Once upon a time--about 10 years ago--a magazine was born in the house of the Jolly Green Giant. The magazine had been an unhatched idea in the heads of a handful of people almost a year before.
They were students who had met at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in an area of Deerfield, Illinois, called Bannockburn, in the fall of 1970. They gathered almost every night in one of their dormitory rooms to pray and study, and to discuss the relationship of their faith to political issues, particularly the Vietnam War. It was an intense and formative time of forging a theology that addressed their historical situation. Out of those times came a deep closeness and common vision.
On weekends they often continued their discussions at Bill's Pub, where the peanuts were free and the beer two dollars a pitcher. These were not your ordinary pub patrons: One evening the waitress discovered them all bowed in intense prayer, hands locked across their table, and she couldn't figure out where to put the pitcher.
If the crew didn't blend into the woodwork at Bill's, it was becoming increasingly clear to many at the seminary that they didn't quite fit there either.
In October, the group circulated a leaflet, described as both "a commentary on the times from the view of the gospel" and a "manifesto of radical Christianity." Jim Wallis drafted it late one night while working a night watchman job in a local high school. The first reading of it to the group is remembered as a gripping and landmark time. The "Bannockburn 7" had gone public.
They continued to write and circulate antiwar leaflets. They also organized a free university, a forum which drew a hundred students who were interested in discussion of a variety of social and political issues. They even once did a sit-in at the seminary's administration building.
Although their behavior wasn't unusual as campus activity went in this country at the time, the news was that this was happening at a leading evangelical seminary. Quite unlike activities elsewhere, however, were regular celebrations of worship which were gathering places for seminary and college students as well as local teenagers. These became the focal point of an evangelistic ministry to troubled youth in the area, an irony for a group with such a strong commitment to social justice.
These were serious worship and social events, despite the name given to them ("God parties") and the choice of "Joy to the World" as the traditional opening song (the Three Dog Night version, for those of us who remember, beginning "Jeremiah was a bullfrog...").
The group became increasingly active in the Chicago area, and their faith convictions and antiwar activities began to draw attention to the seminary, which eventually resulted in financial problems for the school when contributors withheld donations. Eventually, the FBI came to ask questions about a few of the group, an occurrence that had never happened before at Trinity, or probably any other evangelical seminary.
The controversy surrounding the group's presence on campus intensified, and classes at the seminary became highly polarized and politicized. To the Bannockburn 7, this was theology come alive.
But as Joe Roos sat in a class discovering how many square feet per student provides maximal response in Sunday School classes, and Jim turned in a raft of papers with titles like "The Social Implications of the Old Testament Prophets," "The Social Implications of the Early Church," and "The Social Implications of New Testament Eschatology," there was a growing discontent and sense that they had to do more. By the spring of 1971, the group was ready to begin thinking about a publication.
One of the seven noticed a sign on a seminary bulletin board: The owner of a large house in a nearby suburb was looking for students to live there and paint his house over the summer. The author of the notice turned out to be the radio personality who is the voice behind the Jolly Green Giant. The group moved in and spent the summer painting and putting together the first issue of the Post-American, the forerunner of Sojourners.
Each of the seven scraped together a hundred dollars, which was the magazine's first budget. The first issue, and several thereafter, were typeset by Bob Sabath on an archaic typesetter rented from an underground Chicago newspaper. The group had only $25 to put toward the task--the price of a day's rental. Bob was up all night typesetting while the others proofread. Throughout the night they endured the blasts of a band from a singles' bar below, and the regular intrusion of the elevated train which passed by just 15 feet away.
They decided to continue living together and moved in the fall into Lake Bluff, yet another Chicago suburb. Their house was easily identifiable: It was the white frame one next to the sewer, with the bright yellow school buses parked out front. They continued their seminary work, drove buses for special education children in the early mornings, and put out the Post-American quarterly, keeping track of subscribers in a shoe box. The house soon became a gathering point for an additional 30 people.
A year later, a dozen felt that they wanted to form an intentional community in inner-city Chicago. They desired to see their commitment to the poor and their struggles, articulated strongly in the magazine, become a focus of their life together. In the fall of '72, they moved into two adjoining apartments in the Rogers Park area, a block from Lake Michigan.
The apartments lacked heat, so that in winter they got accustomed to eating dinner in their parkas and having late-night conversations in the kitchen around the open oven. The Post-American was put together on an enclosed porch, where winds came blasting off the lake, a numbing experience for much of the year requiring the ability to type while wearing gloves.
The year and a half in Rogers Park marked a gradual erosion of relationships. The group poured most of its energy into finding a perfect community model for itself and, in the process, neglected to care enough for one another. Ego clashes and identity struggles erupted, and the community finally collapsed. Joe and Jim, the Post-American's only staff for several months, moved with three others into another low-income area of Chicago called Uptown.
Slowly, members of the group recovered a vision of living together. Individual wounds began to heal, forgiveness and reconciliation became central to their relationships, and they spent many hours praying and worshiping together. By early 1975, new people were drawn to them, and fresh life was beginning to blossom in Uptown.
The magazine rented its first office for $50 a month. It was close enough to an el platform that whenever a train went by--which was often--the noise cut off the possibility of phone conversations. It was also near enough that Ed Spivey could lean out of an office window one day and yell down to Bob, who was waiting on the platform for a train, "Don't worry, Bob--your tests just came back from the hospital and you're only a carrier. You'll be fine--just don't get near anybody"--and then watch the rest of the waiting crowd disperse.
