Sojourners Fellowship

Our worship has overflowed our largest living room into a small Catholic chapel here in our neighborhood. It has become a place where many new people first make contact with us. Worship has become the renewing center of our life. The community gathers together three times each week for corporate worship, and on other days space is made in the life of each household for family worship.

We have learned to come to worship with a sense of expectation of the Spirit among us and of hearing God’s voice to us as a body of people. As we gather to celebrate the life that we have been given, God’s word comes to us, gently but powerfully: in praise, in song, in prayer, in teaching, and in the Eucharist. It has become a time in which we are both confronted with the claims of Christ upon our lives and comforted by his peace.

As we have found the freedom to open ourselves to God and to one another, worship has become a time of making deeper connection with each other, of confessing our sin, of sharing our brokenness, of shedding our tears, of overflowing with our joy, of being reconciled one to another. In worship we are reminded quietly of God’s love for us which manifests itself in the warmth and affection which wells up for one another. In worship we celebrate our calling as a people and experience a unity in the Spirit that we really never thought possible.

We believe that to be a Christian community in the present American situation is to be a community of resistance. In seeking to learn more of what that might mean for us, we have come to feel that biblically authentic resistance will be based upon the true spirit of worship and celebration. If we are not first a community of celebration, our resistance can be overcome with despair, bitterness, and desperation. We can only learn to say no if we have first learned to say yes to something truer and more life-giving than the oppressive political realities which surround us. We have found that foundation of celebration in the releasing of our spirits for praise and in the Eucharist.

We have three houses and will soon be adding one or two more to accommodate about 50 people. Each household functions as an extended family unit with from about 12 to 18 people in each. The fellowship is developing a broader identity than just those who live in households, becoming a parish community in which people can increasingly become deeply related to the life and ministry of the community, whether or not they are living in a household.

But it is here in the households that our everyday lives are shared most intensely. The household provides a family environment for those who would normally not have one. As single people, single parents, children, and married couples make a family together, our households have become healing environments where hurt and broken people can come to trust and which can surround us all with warmth, love and acceptance as we, with the help of brothers and sisters, seek wholeness for our lives.

The household has also become a place where poor and homeless people can be incorporated into our life. Sharing our money and having all things in common enables us to provide economically for all those in households, and encourages us to continue to simplify the way we live. We seek to guide our lifestyle by the twin efforts at creativity and simplicity. As we share work, meals, time, and living space we find our lives becoming more and more intertwined and our commitment to one another deepened. It is our desire to be a family together--which distinguishes us from being a commune or merely an experiment in collective living. To be a family means to nurture an unconditional commitment and unlimited liability for one another, which enables conflicts, problems, and interpersonal struggles to be resolved much more deliberately and at a much deeper level?

Within our extended household families, we have a deep commitment to nurturing both the marriages within our body and the bonds between parents and their children. Those special relationships can neither be neglected nor become exclusive units from which others are shut out. Rather, as marriage and family come to maturity in the context of community, they open up, become more inclusive, and share freely the life within them with the larger family of their brothers and sisters.

Sojourner’s Magazine (previously titled Post-American) preceded the community and continues to be central to our life and to be our most visible ministry. The publication is no longer an independent project, but flows directly out of the life of the community. The pages of the magazine reflect the questions, the struggles, the commitments of our own life together. While it does grow out of our own community, we are deeply conscious of the role of Sojourners has in serving as a forum and a voice for a much larger community of biblical people growing up around this country. The continual growth of Sojourners readership and the extensive traveling and speaking ministry of Jim and others have placed us in personal relationship with many people, groups, and communities in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

That ministry has become for our community a great blessing and a great responsibility. We have worked very hard this past year to create a publication that would do something that was not being done anywhere else--we want to do serious journalism that probes the issues and events of our own times and is rooted in the radical social and political character of the biblical witness. As the scope and depth of the magazine’s work has expanded this last year Sojourners has established a much more public profile and reputation, and our readership has tripled. As a staff and as a community we are in much prayer and conversation about the future shape and direction of the publication.

Since we have come to Washington, many other ministries and projects have emerged to take their place alongside Sojourners. These have primarily grown up out of the relationships we have found with local people--children and families in our city. One of the most important things that has occurred in our life is the transition from being a community for the poor to a community with the poor. Our relationship to the dispossessed has radically changed as the poor have become no longer merely objects of our concern, but friends with names and faces who share our lives and have become a part of our family. Those relationships have drawn us into providing food, clothing, housing and just simple fun where all were lacking. Opening our houses, daily tutoring, camping trips to the ocean or the mountains, basketball in the alley, trips into the city, special times of children’s worship, talking together about what it means to follow Jesus amid the harsh reality of street life in Washington, D.C.--all these have become a part of our life.

Children, their needs, their problems, their gifts, their involvement, have become central to the whole lifestyle of the community. Part of the reason is that we have so many children in the community (16 at last count, with more on the way...). Our children are an ever present part of our lives and their care and nurture has become one of our primary ministries. They absorb our time, our love, our affection and then give all that back to us in their own special way. Both the time they require of us, and the contribution they make to our life can hardly be measured. It is their uninhibited playfulness and joyfulness and the simplicity of their trust and love which teaches us most about the truest meaning of the gospel, and about what things count most in the kingdom.