Crucible of Community

This issue of Sojourners marks our first five years of publishing. The Post American (our former name) was first published in the fall of 1971. Since that time, a community has emerged to become the foundation for the publication as well as the basis for a wide range of other ministries.

We felt it would be appropriate to respond to the questions we are often asked about the community and to reflect on the past five years. Wes Michaelson interviewed Jim Wallis, Joe Roos, Jackie Sabath and Bob Sabath--all who have been in the community since the early days and who are now part of the leadership of the fellowship.

Wes: Could you talk about the circumstances which brought about the publication of the Post-American?

Jim: We have to begin in the fall of 1970, a whole year before the magazine was published, when seven or eight of us first met as seminary students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, north of Chicago. We had come from very diverse backgrounds, all the way from the radical student movement and antiwar organizing to very conservative evangelical colleges. Our common struggle became to understand what it meant to be biblical Christians in the present American situation. There was a catalytic explosiveness in the coming together of our many backgrounds and experiences which resulted in the publication of the Post-American in the fall of 1971.

Wes: What were the personal political and spiritual journeys that brought each of you together?

Joe: During college my relationship to Christ became more meaningful and took deeper root. I had become involved with an Inter-Varsity group on campus, and in that environment the deepening of my faith took a personal orientation, but not also a political or social direction.

The Cambodian invasion, about six months before we all got together at seminary, sparked my political awareness. I did a lot of reading and thinking about how the Christian faith, which had become so meaningful to me personally, could apply to political and social issues. I went to demonstrations and meetings and listened to what people said, and felt at the core certain moral issues that I could not toss aside. I began to read about this country’s involvement in the war, and to read authors like Jacques Ellul. So when I arrived at the seminary, I was eager to begin exploring these issues with other people.

Jackie: While at college, I became very conscious of the oppressiveness of the society in which we are living and began working in different ways to change it--working on an alternative local newspaper and in other activities. When I saw that we as an alternative group created the same oppressive patterns among ourselves, I began to consider the truths of the gospel. I saw among us an intellectual understanding of the injustice that existed in the world. But in my eyes we were creating the same kinds of injustice, and being violent to one another in our own relationships.

Shortly after the beginning of my Christian commitment, I came across a copy of the Post-American at our newspaper’s office. I was intrigued by it so much that I wrote a letter to the group at Trinity, visited them for several months, and eventually became a part of the community.

Jim: I first became involved in fighting racism while still in high school in Detroit. As the war in Vietnam heated up in the mid-sixties, I got deeply into antiwar activity. My involvement in the movement continued into college.

It was after I had helped organize the national student strike in the spring of 1970 (in response to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the shootings of students at Kent State and Jackson State) that my own searching led me to seriously examine the gospels.

I too found the values and assumptions of the social order being reproduced in new garb and new form in the counter-culture and the student movement. While I believe that our analysis of society was correct, we never had the basis or the resources to construct a way of living that was a genuine alternative.

So while our protest had political impact, ultimately it did not build a life force that could sustain itself, or that could really take root in people’s lives and in society. I searched for but didn’t find in the movement something that would be both a threat to the existing order of things and a deep affirmation of another whole order of things.

My coming to Christ was the result of my pilgrimage toward that vision. I was looking for a way of living that would provide the vehicle for a fundamental kind of change in the personal lives of people and in the corporate life of this society. With that I came to seminary, very fresh out of the student movement, and just at the beginning of my commitment to Christ.

Bob: My own beginning Christian experience was almost the direct opposite of
Jim’s. I had very little sensitivity to the broader social questions that concerned him. I grew up in a situation where the realities of social injustice simply did not touch my life.

My Christian faith began while listening to a Billy Graham television crusade as a high school student in the living room of my home in St. Louis. I do not sense that my life now is discontinuous with my beginning Christian commitment; but I see it as applying in more arenas of human experience, over greater areas of my life.

Prior to coming to Trinity, I graduated from Moody Bible Institute and Baylor University, a Southern Baptist college in Texas. During the heat of the Vietnam war, I knew only a handful of students who even thought of questioning it seriously. A number of those students worked on the same dish machine as I did, and that was the beginning of questioning: what does the Christian faith have to say to a war like that?

