"A Conversation on Interfaith Leadership with Jim Wallis and Eboo Patel"
 
In true Christian form, Jim Wallis filled the evening with parables: from his work preaching and teaching across the country, marching and protesting through history, serving into the future.

‘The future is in your hands,’ Wallis said...  and ‘that is not flattery, but fact... and you could screw it up.’

Eboo asked Jim why he, as a Christian social justice activist, has committed his time and attention and heart to interfaith cooperation.  In response, Rev. Wallis told a story of his own experience with seminary colleagues, going through the Bible and cutting out scripture that speaks to poverty and justice, left with a tattered pile of hol(e)y paper. So why does this individual, who put ‘progressive evangelical’ into the public lexicon, do interfaith work? Because his faith calls him to serve the poor, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and to bring justice to an unjust world. To be a Christian is to be about service and justice. Wallis spoke of the man he follows, Jesus of Nazareth, he focused on how Jesus talked and walked and served people outside of his cultural/social boundaries. It was always troublesome, Wallis reminded his audience about how Jesus was pushing the envelope on the definition of tribe.

So many incredible stories.

Jim spoke of his multiple conversions – his conversion out of the church spurred by a Church elder who said to him ‘Jim, you have to understand that Christianity has nothing to do with racism. That’s political. Our faith is personal.’  ‘God is personal but never private,’ says Jim. His conversion back into Evangelical Christianity was deeply tied to the civil values that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. exemplified and lived for.
 
Like Gandhi, Wallis was inspired by the Sermon on the Mount – the essential call to radical Christian service, often leading to countercultural living. What does Jim Wallis learn from his friendship with Rabbi David Saperstein? ‘You gotta get out of the house more’, Wallis said, referencing the many times that his own faith was strengthened by encounter with people who were different religions than him. It is in articulating one’s self amidst difference that true growth happens.

And what would the world look like if the 800 religiously diverse people in the audience all become the interfaith leaders that they are aspiring to be? What will the world look like in 20 years? Jim told us of a world in which faith communities, those individuals who know their neighborhoods and needs and assets best, transforming the poorest, toughest, most dangerous parts of this country into a safe and welcoming place for all. ‘Conversation about faith is not one of dueling belief systems’ but rather ‘resources that exist in the faith community for the sake of the common good,’ Jim stated.

Religious communities working together have to be part of the solution. Period. This is the response that Rev. Wallis whispered to Eboo as they gathered with President Obama, and this is the call that he declared to the movement gathered in Pick-Staiger at Northwestern Sunday night.
 
Becca Hartman
Interfaith Youth Core Executive Research Associate
October 26th, 2009