Remembering Ryan Karis

 Remembering Ryan Neal Delp Karis - by Steve Clemens

I knew him first as Ryan Delp, the quiet Quaker from rural Indiana who was one of the mainstays of the Koinonia Partners Construction Crew when we first met in 1975 in rural southwestern Georgia. A “gentle giant” – he was taller than any of the other construction crew – Ryan, trained as an engineer at Purdue, laid out the corners of the lots and helped direct the design and construction of the single-family homes they helped build, first in what became known as Koinonia Village and then Forest Park for families who became homeowners for the first time. Some of them were former tenant farmers and these houses became their first opportunity to actually own a home and begin to build generational stability.

I was there when Karen West was in my volunteer group in 1975 and as their relationship blossomed into a marriage, they chose a new name, Karis, a word from the Greek New Testament meaning Grace of God, as their identity of this partnership which has blessed many others these past 45 years.

Ryan was one of the first three or four Habitat for Humanity international “volunteers”, surveying Ntondo, a small village in Zaire at the invitation/encouragement of Millard Fuller. How about that for a honeymoon?

He helped design and build the first passive solar house for Koinonia and then he and Karen invited Christine and I to move in with them as its first residents. If memory serves me correctly, we ate popcorn every night! It also marked the beginning of our long tradition of playing cards and telling stories.

He and Karen were two of the six inaugural members of Jubilee Partners, pioneers – helping build the first structures of this community in northwest Georgia through which thousands of refugees have come. Their living in tents while the first houses were built are warm memories Christine and I share with them.

Ryan and Karen regaled us with stories of their living in a refugee camp in Thailand to better understand the refugees coming from southeast Asia in the aftermath of the US War on Vietnam; then going to Cuernavaca, Mexico to learn Spanish to better work with a growing flood of refugees and asylum seekers from Central America; and then helping coordinate the Ano de Jubileo program that helped hundreds if not thousands of families and individuals find a new home and safety in Canada after the US shut the doors of compassion in the 1980s. He and I shared many bus trips to the southeast Texas border with Mexico and returning to Jubilee in north Georgia with a bus-load of refugees – or trips from Jubilee to Winnipeg, Manitoba, or to London and/or Toronto, Ontario to their new asylum homes.

But refugees were not Ryan’s only concern. As the Reagan White House years “progressed”, Ryan and his fellow Jubilee members decided to find ways to track and protest the shipment of nuclear weapons through our state and the southeastern part of the country as, what was then known as the “White Train” carried nuclear warheads from the assembly plant, Pantex, outside of Amarillo, Texas to the submarine base at Charleston, South Carolina and later to a new Trident submarine base built at Kings Bay, Georgia. I remember more than once Ryan called me in the middle of the night to tell me a train-load of nukes was headed our way – it had just left Memphis, or Anniston, or some other point and would soon be coming down Main Street in Montezuma, GA so we could gather our signs, candles, and banner to vigil along the tracks. That banner, a full-size sheet was emblazoned with the Scripture passage: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.” So Ryan’s passion for nonviolence was one of influences that warmed my heart as I sat in a cold jail cell after blocking that train.

As work and ministry continued to evolve at Jubilee, so did a family grow. Ryan and Karen invited us to join them at the Atlanta airport as they met their new son, Andrew, as he was carried off the airplane after arriving from his native Korea. We also celebrated with them as Rebecka joined their family.

Christine and I made numerous weekend (and occasionally months-long) trips to north Georgia to help build more structures at Jubilee for the growing community as well as the refugee ministry. With a mutual friend, Robbie, we would drive into nearby Athens for a dinner or to go to the food bank and end up in the parking lot of the discount grocery store with a ½ gallon of ice cream and 6 spoons. We’d sit, laugh, tell stories, and enjoy being together. Later, as Robbie fell in love and married a refugee from Cambodia who had come through Jubilee with her family, Chou also joined us when we’d visit.

