TheSojourners Community is anintentional community that was started in the early 1970s by a group of students atTrinity Evangelical Divinity School.[1] The founders had the desire to further explore the relationship between their orthodoxProtestant faith and the social crisis that surrounded them,[1] particularly around theVietnam War. In the fall of 1971, they began publishing thePost American, a newspaper that expressed the group's commitment to the faith and ideas about social change. The Sojourners Community is most widely known forSojourners magazine and for the writing and speaking of its founding memberJim Wallis.
In the summer of 1971, the group organized anintentional community inRogers Park, Illinois.[2] However, in 1974, the community disintegrated.[2] The remaining members decided to move to theinner-city neighborhood ofColumbia Heights,Washington, D.C., where they could better address urban problems and national politics.[2] Combining their assets and incomes, the group gradually established households and a network of social outreach programs.[2] The community lived together in these common households, shared a common purse, formed a worshiping community, got involved in neighborhood issues, organized national events on behalf of peace and justice and continued to publishSojourners magazine.[3] The vestige of the Sojourners' intentional living community remains its intern community, a group of individuals who are hired as year-long interns and who live together in intentional Christian community for that year as part of the internship experience.
OtherEvangelicals have critiqued the Sojourners Community due to their combination of strict evangelical Protestant beliefs (though the Sojourners living community and wider organizational network has also long includedmainline Protestants andCatholics) and radical "social priorities [which] run in markedly different directions".[2] Also, Sojourners differentiates from other evangelicals in its condemning ofmilitarism, corporate excesses, and theexploitation of people in theThird World.[2] However, other social critiques are similar to those of other evangelicals on issues such as condemning ofabortion (as part of a wider pro-life stance that includes protection of life from conception to grave, i.e. anti-war and anti-hunger stances). Sojourners advocates economic justice and expanded services for the poor.[2]
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