The reunification of Sojourners and Call to Renewal

Due to the extraordinary response to our work over the past few years, the sister organizations Sojourners and Call to Renewal decided to combine their respective strengths. The boards of the two organizations decided officially in June 2006 to reunite, effective July 1, 2006. For a brief period of time, the organization was known as Sojourners/Call to Renewal. The board decided officially in October 2007 to return to operating under the name Sojourners.

The whole process was guided by an extensive organizational assessment. The reunited organization began a deliberate process around our mission statement, our identity, our strategy, and even how we name ourselves. For an interim period, the organization was known as "Sojourners/Call to Renewal." A new board, which will met for the first time in October 2006, was comprised 50 percent of former board members from the two organizations and 50 percent of new members who brought great diversity and gifts to guide our future direction.

The creation of the new organization was not just serve its own institutional goals. It has the particular vocation of seeking to build a movement that puts faith to work for justice. The particular mission of Call to Renewal in overcoming poverty continues, and now even more strongly with the project Covenant for a New America and a commitment to put poverty on the forefront of the political agenda by the 2008 elections. We continue to serve the larger and broader purposes that, for more than three decades, Sojourners has stood for.

Sojourners was founded in 1971-35 years ago-by a small group of seminarians at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago. The original name of our publication, The Post-American, changed to Sojourners when we moved to Washington, D.C., in fall 1975. The life of the Sojourners community has changed in many ways over the decades, but it has always been defined by the mission of articulating a biblical vision of social justice-writing, speaking, and mobilizing; challenging the church, the media, and the government with a progressive Christian message.

In 1995, we founded Call to Renewal, with many other partners and organizations, to specifically focus on poverty by uniting churches and faith-based organizations across the theological and political spectrum to lift up those whom Jesus called "the least of these." Call to Renewal brought together a broad constituency, including evangelicals, pentecostals, Catholics, mainline Protestant, black churches, and the Latino and Asian-American Christian communities. Call to Renewal has, for more than a decade, convened the broadest Christian table on poverty in America.

In 2006, the boards of both Sojourners and Call to Renewal realized that our "mission potential" was even greater than our current organizational capacities. We saw that it would be much more efficient to have one combined staff for organizing, media, fund-raising, and outreach, and much more effective to have our founding chief executive officer, Jim Wallis, lead one united organization instead of two.

Thus, after much discussion and prayer, we decided to reunite the two organizations into one and return to the name Sojourners.

We look forward to the increased opportunity this creates to make a difference in the church, in our country, and in the world. And we are grateful for all our companions on the journey.

- Jim Wallis