30 Years Ago ...

Remembering and Resisting for 30 Years by Steve Clemens. August 8, 2013

It was 30 years ago; the U.S. Army School of the Americas was still in the Panama Canal Zone but military troops from the repressive government of El Salvador were training at Ft. Benning, GA. A small cadre of peacemakers, primarily from Koinonia Farm and Habitat For Humanity, came to the main entrance to the sprawling military base for the weekly Quaker-style candlelight vigil. The vigil had begun 4 months prior and usually consisted of 8-20 people who gathered in a circle to prayer, reflect, and protest U.S. policy in Central America.

It was the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero while saying mass in the capital city in March of 1980 that had awoken many of us to the suffering of the Salvadoran people and the U.S. complicity in the harsh repression of the people; campesinos struggling for land and justice from the couple of dozen families of elites that controlled the land and the government. Romero had written to then-President Jimmy Carter just months before his assassination asking him to stop the flow of military aid and weapons to his nation. He never received a reply from the President before the bullet ended his life as he held the chalice of wine over his head during the mass.

Three years later activists discovered that Salvadoran troops were being trained by U.S. Military instructors at the large infantry base on the outskirts of Columbus, GA and a protest march and rally was scheduled around the third anniversary of El Salvador’s increasingly famous martyr. Unfortunately (from my perspective), the tone and tenor of that protest was strident and caustic and I felt that while I agreed with the political aim of ending the military training and changing the foreign policy of the Reagan Administration towards Central America, we would be better served by a reflective, contemplative and confessional presence outside that military base than the bombastic chanting and finger-pointing of the larger demonstration.

A week later, our Thursday evening hour-long candlelight vigil outside the base began. Some friends from across the Chattahoochee River in neighboring Alabama joined us as did a couple of others from nearby Buena Vista, GA. Someone would often read a short reflection, a poem, or a prayer, we’d sing a song or two, but mostly held signs with our candles and reflected and prayed. Occasionally someone driving out of the base would shout something (frequently it wasn’t PG-rated even though children were often present); less frequently someone would stop and talk to us.

In August 1983, Father Roy Bourgeois and Father Larry Rosebaugh drove over to Koinonia Farm (where our family lived) to share with our intentional community their plans for nonviolent resistance to the continued training of the Salvadoran troops. It was my first encounter with “Father Roy” but the Louisiana drawl in his voice and his gentle demeanor made me feel energized and included. I had known “Father Larry” a lot better since our 1981 nonviolent witness together in Amarillo, TX led to our sharing the same jail cell for a week after our arrest for praying at Pantex, the final assembly plant for all U.S. nuclear weapons. After he was transferred to a different jail, we saw each other at arraignment, trial, and sentencing before we headed off to different federal prisons to serve the rest of our time.

Larry had told the 5 of us with him in the holding cell outside the FBI office in Amarillo about his travels through Central and South America, especially his time in Recife, Brazil where he was arrested, jailed, and tortured for his work with the poor. I came to love and trust Larry during our jail-time together so when he arrived with Roy, I suspected here was another “radical priest” God had placed in my life to challenge me to further action. (I should have seen a pattern after “Father Tom” from the Maryknoll seminary in Glen Ellyn, IL “schooled” me during my Wheaton college years and then former-priest Phil Berrigan continued that “education” during the year I lived in Washington, DC.) Father Larry, and now, Father Roy: all wanted to challenge me to live out my values in a way that nonviolently confronted those in power.

Roy and Larry told us that they were fasting and planning to nonviolently confront the Salvadoran troops. They didn’t share the details with us (they seemed to just evolve from one action to the next for them), but we did invite them to join our next weekly candlelight vigil and told them some of us would possibly like to join them in their direct action. We talked about “continuing” the candlelight vigil on to the base after our usual hour presence by the entrance, knowing that we would likely be arrested by base security if we did so.

