INTERNATIONAL ADVOCACY FOR peace and justice has long been central to our work at Sojourners. We participated in the nuclear freeze movement, the anti-apartheid struggle, the sanctuary movement, and more recent efforts to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, combat climate change, and end the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine.
In April, I will travel to Accra, Ghana, for an important gathering of emerging Christian leaders from around the globe. Sojourners is one of several Christian organizations and church bodies that are collaborating under the auspices of a key ecumenical partner, the Global Christian Forum (GCF), to bring together a new generation of Christian leaders. We’re thrilled for the opportunity these leaders will have to share their faith stories and discuss the connections between Jesus and justice in their local, national, and international contexts.
This convocation of young emerging leaders will immediately precede and directly feed into the Global Christian Forum’s fourth gathering of Christian leaders from around the world. Since 2007, the GCF has convened leaders from every major branch of the church, including mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, evangelical, Pentecostal, and more. The goal of these gatherings has been to look beyond the myriad of things that divide the global body of Christ — which since the Reformation has split into 45,000 separate denominations and counting — and instead gather an incredibly diverse group of followers of Jesus around what we all have in common: shared belief in the lordship of Jesus Christ. As GCF leader Casely Essamuah puts it, the gathering is about “seeing Christ in one another and one another in Christ.” The GCF has acknowledged that it needs to do better at including leaders under the age of 40.
Sojourners is keenly interested in supporting the GCF’s effort to engage younger Christian leaders from around the world, for two reasons. First, as authors such as Wes Granberg-Michaelson have noted, Christianity’s center of gravity has fundamentally shifted away from the West in the last century or so. In 1900, 80 percent of Christians worldwide lived in North America and Europe. By 2000, nearly two-thirds lived in the majority world (Africa, Asia, and Latin America). Even in the West, patterns of human migration combined with the explosion of Christianity in the majority world means that the fastest growing churches in North America and Europe today are those with roots in immigrant communities from the majority world. Second, the Christian decline in Western countries is primarily driven by young people choosing to no longer affiliate with Christianity (or any other organized religion).
It’s time to be even more committed to strengthening relationships with Christians from the majority world and with people under the age of 40. Supporting emerging leaders’ participation in Accra this spring is an important step in that direction. Our hope is that this gathering will bear good fruit in the form of new and deeper relationships between younger leaders, planting the seeds for a potential network that can collaborate in an ongoing way to make the vital connection between Jesus and justice more real and urgent for Christians around the world.
Rev. Adam Russell Taylor is president of Sojourners and author of A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community. Follow him on Bluesky @revadamtaylor.
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