Ten Years

It was a hot August night in Chicago. The first copy of the Post-American came off the press at 2:30 a.m. I was standing in the main press room of the city's cheapest printer. I had never seen a large printing press in operation before and was fascinated. The night crew let me come in and watch, no doubt smiling to themselves about this fellow who wanted to be there to make sure everything came out all right.

I saw that our layout boards had been made into plates. A few weeks before, I didn't even know what layout boards or plates were. But now the plates were put on the press, and the presses began to roll. I could see all our dreams, sweat, and prayers coming to fruition. It wasn't long before the first copy rolled off that big web press. I was at the end of the line waiting for it. The ink was still wet when I picked it up and exclaimed, "It's beautiful!"

I waited until the first bundle was finished, put it under my arm, and headed home, promising we would return the next day to pick up the rest.

As I drove home that night, my mind was filled with thoughts and hopes. Halfway home I pulled into a gas station. While my tank was being filled, I walked up to three stoned teenagers who were sitting on the curb by the station's office and handed them each a copy of the brand new magazine, announcing proudly, "You are the first people to ever receive a copy of the Post-American!" Their bleary eyes slowly scanned what had just been handed to them, and I nervously awaited our first public response.

One kid spied the price printed in the corner, looked at me, and said, "Only a quarter for this thing!" I was elated. Another reached into his pocket, no doubt to pull out a quarter. "No, no, no," I said, "For you all, this is free." And ever since, our publisher, Joe Roos, has told me I give away too many complimentary copies.

By the time I returned home it must have been 4 in the morning. Everyone was asleep in the house that had become our community's home for that first summer together. I crept up the stairs, making my way through the darkness to my bed, being careful not to awaken the two other guys with whom I shared the room. I put the bundle down, put a copy on the bed, and just looked at it.

After a few moments, I dropped to my knees and slowly began to cry and to pray. Strong feelings of gratitude, expectation, and bold, confident faith rushed over me. I remember a very powerful sense that something much larger than the efforts of our tiny group was happening here, and that the publication of this little tabloid held possibilities I could not yet imagine. To this day that sense has never died.

After we got the Post-Americans home the next day, we realized that we didn't have a mailing list. So we met that night and began to brainstorm the names of people we thought might be sympathetic to what we were trying to say. We decided that some of us would travel east, and some west, taking the Post-American to colleges, universities, seminaries, churches, and people we met along the way.

Each of us had scraped together a hundred dollars to pay for the first issue; $700 bought 30,000 copies of a 16-page tabloid. We decided that we wouldn't put out a second issue until enough money had come back to pay for the first and print the second.

Later we would learn how important that early financial decision had been. It meant that we would be financially independent and never have to rely on any organization, foundation, denomination, or wealthy donors. We would put out the magazine only if its readers would continue to pay for it. That principle has endured. The price of a subscription for four issues that year was "two dollars or whatever you can afford."

We knew there had to be more people out there who were feeling the same things we were about the meaning of the gospel in our time. In fact, that's why we decided to put out a publication, to articulate the theology and lifestyle that was emerging among us, and to reach out to others who found themselves engaged in the same struggles.

Though we were hopeful about the response, we were thoroughly unprepared for the amount of mail we received. Subscriptions began to climb, and soon the shoebox we had set aside for the purpose of record-keeping couldn't contain all the names of the new subscribers and friends we were finding around the country. We received phone calls, visits, and invitations. The publication of the Post-American had sparked something, and from the beginning it began to draw people together.

I have sometimes likened the publication of the Post-American to the raising of a flag up a flag pole. Many people on the ground, at the grassroots, were feeling the same things and longing for an alternative to the narrow versions of Christian faith they were experiencing in their churches. People came from many places because they saw the flag, and met each other around the flag pole. From the beginning, the magazine created an ecumenical spirit among people who had never been in relationship before. Those who now read the magazine are evangelical, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, charismatic, peace church, and members of secular movements for peace and justice searching for faith and meaning in their lives.

The cover of the first issue was dramatic: a picture of Jesus wrapped in an American flag, with a crown of thorns on his head. It carried the caption, "And they crucified him." The message was clear. Jesus was being crucified again by our American Christianity. His gospel had become almost completely lost in a church that had become captive to its culture and trapped by a narrow vision of economic self-interest and American nationalism. Any real witness to the kingdom of God or practical demonstration of obedient discipleship in our day had all but disappeared from the churches.

The brutality of the war in Vietnam, the persistence of white racism, and the grinding oppression of the poor all screamed to heaven over the church's silence. A pervasive American civil religion was in fact sanctioning these manifold national sins, and the prophetic character of biblical faith was almost never invoked.

The message of the early issues of the Post-American was strident and soon became very controversial. In its pages, young evangelical Christians were calling the war in Vietnam a national sin and disgrace. There were other evangelical Christians in the land, and there were others who thought the war in Vietnam was wrong. But in 1971 there were very few evangelical Christians who were, on the basis of their faith, opposed to the war in Vietnam.