By the time I finished at Baylor, I felt a pervasive uneasiness with established religion, but I didn’t know the roots of it. I just had an undefined discomfort with the meaning of the Christian faith in my own experience.

Jim: Alienation and hope were two things that brought us together from the beginning. There was a deep sense of alienation that we all felt, both from the society and from the form of the established churches. Yet in the midst of that there was a deep hope about another possibility.

From the beginning, what we embarked upon was a search for an authentic Christian faith in our own time. The whole idea of incarnating the gospel in the world was core to all of our conversations. Our “doing theology,” as we used to say, had no meaning apart from understanding how that met and engaged the world in which we were living.

The issue dominating our consciousness at that point was the war. Some of us had been active against the war for a long time; others had just begun to be sensitized to its criminality. The war became an all-embracing concern.

The civil religion we spoke so much about grew from that, because it seemed to be the church’s spiritual sanction for the society’s warmaking, for its racism, for its economic assault against the poor. Overall, we sensed that the deeper question always was the lifestyle of the churches, which conformed almost completely to the social values perpetuating so much injustice. A total transformation of the Christian lifestyle in the American churches seemed to be needed.

The seminary context was a crucible for our own development. We had a sense of the offensiveness of the gospel from the beginning, partly because of the seminary’s response to us. They made an effort to repress and silence what we were about, and their reasons were financial. The administrators admitted to us that we were a problem because we were costing them money in lost contributions.

This attitude on the part of the seminary taught us a lot about the commitment and the priorities of the churches. Our first reaction was to reject the church as another one of the conformed institutions: a chaplain to all the injustice and profit-making violence of American society.

Wes: So that was the context out of which the Post-American emerged?

Jim: Yes. After a year of intense sharing together, of publishing leaflets and statements, and holding weekly worship celebrations, in the fall of 1971 we published the Post-American to express what was growing among us.

Joe: We had no experience in journalism. But we pooled about $700 among ourselves for the first issue. We printed 30,000 copies, got all the lists of names we could think of, and took off hiking across the country, dropping the magazines off at different places.

In those first exciting days when responses started to come in, we knew we were not alone in asking our questions. We started getting responses from large cross-sections of people, writing and expressing a lot of identification with the Post-American.

Bob: The whole spirit of the early days at seminary was illustrated by the first issue of the magazine: the front cover was a statue of Christ taken down from the cross, draped in an American flag, with the caption, “And they crucified him.”

Jim: There was a real enthusiasm in those early days. The response to the magazine began for the first time to demonstrate to us that the radical meaning of the gospel in our time that had so captured us was capable of touching the lives of literally thousands of people. The response began to create in us a sense of ministry and relatedness, a sense of a much wider community than we had experienced just with one another.

Wes: When did the relationships that you were sharing together begin to be more central to your activities?

Jim: Right from the beginning there was a relationship among us that was the foundation for the publication of the magazine, though we would never have called it community or even have been preoccupied with it as a goal. We were a very narrow group: single, male seminary students who were verbally, theologically, and intellectually oriented.

The excitement of new ideas and new directions was catalytic in the creation of our community at that point. The magazine gave a focus to our relationship; it became the task around which we gathered, and it wasn’t long before we began to think more deliberately about community.

We became aware of the broad historical tradition of communities committed to radical discipleship. Just as we were coming to know that we were not alone in the present, so we were realizing that throughout Christian history all of the convictions and commitments that were beginning to shape our life had been present in the lives of other believers before us.

Bob: By that fall, when the magazine was published, we had evolved into a worship group of about 30 people, the great majority of whom were seminary students. By that time, the group had grown from single male students to include married couples and single women. We would gather for worship and afterwards would discuss the direction of the magazine and a number of other different kinds of ministry. It was in that worship group, during the first year of publishing the magazine, that we began to talk seriously about community. Out of those discussions there grew among us a desire to move into a poor area of north Chicago and to purchase an apartment building to live in and to work together.

Jim: It was very immature and embryonic, but there was a sense among us that to talk of the church meant to talk of community. We shifted from a feeling of opposition to the church to a sense of a commitment to rebuild it: to transform its form and life. We had a growing sense of not being able to totally reject the church, and we began to talk about new ways of being the church.

