Prospect Of Arrest Won’t Deter Rev. Wallis From Speaking Out

The Rev. Jim Wallis knows he’ll be arrested on Thursday. The Christian activist and author will return to Washington, D.C., from Spokane, where he led Spokane’s first-ever “gang summit” on Saturday.

Wallis will be among 50 pastors who will gather Thursday at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to protest GOP budget cuts for social programs.

The cuts will increase misery in the inner city and ultimately lead to more poverty and gang problems in towns like Spokane, he predicts.

The founder of the inner-city Sojourners ministry wants House Speaker Newt Gingrich to hear a passage from Isaiah: “Woe to the legislators of infamous laws … who refuse justice to the unfortunate.”

“That text was written for the politicians. But for reading it, they’ve told us we’ll be arrested” for demonstrating in the Rotunda, he said.

The 47-year old “liberal evangelical” has organized prayer vigils since the ‘70s to protest racism, U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and the connections between inner-city violence and poverty.

In 1975, he founded the Sojourners community and magazine. Wallis lives in the Sojourner community of Washington, D.C., where neighbors feed 1,000 families and combat violence.

For his work, he was named one of Time Magazine’s “50 Faces for America’s Future” in 1979.

Wallis has led several other gang conferences, including the National Gang Summit after the Los Angeles riots.

Getting arrested is worth it to send a message to the powerful, Wallis said Saturday.

“Pastors must do the work that Republicans and Democrats aren’t doing. To slash and burn old safety nets with nothing else in their place is immoral,” Wallis said.

“I live 20 blocks from the White House, where the kids go to bed every night to the sound of gunfire. Kids eight, nine and 10 years old are planning their own funerals, not their future,” he said.

“In our neighborhood, crack cocaine and McDonald’s are the only free markets.”

, DataTimes