Looking back, there is nothing very new in what we were saying. It certainly wasn't as new as we thought it was at the time. Sojourners has always been in the stream of historical Christian orthodoxy. The oldest and best traditions of the church demand that the gospel be proclaimed and lived in the midst of the suffering world, and that those who would follow Jesus Christ be particularly sensitive to the poor and the oppressed. A commitment to social justice is simply a consequence of faith in Jesus.

The message was not even especially radical. We were simply stating what Christians are supposed to believe and how they are called to live. The more Christians identify with Christ, the deeper our alienation becomes from the systems of wealth, power, and violence. It was not a matter of making our theology political. It was a matter of putting the gospel first and subjecting every other part of our lives and our society to the standard of the lordship of Jesus Christ. The recovery of the gospel, the revival of the teaching of Jesus, and the renewal of the prophetic biblical tradition are commitments that have emerged again and again in the history of the church.

As the magazine grew, we found movements, revivals, communities, and explosions of faith in the past that served as precedents and guiding examples for our own experience. In the evangelical tradition we discovered how great social evils such as slavery, industrial exploitation, and discrimination against women were attacked on the basis of faith by revival movements in 18th-century England and 19th-century America. We soon discovered that it was not radical Christian faith that was heretical, but rather the church's conformity to American civil religion.

From the beginning, the Post-American defied categorization. Though our roots and faith were evangelical, the magazine was unlike other evangelical publications. And while our pages were full of the social and political questions, the approach we took differed sharply from any of the liberal religious publications.

At first that threatened both the evangelical and liberal establishments. The evangelicals could see that our faith was clearly biblical and orthodox. But our social and political understanding of the gospel fundamentally challenged the evangelical worldview with its comfortable lifestyle, political compromise, and theology that was divorced from the current historical context. The Post-American mystified the liberals too, for here was a publication much more theologically orthodox or even "conservative" than they were, but that had a far more radical political stance. Their liberalism was called into question, both theologically and politically.

The Post-American emerged as an evangelical publication radically committed to social justice and peace. That is not an unusual combination in the history of the church, but in the fall of 1971 it was unusual indeed.

Central to the magazine's vocation has been the integration and pulling together of things long divided, separated through the fragmentation of the church's life. Its pages have consistently reflected the commitment to bring together evangelism and social justice, spirituality and politics, prayer and peacemaking, worship and action, faith and history.

The Post-American soon earned a reputation for being deeply committed to social justice while rooted in solid biblical theology. The first five years saw the further development and evolution of that perspective, drawing people from both conservative evangelicalism and theological liberalism into a genuinely new direction. People sympathetic to the Post-American were soon described as "radical evangelicals."

A community of people has always been associated with the magazine. People have lived together, sharing the work and a common life. The history of Sojourners community is another story, not to be told here, except to say that in the fall of 1975, we all moved from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and it was soon after that the Post-American became Sojourners.

The name Post-American was both deliberate and significant. The faith we were seeking had to be distinctively post-American, moving beyond the confines of Americanized Christianity by becoming more biblical. The Post-American years were characterized by a prophetic stance that was alienated from the government, the system, and the established church. The change to Sojourners reflected the deepening of our identity as a Christian community and a new commitment growing among us to the rebuilding of the church at the local level. The prophetic vision was evident not only in attacking the old but in offering a new vision for the church's life which held the seeds of new social possibilities in the wider society.

The magazine now grew more clearly out of a community that had begun to move beyond alienation to the forging of a new vision, a new style of life that could be offered for the sake of the church's future in this country. We recognized that if justice and peace are to become the characteristics of the people of God, then our life together must undergo a fundamental transformation.

We have learned from our experience in community that we have no more to give to the world than that which we have come to experience together. The healing of the nations as biblically foreseen begins with the healing of our own lives. So the building up of community, the recovering of a genuine pastoral ministry, the renewal of worship, and the recovery of spiritual disciplines have all become central to us.

The name Sojourners came from Hebrews 11, where the people of God are seen as pilgrims and strangers in this world because of their loyalty to the kingdom of God. Their radical identity in this world grows directly out of the positive vision of a new order which commands more loyalty and obedience from them than any of the ideologies of the world systems. Rooted in the gospel, they are placed in a perpetual revolutionary posture, as they seek the justice and reconciliation that God desires.

It's been a very rich 10 years. All along the way, Sojourners has learned more and more from many Christian traditions. Its readers, contributors, staff, and the community out of which it grows is now deeply ecumenical. In recent years the strongest influence has been Catholic, especially the gospel radicalism of the Catholic Worker and the powerful tradition of Catholic spirituality and contemplative prayer. Sojourners is still clearly evangelical, but now, one would have to say, in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions.