That was a real shift in my thinking. It first came, I remember, while speaking at a conference on global justice and economics. Each of us was to put on a piece of paper what we were most fundamentally committed to, and pin it to the front of our shirt. I remember feeling a very deep sense about what I wrote: “to rebuild the church.”

It seemed, even then, that fundamental to the pursuit of economic justice was the rebuilding of the church, in the New Testament sense of what it means to be the body of Christ.

Wes: What were then some of the steps you took to bring that about?

Jim: The first year, we were together on campus at the seminary, living together in dormitories and using campus facilities for worship gatherings and seminars. The second year, while still students, we had a house off campus which was the center for the worship group of 30 people, and living quarters for about seven or eight of us.

Joe: In the spring of 1972, the third year of our being together, about 25 of us each made a deliberate commitment to be a part of the community that was taking shape and to live in an apartment building together.

Jim: At that point a long process of fragmentation began. We tried to talk specifically about what it was we were committing ourselves to. The discussions turned into arguments and real disagreements over what model of community we would choose.

Bob: One thing that held us together in the beginning was a “common enemy”
--an alienating seminary experience. We left the seminary and developed a common mission, which held us together for a while. But as we worked together, we began to fragment in making that mission specific. We were just not able to bear the intensity that developed.

We picked and chose from all sorts of different models of community that we had heard about, and we were going to combine these into a model of community that didn’t exist at any other place. There was a lot of pride and arrogance and ego invested in our own particular model.

Jim: Those discussions became increasingly argumentative and competitive, our egos became involved, and the talks became a forum for working out our personal conflicts and identity struggles. We were in reality more a collective of people than a community, because we still were very ideological about our life and how it was being shaped. We went on like that for a good two years, and began increasingly to feel people splitting off and going different directions.

The circle was drawn tighter and tighter, with a few of the “more committed” moving into the top floor of an apartment building in the city. But we had little sense of what we would now call the pastoral life or a lifestyle that nurtures one another.

There were a couple of major failures during that time. One was that the desire to conceptualize a model for community, theologically and theoretically, dominated our concerns and conversations. We gave endless hours of discussion to that task. We believed that somehow the key to community was finding the best model or structure for it. So we argued and ended up dividing over differences among us about what form or structure of life we would have.

The other was that our conceptual concern eclipsed our love and care for one another. Somehow our overriding sense of mission and our preoccupation with developing the perfect model of community substituted for the quality of our relationships to each other. As those relationships began to fragment, we came into increasing conflict, more competition, ego clash, hurt that we were never able to recognize and resolve, and we began to feel a spirit of self-destruction operating among us.

Jackie: That was such a difficult time because it was the very thing that I had seen happening back in the years when I wasn’t a Christian. I can look back now and see all of our immaturity, but I still don’t doubt the integrity of our struggle and our desire to see God’s church renewed. Here I thought that I had grabbed onto something that was true, but it wasn’t working. Something had gone wrong. I think each one of us dealt with that in very deep ways. We were all broken in deeper ways than we had ever been broken before.

Wes: That was the initial time when you each lost your innocence about community.

Jim: And literally began to lose faith and hope. We moved into the city with high hope and expectations. Then there was a deterioration of our life which went on for two years, at the end of which time we found ourselves unable not only to resolve differences among us about what our community would be, but, more basically, unable to pull ourselves out of the brokenness, distrust, hurt, and betrayal we felt toward one another.

Finally we formally dissolved the bonds and the commitments that had been between us. And at that point, people just moved in different directions, into new living situations, in which the desire and the consciousness about building community was just dropped. The great experiment had failed. Our life together had formally ended.

A number of us still had a lot of affection and history together, so we moved into clusters, with different ones of us together in the city. The magazine continued to be published, and even during that time, the magazine had a ministry in people’s lives all over the country. But there was an increasing despair in many of us about the shape and direction of that ministry.

I remember speaking during that time, being conscious of the brokenness and the fragmentation and the growing disintegration of our life together back home, and feeling myself to have less and less to say to others. On a couple of occasions I frankly admitted to the group of people I was speaking to that I wasn’t really sure I had anything to say to them at all. I would just stop talking in the middle of a speech and say that the words were hollow to me, they were empty, that my own spirit was broken and hurting, and all I could do was to invite them to come up where I was and sit together and talk about our struggles and our fears and our hopes.

