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In the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C., a far cry from the palatial splendors of Embassy Row, stands a once-imposing structure that served as the Nicaraguan embassy during the Somoza regime. Here, at 2401 15th Street NW, the corrupt, U.S.-sponsored Nicaraguan government maintained a cozy relationship with State Department policymakers. Today, badly in need of restoration, this building is the headquarters of Sojourners magazine and the Call to Renewal, both headed by Jim Wallis, who in the 1980s was one of the leading figures in the Central America peace movement.

The irony seems too good to be true—like one of those factoids invented by Stephen Glass or Patricia Smith or Mike Barnicle, journalists for whom mere reality is not sufficiently dramatic. It is as if the former Soviet embassy had been converted into a Gulag Memorial Museum. Then again, maybe irony isn't the point. Maybe instead we are being offered a historical parable.

At the heart of this parable is the improbable triumph of good over evil. Where decadent tyranny once reigned, God's work is now being done. Faith in the ultimate victory of goodness has been a constant in Jim Wallis's life even as he has grown from standard-issue sixties' activism to the coalition building of the Call to Renewal (a network of African-American, evangelical, Catholic, Pentecostal, and mainline Protestant churches, working in concert with allies from both the public and the private sector to combat poverty and foster humane welfare reform). Wallis is just as uncompromisingly Christian as ever, but he is less angry, less self-righteous, and more alert to opportunities for common action with erstwhile ideological foes. It is a story rich with lessons for the terribly divided American church as we approach the eve of a new millennium.

Born in 1948 and raised in a devout Plymouth Brethren family, Wallis—like many of his generation—was radicalized by the blatant racism he saw as he was growing up in Detroit. He couldn't square this with the gospel as he had come to know it, and so, as a teenager, he began to visit black churches. As a result of his insistent questioning, he recalls, "I was kicked out of my little church at the age of 14 or 15." And over time, he chose to cast his lot with the kind of people he encountered in certain blighted black neighborhoods.

In 1975, after education at Michigan State University and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he founded a magazine called the Post-American, Wallis came to Washington, D.C., armed with the liberal pieties that flourished in the seventies, made all the more emphatic—even dogmatic—by his activist Christian faith. The magazine became Sojourners, and the intentional community Wallis had started in Chicago was transplanted to Columbia Heights, a neighborhood ravaged in the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968.

For many years, Sojourners preached against racism, poverty, and unbridled materialism, but somehow the culture critique was directed primarily at conservative Christians who had sold their faith, it seemed, for a mess of Reaganism. Liberal or fashionably radical assumptions rarely came in for the same kind of scrutiny. So the magazine could run an article on the U.S. justice system in which the author—wanting to demonstrate his fair-mindedness—conceded that not all criminal trials in this country are in reality political trials.

But there were two significant differences even then between Wallis and many of his ideological allies. First, despite the predictable tilt of his positions on contested political issues, Wallis never compromised his basic Christian witness. In powerful pieces such as "The Economy of Christian Fellowship" (Sojourners, October 1978), he insisted that we cannot bracket off the "spiritual" from the rest of life. Purely political or economic "solutions" to our national dilemmas are bound to fail, just as a privatized faith is sure to rot. Second, while the typical liberal pundit went home to a neighborhood well removed from the ugly realities on which he or she so confidently and self-righteously pronounced, Wallis went home to one of the bleakest zones in our nation's capital.

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June 14 1999, Vol. 43, No. 7