Sojourners Community

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The Sojourners community is an intentional community that was started in the early 1970s by a group of college students. This group of students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School had the desire to further explore the relationship between their orthodox Protestant faith and the social crisis that surrounded them. In the fall of 1971, they began publishing a newspaper, the Post American, in order to express the group’s commitment to the faith and ideas about social reaction.

[edit] History

In the summer of 1971, the group organized an intentional community in Rogers Park, Illinois. However, in 1974, the community disintegrated. The remaining members decided to make a strategic move to the inner-city neighborhood of Columbia Heights in Washington, D.C. where they could better address urban problems and national politics. Through combining their assets and incomes, the group gradually established households and a network of social outreach programs. The community lived together in these common households together, shared a common purse, formed a worshipping community, got involved in neighborhood issues, organized national events on behalf of peace and justice and continued to publish Sojourners magazine ^[1]. The vestige of Sojourners' intentional living community remains its intern community, a group of individuals who are hired as year-long interns and who live together in intentional Christian community for that year as part of the internship experience.

The Sojourners community has experienced critique from other evangelicals due to their combination of strict evangelical Protestant beliefs (though the Sojourners living community and wider organizational network has also long included mainline Protestants and Catholics) and radical "social priorities [which] run in markedly different directions” ^[2].Also, the Sojourners differentiate from other Evangelicals in their condemning of militarism, corporate excesses, and the exploitation of people in third-world. However, other social critiques are similar to those of other evangelicals on issues such as condemning of abortion (as part of a wider pro-life stance that includes protection of life from cradle to grave, i.e. anti-war and anti-hunger stances). Sojourners are a proponent of economic justice and expanded services for the poor ^[3].

The Sojourners are most widely known for its publication the Sojourners magazine and for the writing and speaking of founding member, Jim Wallis.

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