Sabbatical

It has now been 15 years since the beginning of Sojourners. Before that, for me, were the intense years in the student movement during the late '60s. Only in the past year have I come to realize the enormous amount of time and energy it has taken to start a magazine, found a community, and help build a movement.

I can no longer even count the number of articles, sermons and speeches, cities and miles and days on the road, meetings, community crises, pastoral conversations, marches, vigils, worship services and public actions, new projects, visions, dreams, and everything else it has taken to be a pastor, an editor, an itinerant preacher, and a political organizer. It's also only in the past year or so that I've come to realize I've never taken a break in these many years, or even a real rest, or, until recently, a serious vacation.

I'm very thankful for these 15 years but am more aware now of the toll they have taken. There is also a very deep sense of having completed a period of my life and embarking soon upon a new stage. What is needed now is a time in between to thoroughly digest and understand what has gone before and to prepare for what is to come.

So, at the suggestion of my wise, dearly beloved spiritual director, and with the advice and support of my community and friends, I have decided to take a long-awaited and much needed sabbatical. For the next year, until the fall of 1987, I will not be doing any preaching or speaking on the road and probably very little in Sojourners Community. I won't be writing any books or major articles but only editorials and keeping up this column in Sojourners. And that writing will probably be very different because of the changed circumstances of my life. I am withdrawing from all of my broader involvements, such as Witness for Peace and the Pledge of Resistance, and I will not be organizing or helping to organize the kind of public events Sojourners has become known for, such as Peace Pentecost.

In other words, I will be staying out of the myriad of activities I and other people have gotten myself into these many years. Instead, I will be home, based in my community, being attentive to issues concerning the direction of our life arid ministry but keeping out of day-to-day editorial and pastoral responsibilities. I will travel only for retreat, vacation, renewing friendships, and for going into situations and places where I want mostly to listen and won't have to do so much talking.

What I will be doing is giving myself to rest, prayer, and reflection. Those are the deepest needs and desires I now feel.

While I am filled with gratitude for the past 15 years, I am also filled with questions about next steps and what lies ahead. We have never experienced a deeper and broader response to the message of Sojourners than over the last few years. But that is all the more reason to take some time to stop and pray, to listen and wait upon God to show the way forward.

There is a new movement now in the churches, and we feel deeply blessed to have played a part in it. But where should we be going now? What should this movement be about now? How can we deepen our foundations? What sort of people must we be? And what can we offer to the church and to the nation?

Specifically, how can the flames that have been ignited among us spark the conscience of our country and be used by the Spirit of God to light fires of compassion, justice, and peace in our land and around the world?

I BELIEVE THAT the answers to those and many other questions will come for me right now--more from prayer and reflection than from continued activism. I also know that I desperately need the rest. I need the time and space to establish the personal life that has often suffered during these many years and, hopefully, to make some personal decisions that will equip me to give myself to the long-haul struggle we have ahead of us.

The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time for everything. The concept of sabbatical is deeply biblical and virtually ingrained into the law and commandments. Yet we who like to think of ourselves as biblical people have paid little attention to our needs for sabbatical rest and reflection. At least that's been true of me.

Well, the time has come for me to give some flesh to my insistence that we are not saved by our works or justified by our activism. We are saved by grace, called to respond to the love of God, and required only to be faithful. What is most faithful for me right now is to enter a season of quietness and restfulness, to pray and play, and mostly to listen to my friends, my brothers and sisters, to my own heart, and, most deeply, to the voice of God.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.