As Thursday arrived, most of us had no idea that Roy and Larry, joined by a local Catholic activist, Linda Ventimiglia, had already stirred up a hornets nest with 3 or 4 other acts of witness including the dramatic scaling of a tree outside the Salvador barracks and playing Oscar Romero’s final radio address where he asked, plead, ordered Salvadoran troops “in the name of God” to “put down their guns” and “end the repression.” The three of them had been arrested and thrown off the base several times that week before our Thursday evening vigil.

I don’t remember now if we walked or drove to the Base Commander’s house but at least 4 of us went with Roy, Larry, and Linda. Someone rang the doorbell while others planted a cross (not burning!, I must add, given the context of Georgia) on the front lawn. A teenage girl came to the door and we asked if the Base Commander was home. We were told he’d be home shortly so we told her we would vigil quietly on the sidewalk with our candles. It was only a few minutes before base security arrived, we were arrested, and hauled off to what we assumed was base headquarters.

In the six hours we were held under arrest, I distinctly remember overhearing various military officers saying very vicious and demeaning comments about “Catholics”, especially since they had become familiar with Roy and Larry’s vocation as priests. About 3 AM, each of us was handed a letter stating that we were “banned and barred” from that military base. We had the right to appeal this order if we wished but otherwise it was in effect with no end date listed. (Years later I was to receive “Ban and Bar” letters lasting 1 year or 5 years; this one was presumably for life.) They then drove us off base in groups of 2-3 dropping us off miles from the city center meaning we would have to walk to get to our cars. Fortunately, they did drop Judy Cumbee off back at the main entrance since her leg was in a cast from a previous accident.

Less than one year after these nonviolent direct actions, it was announced that the “School of the Americas” was moving to Ft. Benning as part of the Treaty to return the Panama Canal Zone to Panama agreed to by President Carter several years earlier. Our weekly vigils continued for several years before becoming a monthly vigil. I moved to Minnesota in 1990 and just months after our arrival, we heard word that Father Roy was going back to fast, pray, and protest at the gates of Ft. Benning. And thus began what has become The School of the Americas Watch, a nonviolent movement to embody the call of the martyred Archbishop: “put down the guns and stop the repression” – now throughout the Americas, not just El Salvador. One by one, nations have begun to pull their troops out of this notorious school now renamed “The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC)” in an attempt to “re-brand” it from a “school of assassins” to an institution which promotes “human rights” (albeit at the barrel of a gun!)

More than 300 nonviolent activists have gone to prison to protest this school in those 30 years. Late last week 40 members of Congress (including Rep. Keith Ellison from Minneapolis) introduced a bill to suspend operations at SOA/WHINSEC and begin an investigation of the connection between US military training and human rights abuses in Latin America. In November, I will return to the gates of that notorious institution to once again say “Close the SOA!”

Remembering Koinonia on the Community's 70th Anniversary

Fertile Soil For Faith Formation: My Life At Koinonia Partners 1975-1990 by Steve Clemens. October 2012

When I arrived at the 1400-acre farm in south Georgia in September 1975, the first person who greeted me was the young woman who became my wife 2 ½ years later. Christine Haas told me I was late for lunch and pointed me in the direction of the community’s dining hall. I was one-month short of my 25^th birthday and had agreed to serve as a “volunteer” for the next two years. It was to serve as my “unofficial voluntary service” assignment as a conscientious objector even though my military draft lottery number was too high to be drafted and the Vietnam War had just ended in a resounding defeat of South Vietnamese forces several months before.

I arrived at this “intentional Christian community” as a young man already on the pathway of “radical Christian discipleship” as I had understood it. Having been raised in an evangelical/fundamentalist family in southeastern Pennsylvania, schooled at Wheaton College – proclaimed to be an evangelical “Harvard” (but, in reality not very challenging academically) – and followed by a year of graduate school in Social Work at Temple University, I had already thrown off the “shackles” of that fundamentalism and was exploring my Anabaptist heritage and its understanding of pacifism and nonviolence. Immediately preceding my arrival at Koinonia, I had spent a year in voluntary service with the Mennonites in Washington, DC coupled simultaneously with a year of Bible Study with radical Christian Catholics from Jonah House and the Community For Creative Nonviolence.

