Let Justice Roll

The locations included two churches, one city hall, a civic auditorium, and two college chapels. Audiences varied in size from several hundred to a thousand. And we journeyed to six cities in nine days. It was the Fall 1990 Let Justice Roll tour, featuring Sojourners editor Jim Wallis and Brier Patch Music's Ken Medema.

Perhaps the most dramatic site was Calgary, Alberta, where the local organizers secured their spanking-new city hall for the event, and some 40 social action groups displayed their literature for the public throughout the morning and afternoon beforehand. Coalitions began taking shape during the day -- advocates for the homeless met Salvadoran solidarity folks; Calgary's Inter-faith Food Bank encountered local Greenpeace activists; evangelicals joined together with clergy and laity from mainline churches.

With these sorts of links being forged all day long, the objectives of our visit were well-accomplished even before Ken Medema sounded the Let Justice Roll theme music at 7:45 p.m. The group of 800 jammed the foyer and balcony steps of Calgary's municipal building.

We found the same to be true in the other cities along the way. Our tour provided the catalyst for local church and social action networks to form and set mutually supportive agendas for the short and long term.

Preparations for this fall tour began months before when readers of Sojourners magazine saw advertised the Jim Wallis-Ken Medema offer to bring their nationally recognized preaching and musical talents to local areas. Groups from nearly 30 cities made contact with Sojourners, inquiring about details of the event. From these emerged the six sites that our October-November 1990 tour would visit: Minneapolis, Calgary, Winnipeg, Boston, Toronto, and Rochester, New York.