Ryan’s birthday, December 28 th , always fell on what is called in the Christian calendar, The Feast of the Holy Innocents – when the church remembers the story of Jesus fleeing with his family to Egypt as a refugee to escape the murderous intent of King Herod. We would often have a public witness against nuclear weapons (which threatened children all over the world) or for immigrants and refugees or those on death row on that day. So, after a solemn vigil (or occasional acts of civil disobedience) during the day, we switched gears and celebrated Ryan’s birth in the evening – usually with ice cream, occasionally with cake too..

After 10 years of service at Jubilee, they moved to the Twin Cities just prior to the birth of Emily, their third child, in 1988. They joined a growing, fairly-new, faith community, the Community of St. Martin, that embraced their convictions of nonviolence, service to others, and simpler or compassionate living. When Christine and I were ready to take a Sabbatical year away from Koinonia, Ryan and Karen asked us to join them in the Twin Cities where the Community of St. Martin could provide us space in a hospitality house and help us find work and be part of their worship group. Ryan was already continuing his former construction work with a local Habitat for Humanity affiliate and when that organization decided to grow its capacity, he asked me if I’d like to consider coming to work with him. Christine and I decided the community and the employment prospects were a good change for us and we decided to put down roots in the neighborhood where many of the faith community lived – and I went to work at Habitat with Ryan as my new supervisor.

Ever since I’ve known Ryan and Karen, they have had a special passion for the mountains, streams, and beauty of Karen’s home state of Montana. When they returned from a road trip to the Bozeman/Livingston area, Ryan would haul out the slide projector and give us a report on their adventures. Karen relished the wonders of nature and the creatures, especially the birds, they encountered, and Ryan often had the visual record made with his camera. Those adventures would include not just hacking out a village site in central Africa near the Congo River, or the stark challenges of a refugee camp in Thailand, but also trips to South Korea they took as each of their three adopted children traveled with them to see their own homeland; then a trip to Iceland, taking Christine with them.

Since Karen finally retired from teaching in the Minneapolis Public Schools, and with a brief (apparent) lull in the Covid crisis, we planned to finally take them with us for a week in Cancun, Mexico at the end of January. Alas, it was not to be.

Ryan embodied the Quaker roots he had - comfortable with silence, looking for consensus, committed to nonviolent actions and solutions. People relied on his dependability and, when he shared his thoughts, others realized how engaged he was in the decision-making process.

I love you, Ryan. Thanks for being a valued friend, companion, example, accompaniment, and leader. You were often a calming present in a storm while also providing direction for not only surviving it but finding a way out. As you transition to that “great cloud of witnesses”, may your gentle spirit guide your way home. Rest in that grace of our Creator.

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.

Remembering Ladon Sheats, Peacemaker

Ladon Sheats, Presente! By Steve Clemens. August 2012

It is now 10 years that have gone by since my friend and mentor Ladon Sheats passed over to the other side after a brief but significant battle with an aggressive cancer at age 68. Shepherded through hospice care by my friends Ched, Catholic Workers, and many others, his body was buried in a simple hand-dug grave similar to his own mentor, Clarence Jordan. Ched told me how an eagle flew overhead during their service, a sign of welcome for this gentle peacemaker to the great cloud of witnesses.

My first encounter with Ladon Sheats was during my week of orientation in Akron, PA in September 1974 for my up-coming year of Voluntary Service with Mennonite Central Committee. After spending my summer in rural Mississippi with MCC and MDS (Mennonite Disaster Service), my friend and neighbor Walton Hackman asked me if I was willing and interested in spending a year volunteering at the MCC Peace Section's Washington, DC office on Capitol Hill. Just weeks earlier President Nixon had resigned in disgrace as the Watergate scandal exposed the rot at the center of our national government.

Ladon was on a speaking trip from his home at Koinonia Farm outside Americus, GA and he spoke with passion (and compassion) and conviction. He showed a multi-media presentation using two slide projectors, music by cassette tape, and his spoken narrative which contrasted the values of "The Kingdom of God" and that of America in the final years of the war against the people of Vietnam. Quoting liberally from Clarence's "Cotton Patch" translation of the New Testament, Ladon showed and told us that the American values of "rugged individualism" (exemplified by a photo of John Wayne and Simon & Garfunkel's song, “I Am A Rock"), materialism, and militarism were thoroughly contradicted by the values put forth my Jesus about the Kingdom of God. Interdependence, cooperation and sharing, and compassion with nonviolence were the marks of a radical follower or disciple of the Man From Nazareth – what a contrast with America’s values!

