Clarence Jordan and Koinonia

          When I was 7, I came down the aisle of a small Baptist church to accept Jesus into my heart.  I did my ABCs.  I Admitted I was a sinner.  I Believed Jesus died to save me from my sin.  I Confessed that Jesus was my personal Lord and Savior.  I was certainly sincere in doing it.  Truth is, though, I did it because the preacher scared the Hell out of me.  I wanted Jesus to save me from the fires of hell and if it just took a simple prayer and being dunked under water, I’d happily do it.

 

 

          I’ve come to appreciate the value of this act, limited though it was.  I really did accept Jesus as my Savior and wanted him to be my Lord, but my commitment to him was tenuous at best.  I hadn’t really surrendered myself to God, as my 12-step experience later taught me.

Then, I heard about Clarence Jordan.

 

 

          Jordan was a Bible scholar who, in the 1942,  left academia with the idea of starting a community which would seek to live like the first Christians.  It would be what Jordan called “a demonstration plot for the kingdom of God.”

        Together with his wife Florence and a missionary couple - Martin and Mabel England, they found a plot of land for sale in Americus, Georgia.  They had hardly any money, but as they shared their vision, God provided just enough to purchase the land and get the experiment off the ground.  After a lot of hard work and plenty of trial and error, they made a go of it.  The Jordans started a family and settled in for what would become a wild ride.

 

 

          To follow Christ in community (”Koinonia” means “community”, “fellowship” or “partnership”),  Jordan believed, you have to live by Biblical standards, particularly those described in the book of Acts, about the early Church.  Two of these standards would come to cause a good bit of trouble.  First, they agreed to pool their resources, to essentially live as an economic commune.  Second, they agreed to live with their black neighbors as friends and co-workers and, hopefully, one day accept them as full partners in the community.

            Had it not been for this racial issue, the economic one might have been ignored.  But this was the pre-Civil Rights Deep South.  God intended (so it was thought) that blacks and whites be separate (and unequal).  When Jordan hired a black neighbor to help on the farm, paid him a decent wage, and shared lunch with him, he quickly received a visit from the local version of the KKK.  As the story goes, they told him -

            “Mr. Jordan, we’ll get right to the point.  We don’t let the sun go down on a man who eats with a nigger.”

             Clarence scratched his chin, looked up at the sky, and calmly replied.

             “You know, I’m glad to hear that, because I’m a Baptist minister, and I’ve always wanted to meet the man who had power over the sun.”

    

(more to follow)

 

            (For more information on Koinonia then and now, visit their website.  There, you can read snippets of history and order resources that more fully tell the story.  You can also order products from the Farm.  To read about my experience at Koinonia, check out “Dying to Live at Koinonia“)