Over The Long Haul

Last fall the six pastors, or elders, of our community took a retreat during which they stepped back and took a good, long look at the motley group of 37 adults and six children who call ourselves Sojourners Fellowship. As a community we are involved in family building; tenant organizing and children's day-care work in an inner-city neighborhood in Washington, D.C.; and various outreach ministries, including peace work and Sojourners magazine. The elders' perceptions were written in a pastoral letter, which we have excerpted below in the hopes that your struggles and discoveries may find company in ours.
--The Editors

The foundation of our life and work together must always be our faith. The question continually before us is how conversion can happen in our lives and in the life of the church.

We don't have all the answers and never will; conversion is principally God's activity, of which we can only hope to be a part. Our personal and corporate spiritual disciplines can help us see and understand the movements of the Spirit in our inner lives, in our community, in the churches, and in the politics and history of our times, and will sustain us over the years.

We have discussed the disillusionment that sets in after the first few years of any community's life. The initial enthusiasm of beginning a community, or first joining one, gives way to daily routine. The romance wears off as we realize that the exciting experiment has become something that demands the commitment of our whole lives. Each of us faces the meaning of our choices and of being committed with very human people in very ordinary circumstances; yet the love, growth, freedom, and fulfillment of community can only be experienced as we make those commitments.

The choice for community means a choice against the leading values, rewards, and life patterns of our culture. This choice naturally builds tension within us. The power of the culture often becomes stronger rather than weaker the longer we are in community. In the period of disillusionment following the romance period, the culture reasserts itself with new force. The things we left joyfully behind to join community can become attractive again. This is especially true at transition points like marriage, the birth of children, or an identity crisis about one's vocation or life direction.

For a community's long-term survival against the assaults of the culture, at least two paths can be taken, the first would create an alternate system that protects people from the culture. Very strong, even rigid, corporate structures can be used to create an environment which is self-sufficient. Every community is tempted to find its security in structures which replace the securities offered by the society. But such structures can dominate, control, and stifle growth.

The second path would create a community environment which generates faith. The power of the culture is confronted not primarily by a community's structures but by the deepening faith of its members. The growth of personal faith enables us to resist the cultural pressures and to create together meaningful alternatives to it. This path requires more risk but produces greater maturity and truer security.

Our desire is to take the second path. The community's purpose is not to protect us from the culture, but to mature us in our faith so that we might live as Christians in the midst of the culture. Similarly, our spiritual disciplines must not be used to protect us from the world or from,each other, but to deepen our faith so that we can give more of our lives for the sake of Christ.

To create a climate of faith is both a personal and corporate responsibility. The disciplines necessary for our faith to deepen and grow create the atmosphere out of which everything else must flow and must not be squeezed into and around previously made commitments. We believe that Bible study, prayer, and solitude are the building blocks of a spiritual base strong enough to sustain us long term.

Our personal prayer disciplines have found a place of accountability and nurture in the relationship into which each of us has entered with another member of the community who serves as a spiritual director. The spiritual director helps us discern a personal discipline that suits our lives and ministries.

Retreats, both personal and corporate, are an important aspect of our prayer life. We want to encourage these, not as vacations or escapes, but as part of our work. Our new prayer room, or poustinia, has been helpful in this respect.

We want to make Bible study a community priority. We encourage more study at our weekly Wednesday night community and parish gatherings as well as in our households and in the small groups that have developed around them. Perhaps the whole community could take one scripture each week for personal meditation, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer's community did in the underground seminary in Germany during World War II.

Studying the Scriptures with our neighbors could be one of the best ways of coming to know the people who live around us, as well as learning the meaning of the Scriptures through the eyes and experience of people who are poor. Such Bible study could change our relationship both to our neighbors and to the Scriptures.

Relationship to the poor should be seen as a spiritual discipline rather than simply an occasion for ministry. We should not be measuring how much ministry the community is producing but rather how much compassion and passion we feel for our neighbors.