Another change over the years has been the increasing feeling of global solidarity with the body of Christ in other places around the world. Our deepest identification at Sojourners is with the emerging church of the poor in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The new identification of the church with the poor and the oppressed is literally transforming its life.

During the last 10 years, we have come to the conclusion that we North American Christians will find new conversion to Christ as we are converted to the poor. We have now realized that for the last decade Sojourners has been working out a theology of liberation for North American Christians. We have not always used that language, but as we've seen what the Spirit is doing among Christians in Third World countries, and as we have felt a growing solidarity with them, we have come to see that our calling is indeed the same. We are together a part of what God is doing in the world. The call for liberation in the poor countries is directly related to the call for repentance in the rich ones. They are in fact the same call.

We have learned that siding with the poor brings us into conflict with the institutions and arrangements which oppress them. We cannot know the compassion of Christ until we have broken with the style of life that has hardened our hearts.

Perhaps the clearest evidence of that hardness of heart is our nation's willingness to commit nuclear genocide against hundreds of millions of God's children. The nuclear arms race has for us become an urgent matter of faith in which everything we say about our belief in God and commitment to Jesus Christ is at stake.

As the nations move toward the brink of global suicide, Jesus' call to be peacemakers must be urgently renewed in the churches. We must repent, turn from our many idols, and build a church whose faith and life is an obstacle to American power and dominance around the world.

Sojourners represents an opposition movement to the American establishment rooted in traditional Christian faith. Ours is a biblical radicalism. It is neither liberal nor Marxist, embracing no ideology. It derives from a realization that biblical faith will always break apart old categories and defy stereotypes.

The commitments of Sojourners over the past decade have been simple: the recovery of prophetic biblical faith, a radical vision of discipleship, restoring the integrity of worship, and building community. Over the years, I think we've become more sure of the things we're committed to, but perhaps less self-righteous. We take our commitments even more seriously, but have learned to laugh more and take ourselves less seriously. We are more confident of the gospel, but more humble about our ability to live it out.

We have more love and commitment for the church than we did at the beginning. We are able now to see not only the weakness and frailty of the church but also the strength and hope that comes from its history and present struggles. Over the years we have found that same weakness and hope in ourselves.

The readership of the magazine reflects that change. At first it was a small group on the periphery of the church. Now the magazine has penetrated into the heart of the churches. Most of our readers consider themselves active participants in their local congregations, and a third are clergy. Sojourners is no longer perceived as being against the church, but is seen as forging a new vision in the church's life for the sake of its wholeness.

We've learned the value of friendship and fellowship. There is a sense of family that's grown up around the magazine, not only here in the community but with our circle of readers. And it does feel more like a circle than a list.

One of the greatest satisfactions for us has been the way the magazine has brought people together. Sojourners has always been a little more than a magazine and a lot less than an organization. It has been more like a very extended community with a growing kindred spirit. Strength, support, encouragement, and hope come out of such fellowship. We've gotten a sense that new readers feel as though they are joining something and not just subscribing to a magazine. Our subscribers hold meetings in cities and towns across the country. Out of those gatherings have come new communities, friendships, small groups for prayer and support, actions for peace and justice, and even marriages.

There's nothing we've enjoyed more than the experience of meeting magazine subscribers who feel like friends even as we meet for the first time. The tremendous hospitality and love which have been extended to us have been overwhelming.

We have a sense that the meaning of Sojourners is still more ahead of us than behind us. On the practical level, we look forward to putting into the pages of the magazine more biblical study and reflection, continuing discernment of the times beyond the news and events of standard media coverage, increasing practical help for emerging communities in and outside of local congregations, and more on the deepening of prayer and the spiritual life. We hope to increase our investigative reporting, strengthen our resistance to nuclear weapons, maintain our defense of the poor, and promote more connections and community among our readers.

More and more, we see our role at Sojourners as simply calling people to faith, to a recovery of our commitment to Jesus Christ. The renewal of faith is finally the only thing with the strength to resist the economic and political powers now in control and to provide an adequate spiritual foundation for better ways to live.

There was a time when we felt a little like a lonely voice crying in the wilderness. Now, however, the desert is beginning to bloom. An awakening of Christian faith and conscience is apparent in many places.

Our vocation which began with a biblical protest has grown to include a new vision for the church itself. Returning to our first love, regaining our proper identity, and rebuilding our foundations have become central to our message.

How far the present awakening will spread, how deep it will go into the church's life, what enduring changes will come about, and how it might affect the future are questions that are as yet unanswered.

But that there is a new stirring among Christians is undeniable. That stirring in people, in congregations, and in new communities needs to be nurtured while at the same time we continue to challenge the structures and assumptions of the present system and the church's conformity to it.

Sojourners readers are now part of a growing movement of Christians who want to understand their times in a more biblical way and together seek a new shape for the church's life in the United States. We are simply glad to be a part of that with you and look forward with hope to our future together.

Jim Wallis was the editor-in-chief of Sojourners when this article appeared.