Adam Taylor succeeds Jim Wallis at Sojourners

Adam Taylor has been named the new president of Sojourners, the national Christian social justice advocacy organization founded and led by Jim Wallis since the 1970s.

Wallis will continue working with Sojourners under the new title of founder and ambassador. In July he will also join the faculty of Georgetown University as director of a new center focused on “faith, public life, and the common good.”

The move was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the founding of Sojourners. The new role for Taylor was approved at a meeting of the board of directors on November 12 and was effective immediately.

Taylor has worked in governmental relations, advocacy, and fundraising for organizations such as World Vision and Global Justice, and he spent five years, from 2005 to 2010, as senior political director at Sojourners. He returned to the organization as executive director in 2019.

Taylor said that as president he will focus on equipping and mobilizing people of faith to work for justice. In the past, he said, the organization has sometimes done a better job of articulating the call to justice than of equipping the church to work for it.

Wallis stepped down from his role as editor in chief of Sojourners magazine in August after he removed a controversial article about White supremacy in the Roman Catholic Church from the magazine’s website. That decision led two editors for the organization’s website, which is editorially separate from the magazine, to resign in protest.

Wallis later apologized for removing the article, and it was eventually republished with a correction appended. —Religion News Service