We had thought we could create this thing through our own resources and ideas, and we had failed to do so. What was left was a lot of despair, a lot of hurt, a lot of brokenness between people. Our confidence was so strong that we had to be broken down to point zero in order for any rebuilding to take place.

It really came down to the fact that our concern for the “big” issues, the prophetic witness, just overwhelmed our coming to terms with the simplest of things: whether we were loving one another, whether we were serving one another, whether we were laying down our lives first for one another, as we were talking about the church laying down its life for the sake of the world. There was a real gulf between our concern for healing and justice in the world and the brokenness of the life that we shared with one another.

In our apartment we didn’t talk of community or use the word. We just felt a desperate need to turn to God in a way we had never done before. We just began to pray together.

Wes: How did each of you deal with your despair and the failure of your efforts?

Jackie: I was driven to the need to be very much alone, so that I finally got an apartment by myself. It took me six months to work through the experiences of those two years. I felt completely empty, and I knew that nobody was going to be able to heal me, but that I needed to get down to my own relationship to God.

Through that six month period, healing began to come about in me, starting when I recognized my own sin and the need for me to forgive certain people that I had been deeply hurt by. Out of that long, hard struggle came hope, and forgiveness, and reconciliation. That happened not only to me, but to each one of us in different ways. That was the beginning of the rebuilding, the new life, the new community that was to come about.

Bob: It is surprising to me that the experiences of those two years just didn’t completely destroy the vision of community that we began with. I still sensed deeply within myself the rightness of the things we had been called to, and I didn’t understand why it didn’t work, but I still felt the call of it very deeply.

Each of us looked at the roots of our own faith and probed more deeply than we had ever done before. I began to go to a Catholic charismatic prayer fellow ship in Chicago, and a conviction grew that community is created by the renewal of the Spirit in worship. While all of this was happening, we began to learn how to forgive one another, and out of the healing of some of those broken relationships a new worship experience began.

Joe: I remember at that time reading Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. There was one part in it that just didn’t make any sense to me until that time: that our own vision of what we were going to be as a community needed to be first shattered, and that shattering was really God’s grace. What was central for us was that we began to throw away our agendas and not to have any agenda for our life together. We ceased reflecting about community and started thinking about one another. That was the crucial change.

Wes: During that period, did you feel your own faith deeply tested?

Jim: At first, all of us felt a real hurt and anger: anger at God, blaming each other, blaming God, questioning our call. But once those initial feelings subsided, we came to feel most intensely our own failure and our own sin and to see how our own pride and arrogance and intellectualizing had prevented community from occurring among us.

In order for community to happen among us, our ideas about what it was and what it should be had to be totally shattered. We began to think about the simplest kinds of things involved in what it would mean to begin to forgive one another, and to love one another. It forced each of us to cry out to God out of the poverty of our own spirit.

The breaking point and the failure to build community in those first two years resulted in a level of honesty and of dependence upon God that had never been present before. We were broken enough that Christ could begin to work among us. Before, there was no room for God’s activity, because we were controlling everything. We had our models and our conceptions and our visions and our plans for community, and there was no room for the work of God’s Spirit among broken people. It took for us a complete disintegration of our life for us to begin to learn some of those lessons.

Wes: You then began to try to simply care for one another?

Jackie: Each of us in tentative ways began going to one another and confessing some things, beginning to rebuild the bonds of trust between us. We also began to pray and worship with one another. And this time there was not a need to create a worship experience, which had always been our struggle in the past.

We began to be honest, to be just who we were, and to be very broken before each other. People were crying in worship and confessing their souls. It was a rich, tenderizing time for us. In the past we spoke not out of brokenness, but out of judgment toward others. We still spoke some really hard things to one another, but it was now coming out of our own awareness of our sin.

All of this began to be experienced most visibly in worship, but also in the way we began relating to one another personally. We weren’t going to each other with judgments about how the other needed to change, but were saying, “This is what God is saying to me; I am coming to you asking forgiveness Together let’s work out the rough edges in both of us.”

Wes: Was the healing and reconciliation complete with all those originally involved?

Jim: A number of the married couples ultimately decided in favor of community in a more small town rural setting. They now have settled in Menominee, Michigan. We have experienced a real reconciliation with them and have a close relationship between our communities. But there were people in their group and in our group who, in the midst of all the turmoil, simply left--some not only leaving community, but abandoning their faith and going in other directions.