What attracted me to Koinonia was the opportunity to work and worship with a group of people who shared a vision of discipleship which embraced nonviolence, racial reconciliation, simpler living, economic sharing, and service to others. The community was small enough to make one feel valued and included but also large enough to try to make a difference in the local community. Koinonia ran a Volunteer Program which was a work/study experience where one lived in a shared community household, was given a work assignment in farming/gardening, the pecan processing plant, fruitcake bakery and candy kitchen, home construction crew, or the mail order business operations.

Through the Volunteer work/study program – both as a participant (September –December 1975) and then later as one of its co-coordinators (for 8-10 years in the late 70s and 80s), I got to experience the deep faith of Ethel Dunning, Deacon Ludrelle Pope and his wife, Mamie, Correnza Morgan and Mazie, and Miss Gussie Jackson – residents of one of the two residential housing “villages” created by Koinonia’s housing ministry begun in 1968 or living nearby.  To hear the stories of the harassment and personal travails they endured because of their relationship to Koinonia and their desire for reconciliation with white folk was a life-altering experience. There wasn’t a lot of sophisticated seminary-induced Bible learning but rather a “trust-and-obey” simplicity to their faith and how it was to be lived out. “Peoples is my hobby” is a refrain that sticks in my mind when I took volunteer groups down to the Forest Park neighborhood to meet with Ethel and Ladon Sheats at her house. Deacon Pope would always have a Bible story or drawn-out prayer whenever Christine and I would visit, coupled with his homemade buttermilk biscuits, after Mamie had “passed”.

Mamie, who was employed as the community cook for noonday meals for many years, had to put up with the plethora of new white folks coming into her kitchen. They often suggested she make the latest culinary fad desired by these “hippies” and counter-cultural volunteers who arrived fresh every three or four months. Even the Resident Partners would discuss the noon meals and give Mamie their input for her menus. Since the farmers were growing soybeans, could we incorporate more of that vegetable protein into our meals, lessening the amount of meat we consumed, was the query that the Products Manager George Worth asked. His solution? Ask Mamie to substitute soy grits or soybeans for the hamburger she normally put into her chili. Mamie’s solution to that request? - she asked the “new boy” who was now in charge of maintenance on the farm, a college-educated young man from Pennsylvania (me), to taste the chili for the proper flavoring of the spices since she didn’t want to taste it herself: “After all”, she told me, “soybeans are what you feed to hogs, not people!”

The faith lessons we learned sitting with “Miss Doris” were especially poignant; she had suffered so much in her own life having had her husband die at a young age in a car accident, her husband’s uncle shot and killed by “white folk”, becoming a mother at age 13 and a grandmother at age 26. By age forty, she was a great-grandmother as generation after generation seemed to repeat the pattern of having babies in one’s early teen years. Her daughter, Nadine, battling what seemed to be insurmountable health obstacles; her son Leonard, dealing with the racism of the deep south; her daughter Linda with her struggles as a teenage mom, … Miss Doris, whose job and passion was running the community’s pre-school Nursery, would pour out her love and warmth on all the children she was charged with, depending on the deep spiritual well-springs she drew upon.

Meanwhile, having witnessed the lived-out faith of the local black residents, I spent much of my time reading and listening to the theology and insights of Clarence Jordan, one of the co-founders of the community back in 1942. Fortunately there were dozens and dozens of reel-to-reel tape recordings of Clarence’s sermons, speeches, and story telling preserved as well as the several books he had published over his 27 years at Koinonia. Truly a gifted orator and storyteller, I would sit for hours listening to Dr. Jordan’s southern drawl, marveling at both his Biblical insight and his infectious sense of humor. What always came through was a combination of both compassion and a passion for justice. Clarence often concentrated on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and his parables.