In the early history of the community we were more involved personally with our neighbors. The community was smaller, most of us had relationships with neighborhood children and adults, and our other ministries had not yet developed. We have moved from simply providing services and friendship into neighborhood organizing, from maintenance to empowerment and a more systemic political engagement with neighborhood problems.

In the process, those who work in the neighborhood have intensified their commitment to its people, and many of the rest of us have minimized our personal involvement. We can all help to complement and support the ministries in which the community is already engaged by visiting the families of our daycare children and residents of the apartment buildings in which our tenant organizers are working, as well as making it a priority to intercede in prayer for our neighbors and those working with them.

We are a very diverse and ecumenical community. We come from quite different, and sometimes conflicting, backgrounds and temperaments. The way each of us has experienced our faith, and the way we express it, often bring those differences to the surface in ways that can breed both misunderstanding and uneasiness among us.

We need to talk more as a community about our different faith pilgrimages. Our main problem at this point seems more to be lack of understanding than lack of respect for one another. Our community diversity should be seen as a strength rather than weakness; our ecumenical identity is absolutely central to our vocation.

We are continuing to develop our worship life to make it indigenous to us. The worship group is working on the development of a new liturgy. The word liturgy means "the work of the people." We hope to create liturgies for ourselves that reflect the tradition of the church but are full of our own personality and vocation.

We will also spend more time on important questions about increasing our children's involvement in our worship and making plans for their Christian education. And, as the Eucharist continues to be central to our life, we want to affirm our corporate decision to begin soon with a daily evening Eucharist that is open to all; this will fulfill a need that many of us have been feeling for quite a while.

We would like to keep in mind the tradition and importance of meals in Christian history. For Christians, meals have served as a primary place of fellowship, and the Eucharist itself originated as part of a larger meal and remained so for many years. We need to take care that our meals together not become too hasty or simply functional.

Study easily gets squeezed out of our busy life but is vital to the quality and creativity of our lives and work. Preparation is a part of ministry. We must not get so caught up in immediate needs that we feel guilty about taking time for study.

We are planning three or four teaching weekends using resource people from outside the community. We are also putting together a bibliography of suggested reading. And we would like to establish an intensive-style political theology group, which will include reading and conversation.

For us "prophetic types," play is probably one of the most important spiritual disciplines of our life. More talent shows, coffee houses, and impromptu get-togethers will help us enjoy being together. Our lives must be more than a bundle of commitments. What we need to learn to do better is to live life humanly and joyfully in the midst of our commitments. Learning to listen, relax, and celebrate is essential for those who seek to take the gospel seriously over the long haul. If we do indeed have a prophetic vocation, then humor and humility will be our saving graces.

All of these questions bear upon our freedom to be vulnerable to God, to one another, and to those around us. Being vulnerable means having nothing to protect. I n that sense, it means being totally "disarmed," and therefore is the foundation of any peace ministry we will ever have in the churches. Invulnerability is rooted in fear and causes protectiveness and defensiveness. Vulnerability creates freedom, trust, and the ability to relax with one another.

We are making progress in our ability to be open, but still need to confront the spirit of withholding with even deeper levels of honesty. Genuine vulnerability involves risk-taking. It is based on the willingness to accept ourselves, to accept and challenge one another.

Both acceptance and loving confrontation are needed. Our fellowship together is both a gift and a demand. It can never be only one or the other. Community is the context where the love and the pain both give life, and we move beyond sentimentality and judgment.

It is important for community leaders to share our fears, anxieties, weakness, or confusion in the same way that others do. For all of us, it is not just sharing our strengths and gifts that is important, but sharing all of our humanity. We must resist the continual temptation to share other people's lives more than our own.

As a community, we must always be asking how the environment of our life together generates faith. Our spiritual disciplines and our vulnerability with each other can create a place where vision, creativity, and vitality will flourish. That is our prayer for the new year.

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