At first we felt a real guilt about that. But I think now we feel that God has really redeemed that time of despair and failure and crisis for each of us, and has nurtured us, not in spite of it, but because of it and through it. We need to accept God’s working in us in that way. We need to trust God’s purposes, not just for ourselves, but for all those people who in any way were a part of that effort. It was not a totally negative experience. There were a whole lot of good things--changes, transformations, new consciousness--that affected every one. Yet, the ending of that community was a very broken time.

Wes: What happened after this break down and subsequent renewal?

Jim: One of the next significant things was that more people began to be drawn to us. In the beginning of 1975, new people began to come and say, we would like to share this life that is growing up among you. That was a deeply confirming experience. We were convinced now that the reason we hadn’t felt God’s Spirit more actively is that we had not allowed any space for the Spirit to work in our life.

We were determined to continue to focus on our relationship to one another. And we continued to say again and again, the form and the structure of our lives will come naturally out of our learning to love and care for one another. We must continue to focus on each other and our worship together and the quality of the life that we share together, and allow the decisions about how we will organize and structure that life to emerge more naturally. So we just refused to talk about structure and about order and about how we would do things.

One of the examples of our pride in the past was that we would draw conceptual models from other communities, but we were hesitant to listen to their advice. When their advice wasn’t confirmed by our agenda, we trusted that we knew what we were doing and that we didn’t have a lot to learn from those people. In the breaking down, that changed too. So we had a real desire now to try to learn from the experience of other communities.

Wes: In early 1975 you made the decision to move from Chicago. Already at that time you had a sense that a new thing was coming about, correct?

Jim: We had moved into a poor area of north Chicago called Uptown while we were in the very broken state we have just described. It was in Uptown that we began to feel new life together. It seemed to us that we had little future in that neighborhood, because of the way the whole north side of Chicago was being developed and renovated, so that poor people were being pushed out of our neighborhood. We saw the need to move, both for the purpose of identification with the poor, and because we sensed the need to establish this “new thing” happening among us in some new place.

We decided to pray together about where and how this new life would come about. We had learned that we don’t resolve all of our questions by discussion; we spent about six months in a prayerful waiting. We learned more of the experience of other communities and began to benefit from it, especially at first through Jackie and Bob.

Wes: Was this when you began to have a relationship to Graham Pulkingham and the Church of the Redeemer?

Bob: Jackie and I spent the summer before moving to Washington, the summer of 1975, at the Church of the Redeemer in Houston, an Episcopal parish which had experienced a corporate renewal of its life ten years ago, under the ministry of Graham Pulkingham. One dimension of our life which we had not fully explored was the pastoral dimension.

There was no explicit leadership functioning in the community up to this point. In the decisions we made, there had often been undercurrents of manipulation. Those who were most verbal were able to influence the decision-making processes in ways that others couldn’t. With no explicit leadership, there was no way that the implicit leadership could be held accountable.

While at the Church of the Redeemer, a few others, including Jim, came down for the last week of our visit, and we had an unexpected time of intense relationship with Graham, who was no longer rector of the church, but who was in Texas recovering from an illness. It turned out to be a very crucial meeting, both for us and for him. Graham probed Jim and the rest of us about being as committed to the pastoral dimension our life as we were to the prophetic dimension, and he began to convince us that unless that pastoral base were built, all of the prophetic vision and the new hope for community would flounder, as it had in Chicago.

Jackie: The thing I saw at Redeemer was that they were nothing more than a normal bunch of people who had deeply given themselves to one another, and were committed to working out their life together and hearing what God had for them to do. Their life was not magical; it was simply a relationship of love that had grown up there. I began to see more and more clearly the relation ship between our internal and external life, between the life that we share together in our worship and in our households, and the life that extended beyond us. I began to see that the life that extended beyond us was the same life that we shared.

Bob: Prior to the breaking down of our life, we would not have been able to learn from the Church of the Redeemer. After that time, we were able to listen deeply to groups who did not share fully some of those things that had become central to our lives. Church of the Redeemer did not have a very developed consciousness of the social and political character of biblical faith or of the prophetic mission of the church in the world, but we recognized that we could learn much from their experience and from what God had taught them.