Equally instructive were the stories about Clarence and his family that were frequently shared by his life partner, Florence. Although Clarence died suddenly of a heart attack in 1969, Florence survived her husband by another 18 years and often told the stories of the earlier days of the Koinonia “experiment”. Clarence often referred to the community as a “demonstration plot” of what the Kingdom of God could embody. Educated as a scientific farmer at the University of Georgia before hearing “a call” to attend the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Clarence often drew on his agricultural knowledge and experience in his sermons and stories. Because of his extensive knowledge of koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, Clarence would translate directly from the Greek text when he preached, putting the stories and teachings into the local vernacular and settings for what would become his “Cotton Patch” version of the New Testament accounts.  

Although my politics were radical when I arrived, my theological positions hadn’t evolved as quickly. It was in seeing how others lived their lives that helped break down some of the walls I had constructed from my upbringing and my Wheaton College indoctrination. Clarence Jordan said very clearly on one of the many tapes I listened to over and over that we are not called to “judge others” but we are called to be “fruit inspectors” – noting how Jesus remarked, “By their fruit shall you know them.” In our volunteer group, George and Coffee Worth, lifetime Presbyterian missionaries who arrived at Koinonia the same week as I had, would often scoff at a Bible verse someone quoted, especially if it came from the writings of Paul (or those claimed to be by him). It was clear that they believed neither in the inspiration or inerrancy of “God’s Word” as I had it drilled into me by the bastion of evangelicalism at Billy Graham’s alma mater. Wheaton would have me believe that with such “heretical” views, even missionaries who did not believe in the infallibility of scripture were not “saved”. Yet, using the fruit inspection standard promoted by Clarence and Jesus, it was very clear that the Worths evidenced their “salvation” by the way their lives reflected the life and values Jesus proclaimed. (And Coffee shared the story with me about how she was bitten by Billy Graham’s dog!)

Later, in the mid-80s, another Koinonia resident I had gotten to know came out as a gay man to Christine and me, taking a risk to share the pain and self-loathing he had endured for years while in the closet. Again, I was forced to re-think my theological understandings and the walls and exclusions which remained around my head and heart. Koinonia, as an institution, wasn’t quite ready to be “open and affirming” but at least the Resident Partners began dialoging about that possibility. A few years later we welcomed our first “out” Partner who was gay. But it was bittersweet in recognizing all who may have felt excluded or marginalized before then.

Living at Koinonia for 16 years, I got to meet many of the “legendary” people from Koinonia’s history – or people who knew them. I heard not only stories of inspiration but also you heard or witnessed some of their “warts” as well. Community living has a way of exposing our shadow-side as well as the persona we’d like others to see. Despite the flaws, sins, and shortcomings I often found a way to learn and grow from the privilege of working and worshipping with the same group of people. Koinonia’s size, never more than 25-40 Partners coupled with 5-20 volunteers (plus children) meant that we could relate to one another without bureaucratic boundaries and strictures. Koinonia had morphed from having a more powerful “Director” as it re-emerged in 1968 to a model featuring a more decentralized “Coordinator of Activities”, “Fellowship Team”, Residency Committee, and Housing Committee by the time I had arrived in the mid-70s.

The on-going power of the Koinonia experience for me was its counter-cultural vision and practice. Living in the intentional community was an invitation to reject the values of the dominant society and replace them with the ideas and values expressed in the Gospel and the early church as described by Clarence Jordan’s careful Biblical analysis. The U.S. cultural value of rugged individualism, the John Wayne “tough guy”, go-it-alone mentality was replaced with a value of interdependence rather than independence. American ideals of competition were contrasted with a Gospel of cooperation and community. The main focus of our society seems to be predicated on “consumption” and the best adjective for many Americans seems to be consumers. Koinonia’s emphasis on simple living (which was later recast as “compassionate living”) stressed a downward mobility economically while finding ways to befriend Mother Earth in the process. And arriving at Koinonia only months after the end of the war on Vietnam meant that the culture’s dependence on militarism should have been more readily questioned - but in the deep South that ideology of military solutions to most international programs continues to hold sway in most circles. Koinonia’s clear commitment to nonviolence and reconciliation often provided a sharp contrast to the social and political forces that dominated our corner of southwest Georgia.

