Jim Wallis, Adam Russell Taylor
In January, Sojourners enters its 50th year — 50 years of working to inspire hope by articulating the biblical call to social justice and working toward a vision of the “beloved community.” When I first began reflecting on that impending anniversary years ago, my first thought was: I don’t want to go back to my desk the morning after that celebration. I also knew that I wanted Sojourners to go on long beyond the founder, that we would need a new generation of leadership to take Sojourners into the next 50 years. That vision of a multiracial, multigenerational “beloved community” — as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis called for — has always been at my and Sojourners' core, something for which we have always engaged, worked, and fought. And when I began to think about a successor, one name kept coming to my mind: Adam Russell Taylor. I first met Adam 20 years ago when he was a student in my first class on faith and politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was one of my best students, and the next year, he became my teaching assistant for the course.
Adam came to the class already a committed activist, but he left ready and better equipped to apply his faith to his activism, a clear future leader. He served Sojourners as our senior political director until 2009, when he was selected as a White House fellow in the first year of the Obama administration. He went on to become the vice president of advocacy for World Vision, and then created and led a faith initiative at the World Bank Group. Throughout the years, Adam and I remained close and regularly connected in our work. In 2014, he became chair of the Sojourners board. Adam went from being my student to my boss.
It was Adam’s commitment to justice that always most impressed me, and I have watched him integrate that so deeply with his personal faith commitment — and take it into public life.
I believe that Adam Taylor’s personal story, scholarship, breadth of experience, vision, sense of vocation, and ordination in the Black church all uniquely prepare him to lead Sojourners as its first African American president. In his forthcoming book, A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building Beloved Community (fall 2021), Adam paints a picture of this vision; read a bit of it in his own words at the link below.
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