But other new life was coming to Uptown as well-developers and renovators who were displacing low-income neighbors from their homes. Because of the community's commitment to proximity to the poor, as well as a desire for a new beginning in a different place, they began to pray together for a new direction.
In the fall of '75,18 adults, two babies, a dog, and a cat arrived in Washington, D.C., to begin a new life together in two households. Joe sold his car to finance the move.
This was a time of community identity formation. The group, no longer defined solely by the magazine, branched out into ministry in its low-income neighborhood. The relationships and involvements that developed have grown into the community's current local ministries, which include a daycare center and housing work with neighborhood tenants. The Post-American was changed to Sojourners, a biblical metaphor for the people of God which reflected the broadening vision of the community and the magazine.
We have come a long way from a 16-page tabloid run on a shoestring and out of a shoebox. The 14 fists which appeared in the first issue of the Post-American have given way to a look and content more reflective of our deepening commitment to the church, to community and prayer, and of our growing ecumenical nature, while still retaining the political analysis from a biblical perspective for which the magazine was first known.
Upon occasion David King, our circulation manager, has attended publications seminars. The organizers of such seminars always talk about the essential elements for starting a magazine--the Post American had none of them--and what not to do when starting a magazine--the Post American did them all. The combined pre-Sojourners journalistic experience of the staff--even today--wouldn't fill an inkwell. But apparently the magazine has offered a message that hits home--and continues to do so--for many people. We are thankful for that.
We are now a staff of 18, with a structure to our work life that is very different from the early days. We take an annual retreat together as a time for fellowship, conversation, and fun. We've adapted the Episcopal Church's traditional noonday office as a daily time of worship together: our "office office." Leadership of that time is shared around. Ginny and Rob Soley, who each work part-time and share equally in the raising of their year-old daughter, place reminders in our mailboxes: "You are worship leader tomorrow," and "You are worship leader today." They have recently created a new one for the busy or absent-minded: "You were worship leader yesterday."
We have instituted a weekly time over lunch during which news editor Phil Shenk shares the unusual and humorous stories he's come across in his week's perusal of a mountain of periodicals. This time is usually followed by a book service report from shipping clerk David Peterson, who recently blessed us with a list of current books and their upcoming sequels: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm XI; In Search of the Beyond, Beyond in Search of the Beyond; Beginning to Pray, How to Quit Praying; and Letters from the Desert, Postcards from Hawaii.
We receive subsistence salaries that keep us below a taxable income, so as not to have to pay war taxes. This helps us keep subscription prices low. And we're rather proud of the fact that we can run the kind of an operation in which the shipping clerk, who is not part of the community's economic sharing arrangement, draws a larger salary than the editor.
Work generally flows fairly smoothly. Of course there are always the subscriptions that get lost in the mail, renewal notices that get duplicated, and the typesetter that breaks down occasionally. There are printers who run out of paper, and postal changes that happen overnight and leave us holding the mailbag at the post office the next morning with a thousand pieces of mail metered incorrectly.
There's the day that a shipment of books that was supposed to be Jacques Ellul's Hope in Time of Abandonment came into the office as a hundred copies of Melvin the Miracle Pig. And we often go right up to the wire on writing deadlines--including the time that we were to receive an article by Ellul arriving from France just in time to be typeset and laid out; what we didn't count on was that it was written in French. It's all part of the job.
We tend to write too lengthily, placing editors and art director Ed Spivey in a constant wrangling over space on the pages. When confronted with an overabundance of type, Ed has at times threatened to give in and put out a notice to readers saying, "If you would like this month's graphics, please send a stamped, self-addressed envelope." And there are always valiant but unsuccessful attempts to convince ourselves of the need for on-site coverage of such events as the nuclear civil suit in Hawaii and a new community about to be uncovered in Tahiti.
But perhaps the greatest tension we live with is spelled out by Lindsay McLaughlin on our office bulletin board under the title "The Sojourners Dilemma": "Editors should avoid articles that are repetitive, redundant, and say the same things over and over; but repetition is the key to social change."
There are all the good ideas that come up in staff meetings that never came to fruition--like starting as a regular feature Christian mystery stories written under the pseudonym Agatha Christology and a Readers Digest-style anecdote column called "Life In But Not Of These United States." Ed would like to write a history of the community to answer all the questions ever asked about Sojourners called, "Life with Ed Spivey, 39 Others." Not to mention the party we'd like to throw for all seven of you who responded on our readers' survey that Sojourners has too much humor in its pages.
We enjoy the mail we receive--everything from news of those who met each other and got married through our "Connections" page, to letters from pastors who were among the students at Trinity a decade ago and had their faith challenged, deepened, and re-formed by the activities there. Subscription manager Stephen McNeil is even beginning to be able to appreciate the tracts, ashes--and, yes, even chicken bones--that sometimes come to us in our direct-mail envelopes; occasionally we even get new subscriptions. Keep the cards and letters--but not the bones--coming. We appreciate hearing from you, and are grateful for the support you offer.
At the moment our major preoccupation is finding new office space--the wanderings implied in our name keep coming home. In the past few months we've looked at all sorts of vague possibilities, including an abandoned school, a stable on Capitol Hill that used to board senators' horses, and a former car showroom that has a car elevator big enough to hold the entire staff and two friends each.
We'll keep on searching, and we ask for your patience during the imminent upheaval. Where is the Jolly Green Giant when you really need him?
Joyce Hollyday was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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