Dear R.J.,

“Jim, Christianity has nothing to do with racism.”

That’s what my church elder told me when I was a 15-year-old boy. Can you believe that? “That’s political, and our faith is personal,” he said.

That’s the night I left my church.

This kind of story is all too common. So that’s exactly why we founded Sojourners 40 years ago – to call Christians back to a radical Jesus, the one who called us to be with “the least of these,” including those people living with the realities of poverty, racism, and war.

Forty years ago, many Christians didn’t understand that we are called to the public meaning of faith, as well as the personal. We’ve come a long way since then …

Thanks for being a Sojourner,

Jim Wallis

Above is a e-mail from Jim Wallis the founder of Sojourners. While Sojourners has done a lot to re-face Christianity from when Jim and I were in our youth in the 1950s in some ways Christian congregations are still much the same as mentioned in his letter. We have a long way to go to get back to the foundations of Jesus’ message about the “least of these”. It saddens me that so many churches are more like clubhouses than they are like the body of Christ.