As the slide projector screen flashed pictures of Madison Avenue ads, lynchings of black men and boys, napalm and bombs being dropped from the skies over Indo-China, I could hear Ladon weeping as he told us we had to Choose which values we would live by. The song by Cat Stevens, "Father and Son" played in the background with the refrain "It's not time to make a change, just relax, take it easy; you're still young, it's not your fault, there's so much you have to go through" : the voice of the father trying to salvage for his son the remnants of the crumbling American Dream. But the son tells him, "I have to go away."

Ladon's passion was so great because of what he had given up when he left the corporate ladder-climbing as an up-and-coming executive of IBM (today we'd say he was punching his ticket to enter the 1%) to move to southwest Georgia to be part of a small, struggling inter-racial community committed to economic sharing, nonviolence, racial reconciliation, service to others, and "simple living" as an expression of Christian discipleship.

It was the first time I had heard about Koinonia Partners and the experiment in Christian intentional community that Ladon told us Clarence Jordan had described as a "demonstration plot" of what living out the values of God's Kingdom could look like. It created such a strong impression in this life of a young man about to turn 24 the next month that I moved there as soon as my 1-year commitment in Washington was complete.

I didn't encounter Ladon again until the following March when we shared a jail cell together for the 5-6 hours it took to book us for our arrest on the lawn of the White House in what was to be the last mass arrest of the Vietnam War. There were 61 of us including Liz Macalister, Dan Berrigan, Jim Peck, and Dick Gregory - but it was Ladon Sheats who helped bolster my courage that day in my first attempt to risk arrest for the sake of the Gospel and it's values.

What I discovered (and later re-discovered 6 years later when we spent a week together in a 6-person cell in a county jail in Amarillo, TX after praying inside the fence of the plant that was the final assembly point for all US nuclear weapons) was that Ladon's intensity as a nonviolent resister melted into a joking, hilarious cell mate who loved to relax and laugh.

Many of my friends told me they found Ladon too intense, too serious, always challenging himself and others to "take the next steps" in nonviolent resistance to the American way of death - but had they shared a cell with him, they could have discovered a whole different dimension to him. I think it was because he knew he was in the place where he knew he should be. He had learned from Clarence Jordan that if you hadn't been called a "communist" or had your life threatened, you probably weren't following the Jesus he experienced in the pages of the Bible.

After spending many 1-year sentences for nonviolent resistance in Federal Prison, Ladon would go to the monastery in Snowmass, CO to have time to pray, reflect, and gain strength for the next witness for peace. He often traveled around the country visiting friends and working odd jobs like house painting to earn some of the little money he needed. All his possessions were in his backpack.

One of my favorite memories was when he came through Minneapolis after our family had moved here and my sons were still quite young. I had a wordless children's story book called "The Great Escape" which showed a very determined prisoner escaping from his jail cell or prison over and over again. Ladon would have Zach sitting on his knee while Micah looked on from the side as Ladon turned the pages and together the three of them would make up the stories of this intrepid resister.

Ladon was a man of compassion. Gentle. Humble. With a clear vision of a call to be a Peacemaker. 10 years have passed. I miss him deeply, yet he is ever-present. Ladon Sheats, Presente!

Remembering Clarence Jordan on 100th Anniversary of His Birth

Clarence, I Hardly Knew You by Steve Clemens

I arrived at Koinonia Partners in 1975, six years after co-founder Dr. Clarence Jordan died of a heart attack while working on his “Cotton Patch” translation of The Gospel of John. His widow, Florence Jordan was one of about 21 “Resident Partners” of the re-established intentional Christian community that she helped found in 1942. Even though Clarence was not physically present, his spirit permeated the 1400-acre farm.

