Sojourners Community
The Sojourners Community is a community that was founded in the early 1970s by a group of students from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois . The founders wanted to further explore the relationship between their Orthodox Protestant beliefs and the social crisis, which for them was particularly linked to the Vietnam War . In the fall of 1971, they began publishing the Post American , a newspaper that expressed the group's commitment to belief and ideas about social change. The Sojourners Community is best known through Sojourners magazine and the writings and speeches of its founding member Jim Wallis .
history
In the summer of 1971, the group formed a community in Rogers Park, Chicago . In 1974, however, the group broke up. The remaining members decided in the inner-city district of Columbia Heights in Washington, DC move to where they could better deal with urban problems and national policies. Through community of property, the group gradually built up apartments and a network of social aid programs. The community lived together in these communal dwellings, shared a household, formed a religious community, got involved in neighborhood issues, organized national events in the name of peace and justice, and continued to publish Sojourners magazine. The legacy of the Sojourners' community remains the internship community, a group of people who are hired as annual interns and who will live together in a conscious Christian community for this year as part of the internship experience.
Other evangelicals have criticized the Sojourners community for its combination of strictly evangelical beliefs (although the Sojourners community and wider organizational network has long included mainline Protestants and Catholics) and radical "social priorities that go in markedly different directions". The Sojourners also differ from other evangelicals in their condemnation of militarism, corporate excesses and the exploitation of people in the Third World, but also in their social criticism, e.g. B. condemnation of abortion (as part of a broader pro-life stance that includes the protection of life from cradle to grave, i.e. anti-war and anti-hunger attitudes). Sojourners is committed to social justice and services for the poor.