I don’t even know where I should begin. I process experiences better when I am able to articulate them in lucid ways. And because I have an awful memory, I draw on experiences better when I’ve written them down and am able to re-read them when I am feeling nostalgic. For these reasons, I’ve decided to keep a blog to record my one-year internship with Sojourners.
Sojourners is a Christian social justice organization with a focus on poverty and peace issues, with a focus on expanding the dialogue about the range of issues with which Christians should be concerned (e.g. poverty is a life issue). Their target audience is evangelical Christians, but the organization is ecumenical and broad-based. Sojourners produces a magazine and also has a Policy and Organizing Department, for which I am an intern. Jim Wallis, along with a handful of others, began an intentional community nearly forty years ago that did both neighborhood ministry and produced a newspaper to speak about Christians and political issues, initially primarily the Vietnam War. In this way, they much resembled a Catholic Worker house.
Though Sojourners ministry is now more national in focus, they still maintain intentional community through their internship program. I live in a house in Columbia Heights, Washington DC, just a few blocks from the Sojourners office, with six other interns.
I’ve lived in intentional community before, in Bonita Springs, Florida and at the Houston Catholic Worker. This is the first time, however, that I’ve had a real role in shaping the values and priorities of community life – that is, there are no leaders – we are all new to this community and are committed to sharing decisions, funds, work, and prayer together for this year.
In the past ten weeks, my new community has challenged me, helped me see truth more clearly, and has brought a lot of joy and laugher to my life. I am increasingly convinced that community is an essential component of the Christian life. For that reason, I decided to title this blog “Seeking Koinonia.” That word has made reoccurring appearances in my life recently, and I don’t think they are just coincidental. There is life, spirit, and truth in trying to live simply and counterculturally, trying to model our Christian experience in that of the early church. We opened our initial orientation with these words by Jim Wallis, and I’ll close with them in this entry (I promise more substance and more details later!), as I feel I’ve already been too verbose:
“
Community is the lifestyle and the vocation of the church. The living witness of the Christian community is intended to demonstrate and to anticipate the future of the world that has arrived in the person of Jesus Christ… Community is the place where we lay ourselves open to genuine conversion. In community we begin to unlearn the old patterns and learn what the kingdom is all about.
The community of faith enables us to resist the pressures of our culture and to genuinely proclaim something new in its midst. Community is never withdrawn from the world, because its biblical purpose is to make Jesus Christ visible in the world. Community is a living sacrifice for the church. Community will be a place of struggle, conflict, pain and anguish as we battle with the false values around us and within us. It is where our personal and corporate sin is first revealed. But
community can also be a place of new freedom, of deep healing, of great love and
joy as the power of conversion is experienced. Community helps us to grow, and
it helps us to convert.”
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