In the mid-1970s, Koinonia had a vibrant Volunteer Program that drew people from all over; most, like me, were under age 30 anxious to explore alternative ways to live in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Watergate political scandal, and the social upheavals of “the 60s”. But it wasn’t just young people; in my volunteer group which arrived in the fall of 1975, two couples of “retired” missionaries were part of the group of 17 who came to experience Koinonia’s style of community together.

The Volunteer Program was designed as a work-study experience in which the group gathered three times a week for two hours of input and discussion focusing on “radical Christian discipleship”, living in Christian community, and social and moral concerns. The 4-month program served as both an introduction to the community as well as an entry point for those who wished to begin the process of becoming members (“Partners”). We worked in assigned areas: home construction, farming/gardening, maintenance, early childhood education, or part of the mail-order business which provided most of the income for the community. The latter included working in the pecan processing plant, the fruitcake bakery, the order assembly and shipping department, or order processing and other office clerical duties.

The work often introduced us to tasks we had seldom encountered before our arrival on this south Georgia farming compound, but it was the theological ideas and how they were lived out which what drew me to Koinonia. My previous exposure was limited to meeting Ladon Sheats, one of the Partners who often was asked to speak about the community and Christian discipleship around the country in a similar manner that his mentor, Clarence Jordan, had done throughout the 1950s and 60s. Ladon, a rising IBM executive, chose to resign that position, coming to live and learn from Clarence. Ladon, Millard Fuller, and Don Mosley soon were thrust in the role of sharing the message of Koinonia to the wider world after Jordan’s death in October 1969. They are the ones from whom I first heard about Koinonia and Clarence’s theology. After I arrived, I discovered a treasure trove of records, tapes, and books of Clarence Jordan’s sermons and other speeches and talks and I loved to listen to his southern drawl, his infectious humor, and his frequent quoting of the Greek text of the New Testament with his own “cotton-pickin’” translation.

Having lived as part of the Koinonia community for 16 years before moving to Minnesota in 1990, I owe much of my Christian formation to this Southern Baptist Greek scholar who tried to put his faith and ideas into practice on a peanut farm in his home state. There are so many memorable phrases from Clarence’s books and tapes that remain fixed in my mind that it is hard to pick and choose a few to illustrate his impact on my own thought and discipleship.

“Fear is the polio of the soul that keeps us from walking by faith”, “Faith is betting your life on the unseen realities”, and “Faith is not believing in spite of the evidence but rather in scorn of the consequences” are three  phrases from Clarence that I find myself quoting a lot when describing my own commitment to nonviolence which Clarence not only shared but helped inform. I credit Clarence Jordan’s lively translations and explanations of the parables of Jesus, his retelling of Paul’s missionary journeys and letters into the geography and politics of the US south, and his obvious love of the text with my own re-engagement with the Bible which I had mostly put aside out of disgust with the way Christianity had abused and misused the text during my years at Wheaton College, the evangelical bastion which openly embraced American exceptionalism and American militarism during my undergraduate studies. Their practice of sewing on Wheaton’s motto, “For Christ and His Kingdom” on the compulsory ROTC military uniforms for their male students couldn’t have contrasted more with the active nonviolence of the Jesus proclaimed by Clarence Jordan and the community outside Americus, GA.

Clarence always told us we had to choose either to follow the way of Christ or the way of the culture. Like his southern contemporary, Martin Luther King, both men saw “the giant triplets” of racism, materialism, and militarism as major stumbling blocks to genuine Christian discipleship. Although they took very different strategies, (Clarence strongly disagreeing with tactics such as boycotts due to his community’s own experience at the hands of the Klu Klux Klan and other racists in Sumter County, GA), both of these Sons of Georgia were responsible for challenging and encouraging my generation to take sides in the struggle for hearts and minds as the American empire came into so much conflict with the teaching of the compassionate and radical Jew whose life and message exposed the brutality disguised as benevolence of the empire of his day.

