Monday, July 5, 2021

Fifty Faithful and Fruitful Years: Jim Wallis and Sojourners

During the academic year of 1971-72, my family and I came back for a year in the States after living in Japan for five years. Those were turbulent times in the U.S. and only a little less so in Japan. During that year, I learned of a young man named Jim Wallis and a new publication, The Post-American.

The Beginning of the Sojourn

Jim Wallis was born in Michigan in June 1948, so he is nearly ten years younger than I. But he is a thinker/writer/activist from whom I have learned much over these past 50 years. 

Jim Wallis in the 1970s

Wallis enrolled in Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in 1970 and on his very first night in the dormitory, he talked with a next-door student about his disillusionment with the evangelical church’s support of the war in Vietnam and its indifference to racism.

Jim tells his story in Revive Us Again: A Sojourner’s Story (1983). Chapters two and three narrate the main contradictions he saw between the teaching of Jesus and the evangelical church at that time: racism and “the war.”

Part of what drew me to Sojourners was that the two main criticisms I had heard during my first three years of teaching in Japan (1968~71) were of “Christian” America’s racism and involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Here is the link to the foundational statement of the original Sojourners community (before they used that name).

The small group of Christian “radicals” that formed at TEDS published the first issue of their new magazine in August 1971. They named it The Post American, as an indictment of the civil religion in the U.S. which was supporting the Indochina War in contradiction to the Gospel of Jesus.

Fifty Years for Sojourners

In 1975, the community moved from the Chicago area to downtown Washington, D.C., and took a new name, also changing the name of their publication to Sojourners.

Last year, dissension at Sojourners resulted in Jim being replaced as editor-in-chief in August, and in November, Adam Russell Taylor replaced Wallis as president of the organization. Then last month, on June 24, Jim published “My Farewell to Sojourners.”

Wallis wrote, “I am deeply thankful for the last 50 years with Sojourners; I am honored to be its founder...and will remain an ambassador of this unique organization going forward.” This marked the end of fifty faithful and fruitful years.

In that article, Jim also announced, “I have accepted an invitation from Georgetown University to become the inaugural Chair in Faith and Justice at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the founding director of the new campus-wide Center on Faith and Justice.

My Sojourn with Sojourners

For nearly 50 years I have read and been influenced by Sojourners magazine, including the years before it took that new name in 1975. I learned from Jim Wallis, of course, but also from the wide range of perceptive authors who wrote for the publication.

In January 1977, during our second “furlough” from our work in Japan, I was able to make a two-day visit to the Sojourners’ house in Washington, D.C., spending the night with them. I was disappointed that Jim was not at home at that time.

Later, I did get to meet Jim on a couple of occasions. In April 2005, I heard him give a powerful public talk/sermon. In my diary, I wrote, “It was a wonderful talk... He stressed that religion should be a bridge, not a wedge. And he said that hope is a choice.”

My appreciation of Jim Wallis still runs deep. When I published my life story last year, I included him as one of the “top ten” stimulating, challenging speakers/writers that I have heard/read. Also, Jim’s God’s Politics (2005) is one of my ten favorite 21st-century non-fiction books.

I close this article with these words by Jim Wallis published in the first issue of The Post-American, words badly needed now as they were 50 years ago. 

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** For a list of many significant statements by Wallis, open this link to the Goodreads.com quotes page.

18 comments:

  1. Happy Fourth, Leroy! Thanks for the review of Jim Wallis's sojourn. Sojourner's was important for me, having started seminary in 1971. I was already disillusioned by white evangelicals' racism. As I became anti-War and anti-imperialism in the late 1960s, it was refreshing to me to have started at a UCC seminary (in 1971) and finding out there was a Christianity not married to American jingoism and critical of the Vietnam War. I still remember, about the time I was in seminary, hearing that the Southern Baptist Convention, of which I was still a part, finding itself unable to pass a resolution suggesting there were moral ambiguities associated with the War. I haven't followed Sojourner's closely for a long time. I didn't know that Jim Wallis was removed from leadership.

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    1. Thanks, Anton, for posting your comments on the blogsite early yesterday, and I am sorry to be so slow in responding. Yes, I can imagine you finding great affinity with Jim Wallis and his friends as they began publishing "The Post-American."

      Even though I was being supported financially by Southern Baptists, in the 1970s I was much more aligned with Jim and his fellow sojourners' interpretation of the Bible and the understanding of Christianity than with what I was hearing from the Southern Baptist Convention. Before the end of the 1970s, I was teaching a course at Seinan Gakuin University called "Radical Christianity." In addition to lectures on Martin Luther King, Jr., and other "Western" Christian, I also lectured on Toyohiko Kagawa and had a lot of good feedback on those lectures.

