection. We began to feel pulled eastward and eventually drawn to Washington, D.C. The final decision came less through an analytical process of weighing the pros and cons and more as a result of a growing sense among us all that Washington, D.C., was the right place for us to be. It seemed rather ironic, at first, being a group that holds little confidence in the American political system and has come to question the wisdom of viewing the exercise of political power as the road to meaningful and fundamental change on both biblical and historical grounds. Change comes, we suspect, more through the witness of creative and prophetic minorities who refuse to meet the system on its own terms but rather act out of an alternative social vision upon which they have based their lives. Such a definition of the church seems, to us, more consistent to the New Testament. Slowly, we came to believe that, perhaps, the most appropriate place for such a community was in the midst of an environment characterized by urban conflict and the idolatry of political power rather than a place more withdrawn from such things.

Our initial interest in Washington was the possibilities for finding the kind of neighborhoods we felt called to. It is in such a neighborhood that we will begin. Also an important factor was the many relationships with other Christians in the city and the potential for sharing and cooperation with other Christian communities and churches in the city with whom we already have identification.

Though the choice of location was initially more for community reasons, the new directions and developments for the Post American now being discussed editorially make Washington a good location for the publication. Increasingly, our commitment is to the creation of a publication whose vocation is the reporting and discerning of the times through eyes of biblical faith. We want to take both the reporting and the discerning functions more and more seriously. This means growth in new areas which we will be discussing in our issues this fall. We will be adding staff editors, correspondents around the country and in various parts of the world, and new contributing editors. We will shortly be asking for your feedback on many questions related to the expanding vision of the publication.

These past five years have been filled with excitement and disappointment, with deep joy and real pain, with both healing and brokenness, with clear vision and confused frustration, with many things to be thankful for and much failure to confess. Our future together will be filled with all of these. We will continue to pray for the discernment to understand the next step we are to take and the courage to take it. Our support now comes from taking those steps together and our confidence and hope comes from the promise of God’s action among us, transforming us into a new people.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.