As most of our readers probably know, Sojourners magazine originates in Christian community. Since the magazine comes not out of a board, or just a staff, but out of the life we share together in community, it seemed fitting to give our readers a better idea of how that life has developed and to try to paint a portrait of how it presently looks. We have come to feel that Christian radicalism is not something that grows out of our heads, but something that grows out of the lives we share together.
It has become crucial to us to make the vital connection between the healing of the nations as biblically foreseen and the healing of our own lives together. We have given greater attention to the quality of our common life as we have increasingly sensed that the life of the believing community is biblically intended to embody and carry out God’s purposes of justice and reconciliation in history, thereby subverting the present world system with the practical demonstration of a whole new style of life.
Our deepening experience of community, worship, and of a healing relationship one to another has begun to serve as the foundation for the concrete ways we are trying to respond to the basic needs of the urban poor in Washington D.C. Our life together also guides our struggle to find the shape of a prophetic witness through publishing and through our own public life and action.
We came to Washington in the fall of 1975 with a group of about 15 adults. During the first year we have grown until we now number about 50 people living in three households, soon to be joined by another household or two. We have worked hard at establishing a solid basis for our life together. The magazine has greatly expanded, and we have become deeply involved in the lives of children and families in this city. Our worship has overflowed the confines of our houses and the confines of our lives, which had for so long prevented us from deeply sensing the vital relationship between spirituality and social change.
We hope never to become simply another religious magazine. Rather, our commitment is to deal with the issues and events of these times from a perspective that is grounded in the biblical witness and that flows deeply out of the life of Christian community. Our struggle is to be what our name commits us to: sojourners, one of the central biblical metaphors for the people of God, those who are to live in this world as strangers, pilgrims, and aliens because of their loyalty to the kingdom of God.
Sharing in community with brothers and sisters has certainly been the best experience of our lives. It has also been the hardest. Our lives have been opened up as never before. We have slowly begun to feel more at ease with our vulnerability. The broken places in each of us have had to become more visible in order to be healed. The intensity of our life together often causes us to ponder the meaning of the gospel.
Our greatest struggle has been to find a unity and integration between the prophetic and the pastoral life. The separation between the two seems to us to be the most pervasive division in the church today. Some communities are oriented around a deep sense of worship, personal healing, pastoral nurture, and strong bonds of love and trust between the members. Other communities are gathered around the prophetic imperatives of biblical faith, around the pursuit of social justice, political action, non violence, and resistance. In almost every case, where one orientation is stressed the other is missing and its lack is painfully evident.
To experience a wholeness and rhythm between the two styles of life is certainly a biblical necessity, and an urgent priority in the fragmented time in which we live. However such a unity is one of those many things that is much easier said than done. The pulls and tugs of multiple demands upon our life often stand in tension with the limitations of our time and our energy.
This past week was typical. The beginning of the week brought a talk, late into the night, with someone whose history of loneliness and rejection has driven him to desperation, while at the same time planning went on for a spring campaign against torture. Involvement in public action challenging the city’s housing policies must take place along with running a household for homeless people which now includes a welfare family with 11 children. Last night it took 50 eggs and 70 pancakes to make a meal that would feed everyone.
At a Wednesday afternoon pastors’ meeting we have to balance requests for speaking around the country with our commitment to maintain our frequent times of worship and teaching here at home. Our midweek community meeting discusses the way the housing campaign we’ve entered into will affect the other parts of our life; the meeting must end early enough to send some of our people out to pick homeless people up off the streets and bring them back to a warm house for the night. The music group practices the next evening. Our Friday worship celebration for people around the city convenes the next, a community talent show makes us all laugh on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning we gather for worship, teaching, and the Eucharist.
Spending the time sustaining the relationships of love and trust with each other is a continuing task--while trying to run a national magazine, a dayschool, tutoring program, a house of hospitality, a food cooperative, activities for neighborhood kids, and households designed to be healing living situations for us all. All this must take place while responding to the regular flow of visitors into our lives.
The relationship between the prophetic and the pastoral imperatives converges in what we now believe to be the basic theological question of our time--the shape of the church. We have come to that conviction out of our own pilgrimage as a group of people who have struggled to comprehend the political meaning of biblical faith and the prophetic character of the church’s style of life and witness in the world. Now we feel that to talk of a radical identification with the poor and dispossessed, to talk of resistance to the violence of principalities and powers, to talk of global justice and peacemaking, to talk of forging a whole new way of life as biblical people, and to talk of Christ’s love becoming incarnate in the midst of the world’s pain and brokenness is to talk about the shape of the church. Similarly, to talk of the renewal of worship, to talk of personal healing, to talk of recovering the pastoral life and ministry, and to talk of teaching, discipling, and evangelism is to talk about the shape of the church.
The shape of the church toward which we feel called stands in stark contrast to the style and structure of life now evident in our churches, which have become so conformed to the surrounding culture and so dependent upon the social system for the direction and control of their life. Without fundamental changes in the shape and structure of our churches, the Christian community will have no capacity for either dissent or an alternative social vision. This is true despite the endless position papers and statements of social concern which the denominational bureaucracies and social action commissions churn out. Social action projects simply cannot be superimposed upon congregations of people who are captives of the system, and whose social and political conformity to the status quo has become a way of life.
An authentic political witness can only arise from an authentic style of life which has established some independence and integrity--enough to resist the assaults and controlling interests of a society’s power centers. Therefore, any meaningful social action on the part of the Christian community can only derive from the renewal and reshaping of its corporate existence at the local church level.
The call of Christ to faith and public discipleship and the church’s call to be a new community, nothing less than a new society growing up in the shell of the old, is central to the political integrity of the Christian community. Only enduring communities of faith will be able to sustain themselves in a protracted social struggle to resist being conformed to the spirit of the age, and to seek what it means for them to be radically faithful to Christ in these times.
That new shape for the church will emerge as we begin to feel a growing rhythm between our worship life and our public action, our love for one another and the incarnation of that love in the world, our pastoral community and its prophetic style of life that is a rebuke to the world’s principalities and powers. Through their balance and harmony, we begin to feel a wholeness in the lifestyle to which we are called.
A major portion of this issue is an attempt to describe the emerging life of Sojourners Fellowship. We have tried to capture in words and pictures the present way our life is being lived. We have tried to reflect upon our history and the development of the community since a few of us first met five years ago. In those years we have finally come to see that the quality of love and life that we have to share in the world will be no different and no better than the quality of life that we share with one another.
Jim Wallis was editor-in-chief of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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