While I never had the opportunity to meet Clarence in the flesh, I loved listening to Florence’s stories about the first 30 plus years of Koinonia before I arrived. I count him as a mentor even though we never met. I spent hours and hours, “sitting at his feet” (more accurately, listening to his voice over the reel-to-reel or cassette tape players), and learning from others he mentored: Ladon, Millard, and Don, among others.

“We worship the hind legs off Jesus – but we don’t do a damn thing about what he taught us to do” is just one of the many gems of Clarence Jordan. His 100^th birthday would be on July 29^th and I’m so grateful for his life and witness. “Clarence Jordan, presente!”

Remembering Millard: My Reminiscing About Millard Fuller

Remembering Millard - My Reminiscing About Millard Fuller by Steve Clemens. March 20, 2009

Even the name was memorable; how many of you know a person named “Millard”? Millard Fillmore, an obscure US President, comes to mind. But for those who encountered Millard Fuller, the first name sufficed to know to whom you were referring.

One of my first recollections of Millard Fuller occurred with a double dose of “Millards” – boy, that jury must have been confused, facing not one, but two Millards. Millard Farmer and Millard Fuller teamed up to defend five black teenagers accused of murder in the south Georgia town of Dawson in 1977. Fuller did the jury selection and planned to do the closing argument; Farmer handled the evidentiary part of the trial. It was more than 30 years ago so my memory isn’t exact; I just have broad impressions today.

What I remember of the man from that encounter as well as numerous others over our 34 year friendship was his ability to look you in the eye and challenge you to do more, to be more, certainly to give more. He called you to act on your beliefs, not just sit back in pious contemplation of them. “What good is your faith if it doesn’t have works/deeds to back it up?” is the way the Epistle of James, the reputed brother of Jesus, puts it in the Christian scriptures. It seemed to be the life force of Millard Fuller.

Oh, I’d heard the story of “Millard and Linda” soon after I arrived at Koinonia Partners in the fall of 1975. Millard and Linda Fuller and their kids had already left for Zaire (Congo) in Africa several years before. But the story still lingered in mythological tones: he made a million dollars before he was 30 – and then gave it all away and moved to Koinonia to learn at the feet of his new mentor, Clarence Jordan. Together, these two giant personalities came up with the vision of Partnership Housing “to provide decent, affordable housing for God’s people in need.” In 1968, the first house for Bo and Emma Johnson’s family was under construction and finished just before Clarence’s untimely death in 1969. Little did we know his collaborator in that effort would also succumb to the grave before his three score and twenty.

The Millard Fuller I knew wasn’t perfect; he was over-sized, he was packed full of zeal and energy, but he was fallible and had his foibles. One can concentrate on those weaknesses of the flesh or the abuses of power as a way to dismiss him and his message – but it is often a defense mechanism on our part to try to avoid his clarion call to do more, to be more, to give more. He could have had a celebrated and successful career as a lawyer. His presence in the courtroom was a sight to behold and experience. His gifts of word and presence made him a powerful advocate and a force to be reckoned with. I should know; Millard was directly responsible for getting me out of jail once, long after he had given up his legal practice to concentrate on his Habitat work. But this story is about him, not me.

Both Millards, Farmer and Fuller, persuaded that south Georgia court not only to forgo the death penalty but to drop the fraudulent, racist charges and freed the young men. It was a significant blow to Jim Crow and the rampant racism routinely dominating the “justice” system of south Georgia. With President Jimmy Carter’s home not far away in the next county, this case drew some national attention and Millard could have used that spotlight to further his legal practice. But Millard used his legal practice primarily to pay the bills while he nurtured his fledgling Habitat For Humanity program through its early years.

Millard and Linda had returned to Koinonia after their years in Zaire convinced that this radical idea that houses could be built by volunteers and sold for no profit and with no interest on a mortgage so that the poor could have a simple, decent place to live. The model had continued at Koinonia while they were in Africa. Several dozens of homes were owned by families next to Bo and Emma’s and more were being built as the Fullers moved back into the duplex house owned by this small, Christian community founded in 1942 in rural Georgia amongst the gnats, fire ants, and racists known to populate the region.