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  2. The first comments received this morning, at about 6:10, were from local Thinking Friend, and good personal friend, David Nelson. I was not surprised at his affirmative comments:

    "Thanks for this tribute to our brother and prophet Jim Wallis. I too remember Post American and have been a subscriber to and reader of this important journal. Jim has also been a voice of Christianity on TV and in other news outlets. He has helped a great religion to remain faithful to it’s Lord. Like you, I would include him on my list of current influential voices for 'Staying Human' in a world going in other strange directions."

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    1. Thanks, David, for reading my new blog post and responding so early this morning. As I alluded to above, I am not at all surprised that you have known of Post-American/Sojourners through the years and profited from it as I have.

      I have a bound copy of the issues of Post-American from that first one in 1971 to Vol. 3, No. 2, which was published in the early spring of 1974. I will try to remember to bring that to show you when we finally are able to meet in person again.

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  3. Thinking Friend Eric Dollard in Chicago, who also became a good personal friend when he lived in Kansas City, sent these comments:

    "Thanks, Leroy, for your fine blog about Jim Wallis. I have heard of Sojourners (which has come up in Lutheran discussions) and Jim Wallis, but I do not know much about either the group or its founder, so I read the Wikipedia article about him. He has led quite a career.

    "I fully agree, however, with the quote from Wallis that you provided at the end of your blog. We still live in a spiritually sick society, so we have much work ahead of us if we want to realize the goals mentioned in the quotation, which was timely then and is timely now."

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    1. Thanks, Eric, for reading my new blog post early this morning and for your pertinent comments. I was impressed also at how Jim Wallis's words at the end of that opening article in the first issue of Post-American seem to be as relevant now as they were then.

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  4. Local Thinking Friend Bruce Morgan shares this brief but significant comment:

    "Wallis has consistently been a prophet in the Biblical tradition, fearlessly challenging Christians to resist the seduction of materialism and nationalism in order to live Christ’s alternative way."

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    1. Thanks, Bruce, for your fine statement about Jim Wallis; I fully agree with what you said about him.

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  5. Thanks Leroy for this informative Blog and I agree that we should follow what JESUS taught and Not the ways of the world.

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    1. This comment was from Thinking Friend John Tim Carr in California, who was in hospice care but, I am happy to say, is no longer needing such care.

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  6. Here are comments from Jerry Jumper, a relatively new Thinking Friend who is a medical doctor, now retired.

    "I was in college and med school during the 60s and was too busy to be involved in activist activities. Only later did I come to appreciate the work of so many of my peers in the anti war effort."

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    1. Thanks for your comments, Jerry. I, too, have regrets that I was not able to participate in anti-war and other activist activities in the 1960s. I was much too busy, I thought (probably legitimately), in graduate school, in language school, and then beginning my teaching career in Japanese to be involved in anything else. That is one reason I was thankful for and became a supporter of Jim Wallis and his friends in the early '70s who became fruitfully involved in activism in protest of war, racism, and other social evils.

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  7. I was happy to receive this word from Thinking Friend Glenn Hinson in Kentucky:

    "Sojourners has had a significant impact. I am happy to have written for it and to have enjoyed the friendship of Jim Wallis."

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    1. Thanks for sharing this, Dr. Hinson.

      You probably had other articles published in Sojourners, but I found the one you wrote about St. Francis of Assisi for the December 1981 issue. I was in the States for our third missionary "furlough" during the 1981-82 academic year and was teaching some at William Jewell College. I most likely read your article then and perhaps mentioned it in one of my classes. My anti-war stance was not well received by some of the conservative Christian students at Jewell at that time.

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  8. I do not know much about Wallis and Sojourners, other than by reputation, so I will instead respond to your discussion of the Japanese criticism of "'Christian' America's racism and involvement in the war in Vietnam." We have not moved much since 1968, except in replacing Vietnam with Afghanistan, Iraq, and the US Capitol! May God have mercy on us all.

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    1. Thanks, Craig, for commenting. I think you would have enjoyed reading "Sojourners" through the years, and still after all these years the monthly issues are well worth reading.

      I, too, was saddened that Jim's words of 1971 seem to be as relevant today as they were 50 years ago, which means that there has not been a lot of improvement in so many segments of society. The "moral arc of the universe" may bend toward justice, but that bending sure is slow!

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  9. Yesterday, Thinking Friend Truett Baker in Arizona sent me an email that, among other things, included the following comments:

    "I have read some of Jim Wallis' writings and, as a social worker as well as a Christian, appreciate his advocacy for justice. I am curious as to the reason for his leaving Sojourners; however it seems his new job may be a better fit for his evolved understanding of the important issues he so ably addresses."

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  10. I did not fully understand the criticism that Jim came under that led to him being replaced as president and CEO of Sojourners. It had mostly to do with what he wrote about White supremacy in the Catholic Church, it seems, but I didn't give it enough attention to gain an adequate understanding. In spite of it all, though, Jim is highly affirmative of Adam Russell Taylor, the man who took his place as president in November last year, and of "Sojourners" still.

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