Jackie: The music we learned there and carried back grew in us, along with a new experience of a deep quality of worship, which had already germinated among us.

Jim: The richness of Redeemer’s worship was something that really drew us, not because of a “worship experience,” but because it was so organically connected to the life that they shared together. Worship was an overflowing of their life, a manifestation of that life.

Wes: Was this time, then, crucial in developing your commitment to unite the prophetic and the pastoral imperatives of biblical faith?

Jim: It seemed that in Graham’s life and ministry this was a similar time of new direction and openness--to all the things that had shaped our life, especially the radical political meaning of the gospel and our corporate commitment to the prophetic character of the Christian life. So there was a deep exchange in the encounter and a friendship that grew from that time which was the catalyst in the relation ship among American and European communities that has since occurred.

The desire to see a unity between the prophetic and the pastoral was really sparked both in Graham and myself in that encounter. We talked about vision and nurture. Vision without nurture is oppressive and destructive; it will feel like an overwhelming weight on people. Unless people are being nurtured in the vision around which their life is called, there will be no community. There can be no community apart from that kind of pastoral leadership.

Similarly, we sensed that without a prophetic voice challenging God’s people to lay their lives down for justice in the world, pastoral nurture and minis try can easily degenerate into a self-serving group welfare, or an unbiblical inward preoccupation. We came back from Redeemer and the time with Graham with a deep commitment to establishing a pastoral life and ministry among ourselves.

Wes: About twenty of you moved to Washington in the fall of 1975. Why the decision to move there?

Jim: Since we’ve come, the reasons why we are here are much more evident to us than they were before. We came to Washington because we felt that’s where we were called. It seemed like Washington would be a crucial environment for the maturing of a prophetic and pastoral life in the common life of one body of people. The juxtaposition between making community with the poor and powerless while having relationship to those in places of power is becoming more a part of our experience.

Wes: How has your understanding of leadership in the community evolved since you came to Washington?

Bob: There was still a residue of discomfort in the relationship among Jim and Jackie and myself. During the time at Redeemer we worked through some of the last vestiges of those things keeping us from being in complete relationship to one another. Our deepened relationship, coupled with that commitment to the pastoral life, was the ground for a more explicit leadership that grew up within the whole fellowship during those first weeks when we came to Washington.

Jackie: Within Jim, Bob and myself was an almost unexplainable sense of commitment and call to give ourselves in some way to the building up of the life that was growing among us. We knew that any leadership needed to be explicit and to be completely identified and affirmed, as well as tenderly developed and held accountable to the responsibilities it was given.

We shared the deep longing we had for the body of Christ to built up here. It was a confusing thing to work all of that out, especially because of the nature of our past in Chicago. But we have been coming to grips with what it means to have a serving kind of leadership in the oversight of the whole community.

It’s something that transmits God’s grace, that pastors, that teaches, that loves and that also reproduces itself. It disciples in such a way that other people are brought into maturity and leadership. It may be mixed with all kinds of mistakes and old patterns that we revert to at different points, but there is trust established so that those things are worked through and forgiven.

Jim: Leadership can never emerge where there is lack of trust. In any group of people there is leadership, often just a natural kind of leadership that may not be there to serve at all, but just to control. That kind of leadership needs to be transformed into something that really is a spiritual leadership of a body of people.

I think leadership has to do with more than decision making. It has most to do with pastoring and nurturing and discipling and teaching--a loving kind of oversight for the life of a body of people, taking responsibility for its growth and maturation. That’s what the New Testament pattern really is. The whole idea of an elder-younger relationship is to pass on the biblical tradition and to see it reproduced.

We don’t have any dogmas about leadership--how it should be structured or exercised or established--except that the New Testament teaches that leadership needs to be functioning within a body of people. There are no normative patterns for how it emerges within the life of a community. At some point it’s crucial in every community that a more recognized leadership emerge to serve the particular needs and calling and ministry of that body of people. There is no leadership apart from the body of people it serves.

Leadership in community has to be deeply accessible to everyone who is part of that body. The only kind of leadership in the Christian sense is that which lays its life down for the sake of the other. That has totally transformed our idea of what leadership is: from control to serving. Allowing the needs and life of the body to shape the character of that serving leadership.

Wes: Could you explain the significance of the magazine’s name change, and how the magazine reflects the life of the community?