Millard’s style of leadership and personality had caused some tension in the intentional community that was trying to re-establish itself after a radical restructuring in 1968. Part of the Fuller’s decision to work in Africa arose from those tensions and their return to Koinonia was with the understanding that this new venture (which didn’t even have the name Habitat yet) would become a separate identity - lest this new project, an expanded housing ministry, completely overtake the community life and work in 1976.

The Fullers used Koinonia’s connections and mailing list (as well as some of it’s present community members) to form its own identity and moved it’s operations into the nearby town of Americus after its first year. Even with the seven-mile distance separating us, Koinonia and Habitat retained a close relationship during those formative years and we saw the Fullers often. We were pleased when they attended our wedding in 1978 and not terribly surprised that they brought along a couple of Habitat volunteers we had never met along with them.

Of course, if you knew Millard, the phase, “You’all come now, you hear?” fit him to a T. Millard was always inviting more to come. It was certainly fitting to have Tony Campolo give the sermon/eulogy at the Memorial Service for Millard held in Atlanta last week. Tony always talks about how the Kingdom of God is a party! – and no one better exudes that spirit quite like Millard. He was always inviting more people to join in, much to the chagrin of any staffers or community members who were responsible for the planning of meals, bed-space, or other logistics. Millard truly understood the concept of God’s abundance and he did his best to incarnate that in his life and activities.

I couldn’t begin to estimate the number of speeches Millard must have given in his 74 years – especially during those last 33 years of Habitat For Humanity and The Fuller Center For Housing. He seemed indefatigable, bounding with his loping steps to a podium or into a room of people gathered to be engaged by his warmth, enthusiasm, and energy. I imagine his tall, lanky frame to be similar to our national hero, Abe Lincoln, unless you were still holding on to the dreams of the Confederacy.

Millard was born in the South and lived virtually his whole life in the Deep South but he was no son of the Confederacy. Millard always tried to find ways to include everybody. Although a deeply committed Christian, he made it clear that his “theology of the hammer” meant that everyone was to be enlisted – no matter your race, color, creed, gender, or nationality - no one was excused from the call to justice and compassion. His own faith drove him in his work but you didn’t have to share it to join him. And his enthusiasm was contagious.

President Jimmy Carter understood how infectious that energy was and he jokingly said at the Memorial service that probably all of us in that crowded Ebeneezer Baptist Church sanctuary had a hard time resisting Millard’s call to join him. Carter laughed as he recounted his initial meeting with Millard and Linda; Jimmy said he and Rosslyn had decided ahead of time that they would politely listen to Millard’s pitch and then nicely turn him down because they already had too much on their plates after his failure to be re-elected to a second term. “Millard came with a list of 32 items he wanted me to do, all written up on one of his yellow, legal pads. And before he left, I had agreed to all 32 of them”, Carter said. We all laughed because we too had had been challenged and cajoled by Millard Fuller, many of us not just one time!

Some of the past years have been bittersweet. Millard and Linda battled with the increasing corporatization of Habitat and its new leadership. It led to a messy public parting of the ways with Millard refusing to go quietly into retirement. Certainly he had earned a quiet retirement from all the millions of miles traveled in a ministry that had housed close to 1 ½ million people.

But Millard refused to quit. He and Linda started the Fuller Center For Housing to try to ensure the early principles of no-profit, no-interest remained at the heart of their work. It’s not that Millard didn’t take or seek corporate money and help – he just didn’t want the mentality of “the suits” to take it over. He knew down deep that the social and economic systems that caused the housing crisis in the first place couldn’t be trusted to solve the problem. He knew it would have to take a radical new approach that some would mislabel and confuse with “communism” or “socialism” -- no-profit and no-interest when it comes to relationship with “the poor”. This wasn’t out of some dreamed up ideology but because it was what God wanted/demanded in the Christian scriptures that Millard read and frequently quoted.

