Sojourners in the News

Let’s say you step into an elevator, push the button for the 10th floor, watch the doors slide shut and cast a quick glance at the other passengers in the car. Lo and behold, you spot one of the Koch brothers!

Sojourners and IMA World Health (on behalf of the WeWillSpeakOut.US coalition) recently released a new report, Broken Silence: A Call for Churches to Speak Out, based on a LifeWay Research survey of 1,000 U.S. Protestant pastors. According to the report, U.S. faith leaders seriously underestimate the prevalence of sexual and domestic violence experienced by people within their congregations. They also lack the tools to address it in constructive and helpful ways. The good news is more than 8 in 10 said they would take appropriate action to reduce sexual and domestic violence if they and the training and resources to do so.

Though immigration is a polarizing issue, the plight of migrant children at the southern border of the United States is so dire that an unlikely assortment of faith groups have found themselves standing on the same side of the fence.

Signers of the letter include leaders from groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals, World Relief, Bread for the World, Christian Community Development Association, Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, World Vision U.S. and Sojourners.

I met my wife, Joy Carroll, at Greenbelt, a summer festival of faith, arts, and justice held annually in England. It was August 1994. A few months earlier, in May, Joy was one of the first women to be ordained as a priest in the Church of England. We were both speakers on a panel one day at Greenbelt, in a tent with 5,000 young people. Afterwards, we met for coffee. Joy had been an ordained deacon in the church for six years and was a leader in the movement to recognize all the gifts women had to offer both to the church and the parishes they served. She was the youngest member of the General Synod that decided to ordain women, and she was there for the historic vote in Church House Westminster in London. That cup of coffee eventually led to our marriage in 1997.

This is a moral moment for America and what it means to be an American. And for the church, it is a moment to make clear what it means to be a Christian.

This is not the first time that biblical films have been criticized for "whitewashing." In an op-ed for Sojourners last year, Ryan Herring noted that his initial excitement for "Noah" and "Exodus" turned to "disdain" after realizing that "not a single one of the leading roles in either movie was given to a person of Middle Eastern descent." "Some things never change. In Hollywood, whitewashing, also known as racebending, is one of many longstanding tradition...Historically, this practice was used to discriminate against actors, both male and female, of color," wrote Herring. "The most common examples of this in the past were white actors dressing up in what is known as blackface, redface, and yellowface. While maybe not as controversial or blatant today, the practice of whitewashing still continues in Hollywood...[where] roles from scripts that clearly call for a person of color are given to white actors."

In a recent article for TIME, Jim Wallis asks: Whatever Happened to the Common Good? Wallis notes: The common good has origins in the beginnings of Christianity. An early church father, John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), once wrote: “This is the rule of most perfect Christianity, its most exact definition, its highest point, namely, the seeking of the common good . . . for nothing can so make a person an imitator of Christ as caring for his neighbors.

I think we all know that the issues we’re facing cannot be solved by Gamaliel alone. They cannot be solved by Catholic Charities alone. If they could have been solved by one institution—Sojourners, the National Council of La Raza, the NAACP—they would’ve been solved.