Celebrating Fifteen Years

I have always loved Chicago, and it is always a treat for me to return there. Chicago is the place where Sojourners magazine and community were born 15 years ago and thus is a place full of memories for us.

In August I was back in Chicago again, this time to show Joyce Hollyday all the old places that figure so prominently in Sojourners' history. Joyce joined the community in our early Washington, D.C. days and, though she had heard all the old stories, had never seen the old places. In one day, we retraced the five-year journey the community had taken in the Chicago area. The starting point was Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, a few miles north of Chicago, where the original group first met in the fall of 1971. We were all young seminarians at the time, full of energy and hope. I took Joyce to see my old dormitory room where our little group often met for endless hours together, full of intense discussion, playful conversation, fervent prayer, laughter, tears, and, most of all, dreams of the future. There our visions began to be constructed.

While wandering through an old classroom building, we ran into one of my former professors and stood in the hallway talking for two-and-one-half hours. Next we surprised Thorn Morris, who was part of our original group and stayed on to become the librarian at Trinity College (across the street from the seminary). Thorn was our first magazine treasurer and subscription manager back when we got by with 3-by-5 cards filed in a shoebox. Thorn reminded me that our very first subscriber was a young Trinity College student named Phyllis. Thorn was so grateful, he married her. They just had twins.

By the end of our first year at Trinity, we had decided to start a new publication and to put the first issue together that summer. We needed a house where we could work together on the new magazine while also earning some money for school. An ad on the seminary bulletin board for house-sitters seemed like a good solution, and we soon found ourselves in the Lake Forest home of a Chicago radio and television personality, who was probably best known as the voice of the Jolly Green Giant in frozen food commercials--you know, the big, green guy who says "Ho, ho, ho." So the unlikely birthplace of Sojourners magazine was in a posh Chicago suburb, in the house of the Jolly Green Giant. It was great to see the house again, though our famous friend had moved.

Then it was off to nearby Lake Bluff, where we had established our first community house during our second year of seminary. This old, white-frame place was the site of our Sunday night worship meetings and community discussions. One of the bedrooms was our first magazine office.

We then retraced our journey into the inner city as seminary days came to an end. Our first stop was an apartment building in north Rogers Park, near Lake Michigan. It was a place I never will forget, particularly its frequent lack of heat in the winter months and the even more frequent breakdown of the plumbing. That famous bone-chilling Chicago wind coming off the lake forced us to type with gloves on in the front room that we had converted into our office.

NEXT STOP--UPTOWN, the inner-city neighborhood that was home for us in the year before we came to Washington, D.C. Uptown has always been a port of entry in Chicago and may be the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the country. The local high school has more than 100 languages represented. I was amazed at how little has changed and startled by how much I missed the old neighborhood.

We visited our first real office, still located above a string of skid-row bars and storefronts on Lawrence, near Broadway. As usual, the door of the office building was open, and we could see there was still a lot of empty office space in the deteriorating building.

The Uptown streets still look poor and tough, with graffiti from the same gangs I remember from 10 years ago. Uptown really looks like a microcosm of the world, with both the polarizations and possibilities of the racial, cultural, and national diversity vividly evident.

When we arrived on our old street, we immediately ran into an old friend out walking her dog. She took us up to meet the people now inhabiting our building who, amazingly, are all Sojourners readers and who had bought the place together.

I hadn't been up there since we left, and it was wonderful to see the old place again. Each room was filled with so many memories. The current residents pointed to the grease spot, still indelibly marked on the dining room floor, which they had heard was made by Ed Spivey's motorcycle (it's true). We talked for a long time about the news and changes in the neighborhood over these 10 years, and I felt again the excitement that is Uptown.

We ended the day with dinner at one of those Mexican restaurants that Chicago is famous for and that we often frequented in the early days.

Fifteen years have gone by since we began at Trinity. It seems a long time ago now, but the memories are still fresh and warm. We've changed a lot and are still changing, and it's still too early to tell where we are headed. But as we celebrate our 15th anniversary as a magazine and community, I am grateful for where God has brought us and for whatever lies ahead.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.