Building Beloved Community Through the Sojourners Fellowship Program

I first learned about Sojourners because I was looking for post-graduation fellowship opportunities in Washington, D.C.; at the time, I had no idea that a robust faith-based advocacy space like Sojourners existed, a place where people were living out their faith through the call to biblical justice. After I was accepted into the program but before move-in day, I met via Zoom with the five kind and impressive women who would make up the 41st cycle of the Sojourners Fellowship Program. We briefly discussed what our lives would entail throughout the fellowship and learned about the professional and spiritual development that the program would provide; I eagerly looked forward to my move.

Living in an intentional community is a core part of the fellowship experience and so our year in D.C. began with a week of long workshop days. We focused on activities such as learning our Myers-Briggs and Enneagram types, building up our conflict-resolution skills, and training in nonviolent communication to better equip our community full of people from different racial, cultural, and societal backgrounds to navigate any potential conflict we might encounter.

We knew that each of us had different lived experiences, making our intentional community beautifully diverse, but also complex in terms of how our group would mesh together. Keeping those differences in mind, everyone made it a point to deeply commit to showing up as their authentic self, highlighting each member of our community’s uniqueness as a strength.

We drafted a community covenant in which we wrote: “We are an ever-changing sisterhood composed of uniqueness and diversity standing together in solidarity and peace.” In this way, we created space for our cycle to grow together spiritually and professionally, but also as individuals seeking to find God’s will for our life.

As time went on and we continued to build relationships, our community and friendships grew stronger. Each person in our intentional community brings something special to our cohort — each personality plays a vital role in shaping the group dynamic and vibe of the house — like Laura’s obsession with Pangea, Mariela’s Snoopy memorabilia, and Hojung’s amazing eye for natural beauty and birds. Living and working with the same five people seems overwhelming, but we all agree that when one of us is missing from the collective, things just aren’t the same.

Another aspect of the fellowship I love is how every Friday we attend seminars geared toward professional, vocational, and/or spiritual development. These seminars were led by individuals established in their careers who shared lessons learned from their own experience. For me, they’ve been a catalyst of personal growth in my life through exploring new things -– fully immersing myself in new experiences has made me open to new ideas and helped me see value in things that I did not see before.

At our community’s core, we value the commitment to building and caring for the Beloved Community and living out the call to biblical justice. We committed to participating and practiced community care by cooking meals for each other and being attentive to each other's needs. And we lived out the call to biblical justice by deeply believing in Sojourners’ mission and advocating for the change we want to see in the world.

Although the Sojourners fellowship is only a short year, we gained invaluable experience to carry with us after the “Sojourney” — a term coined by one of the fellows to describe the Sojourners fellowship — ends. As the year comes to a close, I am excited to see how my Sojourney will end.