Sojourners internship
Photo by Omri D. Cohen on Unsplash
My favorite place in the Sojourners’ Fellowship house is the chair by the window. Each morning, I tiptoe through the dark house, flip on a lamp, and turn on the kettle. I center myself in the lingering darkness of the previous night.
Together in community, we have the opportunity to reveal our whole selves to one another: our pains, our joys, our doubts, our hopes, our failings, and our gifts. Being like Christ is to love people in their fullness — recognizing their strengths and not stopping there, recognizing their weaknesses and not stopping there. Because of our love for one another, we see each other. We do not dwell on our shortcomings, and we do not pretend their nonexistence. We are not wholly bad or wholly good. We are a beautiful, human group of somewhere-in-betweens who desperately want to live out Jesus’ commandment to love one another.
Intern Cycle 30. Image via Sojourners.
This week’s headlines regarding the latest Pew report about the changing religious landscape in the US have gotten me thinking about my own journey with religion, especially as the discussion continues to emphasize the growth of the 'Nones' – the religiously unaffiliated who are said to now make up about one-fifth of the population and outnumber Catholics and mainline Protestants.
Almost eight years ago, I showed up to work at Sojourners for the first time as a member of Sojourners’ Intern Cycle 24. It saved my faith and it changed my life.
Screenshot from 'The Sojourners Internship Program' trailer. Courtesy Ted English/Sojourners.
It’s rare that a film can take all of these journeys and still tell a cohesive story. Sometimes, when we’re very lucky, a truly special film comes along that gets as close as possible to combining and distilling the infinite layers of the human experience. The Sojourners Internship Program is one of these truly special feats. It takes each facet of its characters’ journeys seriously, and allows each of them to explore those facets in their own unique ways.
Like most great stories, the setup of The Sojourners Internship Program is simple, but filled with the potential to go any number of directions: 10 individuals from different ethnic, economic, political and spiritual backgrounds are selected as interns for a social justice organization. They travel to Washington, D.C., to live in community and work together. But the community they live in is no ordinary community, and neither is the organization. The interns enter their house in Columbia Heights as strangers with hopes, ideals, doubts and a few preconceived notions. But they will leave forever changed.