The houses in Columbia Heights range from two to three stories; they stand side by side, shoved against each other, several yards back from the streets. Many have front porches or steps that during the summer become gathering places for kids jumping ropes, and in the relative cool of the evening, for adults who turn up their radios over the whirring of fans and gunning of car engines.
In the winter, landlords tend to skimp on the heat. And the neglect of needed repairs, which was more tolerable in the warm weather, becomes a crisis as people spend more time indoors.
It is here in this inner-city Washington, D.C. neighborhood that the 37 adults and 10 children who make up Sojourners Community have our various houses and apartments. We live on Euclid, Fairmont, Harvard, 13th, and Girard Streets—names that have come to mean home for us.
While the community carries out several ministries centered in our neighborhood, we see also a world beyond Columbia Heights. It is a violent one filled with injustice; but too it is graced with the presence of Christ, whose church offers the good news of Jesus' victory over the forces of death and of a kingdom of love, justice, and peace. Sojourners has responded to the call to be a Christian community attempting to reflect that kingdom. Our particular vocation is to the church and for the sake of the church's faithfulness in the world.
Some in the community first sensed that call nearly 15 years ago, when a handful of students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, began meeting to discuss the relationship of their faith to political issues, particularly the Vietnam War. In 1971 the group decided to publish a tabloid that would express their commitment to social justice and peace and test whether other Christians had similar convictions about the radical nature of the gospel. The Post-American was born.
The students moved to Chicago and began to share a common life and identify themselves as a Christian community. In 1975 the community moved from Chicago to Washington, D.C, and changed its name to Sojourners.
Many things besides our name have changed over the years. We have broadened beyond our evangelical beginnings, as those of diverse Christian backgrounds, including mainline Protestants, Anabaptists, and Catholics, have joined us and shaped the community's life. Our common desire has always been simply to follow Jesus and to live our lives in active response to the gospel.
We have been drawn together—families, singles, and married couples—into a community. We share all our money in a common treasury and are mutually accountable to one another for our commitments to a simplified lifestyle, shared decision making, personal conversion, and spiritual growth. A group of five pastors, both women and men whose authority has been recognized from within the community, directs, guides, and challenges the community in dealing with the issues we face together.
Our local ministries just last year moved into a large house that holds the offices of our tenant organizers, provides space for food distribution on Saturday mornings, and is home for children's programs as well as nutrition education and support groups for mothers of young children. Our national ministries are located in another building across town and include the magazine, local and national peace organizing, a mail-order book service, a speaking and teaching ministry, a guest ministry, and an internship program.
The community has always attempted to join that which has often been divided in the history of the church: prayer and ministry, worship and politics, evangelism and social action. Some days in our own life, when not one of our community cars is available for a run to the grocery store because they are all being used either to go to work or take children to the park, to deliver leaflets downtown to the printer or ferry people to the airport, it feels as if everything is not quite coming together.
Last Thanksgiving weekend, though, as the community was finishing our annual retreat at a center several miles out of the city, a different sense emerged. The air was crisp and the sun warm as we gathered on a hill overlooking fields and a river whose tree-lined banks were still tinged with russet and gold. Our children gamboled beside us (and through our legs) as we took time to revel in the gift God has given in community, in a history of shared joys and sorrows—a bond stronger than any difficulties.
After the retreat we returned to face the rough edges in our common life, the struggles of life in an inner-city neighborhood, and the alienation we experience from the values and attitudes of our country's culture. But on Sunday mornings, in the worship that is at the heart of the community's life, we each come forward to take from a rounded loaf of bread and a simple ceramic cup. In the bread and wine we touch God's life poured out for us and for the world, and we are renewed.
Lindsay Jane Dubs was managing editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
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