It was a multi-media presentation by Ladon Sheats of the comparing and contrasting of American values with those of the “Kingdom of God” that was my first introduction to both Koinonia and Clarence Jordan just a year before I arrived as a volunteer. That “Values Presentation” continued to be used in Koinonia’s volunteer program a decade later as the struggle between the dominant culture and the counter-culture values espoused by Jesus continued to help define the community. Even though most Resident Partners embraced those values, there certainly were differences of styles and expressions of how one talked about and lived them out.

Another strength of the Koinonia “experiment” was its ecumenical nature in embracing and welcoming a variety of Christian denominational expressions. In my 16 years there, numerous individuals led worship, were elected to the Fellowship Team (providing leadership and coordination for the spiritual life of the community), and/or conducted Bible Studies or prayer groups. My Mennonite tradition was accepted alongside Roman Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, Swedenborgians, Presbyterians, Methodists, evangelicals, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and non-denominational Christians and even those who had given up on institutional expressions of the faith. Some infants were baptized; others were “dedicated”. What was “communion” for some was “Eucharist” for others. Some Resident Partners attended other churches in town while Koinonia’s own worship on Sunday evenings was seen as their primary “church” for many others. Speakers from outside the community were invited a couple of times each year to provide inspiration and challenge. Most notable for me were visits from Walter Brueggemann, Daniel Berrigan, Murphy Davis, and Joyce Hollyday.  

I am so grateful that I had the opportunity for much spiritual formation and grounding as a result of my years at Koinonia. It led to relationships with other intentional communities (Sojourners, The Open Door, Jubilee Partners, Reba Place Fellowship, New Jerusalem Community, …) and their members and, through our mailing list, thousands of visitors. The 1970s and 80s were a time of social and theological ferment and Koinonia was a helpful place not only for me but also a place to start a family and begin to raise my sons in an atmosphere of love and acceptance. Even though we lived almost a thousand miles from my family of origin, my sons had “aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and other relatives” among the other community members who served as surrogates for relatives in Pennsylvania. Community became family for us, making it very difficult for us to leave after 16 and 20 years respectively living at Koinonia.

If there are just a few things to mention about my experience in intentional Christian community between Plains and Americus, GA it wouldn’t be having a Presidential campaign anchored from the nearby town, nor the Ku Klux Klan gathering to protest and embarrass the new President a year later. Our visits over 10 years to a man on Death Row stand out as well as helping in the starting of three new communities: Jubilee Partners, The Open Door Community, and New Hope Hospitality House. The community support for Peace Pentecost, the White Train campaign, and anti-Trident submarine protests was impressive. Joining with the Jubilee Partners community working with their Año de Jubileo program to help Central American refugees gain asylum in Canada and Open Door friends with assistance and advocacy on behalf of the homeless and imprisoned was very satisfying for me. I was very moved by community solidarity when I was jailed for six months after the Pantex witness plus weeks in jail in DC, Atlanta, and Montezuma. Participating in vigils during state executions or in witness against the U.S. Army School of the Americas drew many of us together in prayer and protest. Witnessing the birth and growth of Habitat For Humanity. The list could go on and on.

But what I remember most deeply are the words of Clarence Jordan: “Faith is not believing in spite of the evidence but rather acting in scorn of the consequences.” And “Fear is the polio of the soul which keeps us from walking by faith.” Those words, embodied by years of faithful witness while embattled by racists and other opponents, continue to instruct and inspire me more than 40 years after Clarence joined the great cloud of witnesses. My friends Ladon, Will and Margaret, George and Clara, Ray and Lois, George Worth, Art and Ruth, Miss Gussie, Ludrelle and Mamie, Correnza and Mazie, Jophie, Mary Ruth, Don, and many others have also crossed over but continue to live in my memory. The fertile soil of what was once 1400 acres of red Georgia clay may have grown peanuts, corn, soybeans, grapes, and peaches – but it also helped develop disciples, people choosing to embrace the nonviolent servanthood of Jesus of Nazareth and trying to make and be a difference in our world.