Joe: The content of the magazine has always reflected who we were as people and what we were thinking. In the beginning stages, out of the alienation we felt so strongly and out of a view of ourselves as almost exclusively a prophetic voice, we chose the name “Post American.” Even before the name change, certain issues surprised many people.

We had an issue on community, reflecting our initial thoughts and feelings about community life and how that was growing in us. Not long after we fell apart, we did an issue on the charismatic renewal and that reflected our own searching, our own need for a deeper spiritual dimension of our life together.

After awhile, the name Post-American reflected, at best, a part of who we were. We felt that the name needed to reflect a more affirmative, building stance, which we were feeling as a body of people. We chose Sojourners to reflect the need for the building up of the church, both prophetically and pastorally.

Jim: To be Christian in this time is to be post-American, but it is to be more than just post-American. We desired to root ourselves in the biblical tradition of the people of God. We were reflecting and reading Hebrews 11 when we came upon the name.

It really has become our conviction that more central than anything we do is who we are; that God’s purposes are carried primarily in history through the life of a people, and it’s in the quality of life that they share and then lay down for the sake of the world that God’s purposes of justice and healing and liberation come to pass in history. We were struck by the biblical metaphor for God’s people as sojourners, or pilgrims, aliens who are citizens of another city that is fully present in the world, but committed to a whole different order of things.

To be Christian in American society in our time is to be, of necessity, a community of resistance, but the resistance flows from a deeper sense of celebration. We are first called to be a community of celebration--celebrating the life to which we are called, the life given to us to share together and then give away for the sake of the world. In so doing, we become a community of resistance.

So the character of that life--of building the new society, beginning with our own relationships, and then offering that new society as a sacrifice to the world--is fundamental now to who we are. Building the body of Christ is not one of many issues to which we are committed, as it once was; it is the foundation for all that we do and all that we are. It’s the environment out of which we are called to live and minister.

Wes: There are still deeply disillusioning and crushing times. What is it, individually and collectively, that sustains you now in periods of testing?

Jackie: The last year of our life has brought us to a point where we have a strong core group of people who share a vision and a commitment to one another. There might still be disagreements, but there’s always the trust, the depth of relationship, to be able to work those things through to a point of resolution. One really significant part of that is our willingness to recognize our own sin in situations and to be able to extend to one another the kind of forgiveness that God extended to us through Christ.

Jim: There is no structure, no model, that guarantees against hurt, failure, betraying one another, or hurting each other. Community is not meant to take us apart from our humanity. I don’t think there are fewer problems now, but there is a way of resolving all of those things that was not present before. I think we are all confident about this dynamic, probably because we know that it is just not simply of our own making.

My faith has been rekindled in the power of love. I believe in the power of love more deeply than I ever have before. At the foundation of everything that we are or do, we are called to love one another, and without that, every thing else is utter futility. The power of love is not just an abstract idea anymore, something on which I theologically base my defense of nonviolence, but a practical daily part of my existence. It makes me realize more and more deeply why Jesus so identified our love for one another as the beginning of any minis try or any witness that we have in the world.

Many people are going to feel deeply judged by our lifestyle and by our whole existence, whether or not we feel judgment ourselves. People need to feel access to the life that’s here, and a love and acceptance for them in the present place where they are. I don’t believe people are deeply changed or nurtured unless they are in an environment in which they feel loved. When people are feeling only judgment or criticism, they can not easily respond to the need for change in their lives.

Wes: Is the deepest lesson that’s been learned throughout your history that God’s Spirit is what creates community?

Jim: I think the meaning of Pentecost is that when God’s Spirit came, the people were waiting patiently to be filled. I think there is a continual recreation of that scenario.

There is a way that corporate life can become its own tyranny. The pace and intensity of corporate life and ministry can become a tyranny that so absorbs your time and energy that you are no longer in a place of waiting and listening for the fresh outpouring of God’s Spirit. Then you rely upon the structure of the life, the tradition, the capital that is there.

Our desire is to make the space to wait for God’s Spirit to continue to come upon us in new ways, to reshape us, to change us, to move us in deeper ways. The end is not corporate life; the end is not communalism. This is no new gospel of community. The shared life of God’s people is simply a means God has chosen for purposes of salvation and liberation in history.