For me, the genius of Habitat was in getting the staff and volunteers to work alongside the families and developing a personal relationship with poor folk. Those personal relationships, in turn, would change us as we began to see poor folk as no longer “the other” but instead recognize our common humanity. As Habitat and its affiliates grew bigger and bigger, it became harder to keep a bureaucratic structure from overwhelming the original “Personalism”. In my own work with a Habitat affiliate, I longed for the days of that smaller, personal encounter with the volunteers and the families working together.

Part of the problem – and not just a small part- was Millard’s insistence of housing more and more families; when you set a goal of “eliminating poverty housing”, more and bigger sometimes gets into the way of relational styles. Efficiencies and economies of scale often trump what I call the Catholic Worker style of Personalism. But again, that is more my agenda than Millard’s. He was focused on the mission, the need. He left many of the details of how to do it to those he had inspired. Yet, often he didn’t. I remember hearing staffers at Habitat complain about “Millard’s meddling” in some of the everyday operations instead of just being “the visionary”.

Millard wasn’t an easy man to work with. His boundless energy, while initially empowering, also came with high expectations. Many staffers felt like they had “married Habitat” in that the commitment of time and energy expended and expected often conflicted with home and community life outside of Habitat. Some people felt consumed in the process; others could engage for several years and then had to pull back, lest they too be consumed. Did Millard ever really have much “down time”? Could he ever turn off that same drive that made him a millionaire but was now re-directed not toward making money and accumulating worldly goods but rather in service to others?

One thing that sticks in my mind from the moving Memorial Service last week: I never even knew Millard had a brother –or if I knew, I had forgotten. Doyle, Millard’s brother was close to a dozen years younger and doesn’t look too much like his older brother. But he movingly told how Millard was his “hero” while growing up. How Millard had carried him up a hill when Doyle’s legs were crippled. How he was such a graceful yet powerful baseball pitcher. How he made his million dollars. Hero. Hero. Hero.

But when he decided to “give it all away”, “I thought he was crazy”, Doyle continued. And then he announces he’s going to house the world! Crazy!. Doyle reminded us that Millard had his flaws. But he continued, “You don’t have to be perfect to do perfect things”. All of us in the room knew what Millard (and those he inspired) had accomplished in his life. All those families living in decent, affordable shelter around the world experienced that “perfect work”. And for that life, that witness, that modeling, I’m eternally grateful for my friendship with Millard Fuller.

Remarks at the Open Door Community's 25th Anniversary

Clarence Jordan, Koinonia, and The Open Door Community

Remarks by Steve Clemens, July 16, 2006 at 25^th Anniversary of Open Door

Clarence’s Biography

Clarence Jordan was born in 1912 into a fairly-prominent, well-to-do, white Southern family in Talbotton, GA. His brother went on to serve on the Supreme Court of Georgia and his nephew, Hamilton Jordan served as Chief of Staff for President Carter.  So Clarence came from this good Georgia stock and somehow something changed in him. In The Cotton Patch Evidence, which is a biography of both the Koinonia Community and of Clarence, Dallas Lee talks about an experience Clarence had when he was twelve. He recalled singing “Love Lifted Me” at the local Baptist Church on Sunday and when he went home at night, his house was only a block or so away from the county jail. And he heard the screams at night coming from the man pulled on “the stretcher”, a rack with a pulley and a chain, stretching the man out who was then beaten,  knowing that the Warden, the man beating the prisoner (who was most likely a black man), was a member of the choir at that Baptist Church. The dissonance between the song and the subsequent actions made a mark on the conscience of that young boy.

At age 17, Clarence enrolled in the Agriculture school at the University of Georgia. Like fellow members of the white, male, ruling class, Jordan signed up to become an officer in the ROTC unit – that’s the heritage of the old Confederacy. Just before graduating with an officer’s commission in the cavalry, while practicing shooting and stabbing at cardboard and straw dummies from his horse, Clarence realized he couldn’t keep doing this because he recalled from his Sunday School heritage the words of Jesus to love one’s enemies and that dissonance between the two caused him to resign his commission. His interest in following the call of Jesus led to a call to seminary and after graduation he enrolled in the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, KY. While there, he started doing work in the African-American community and churches in Louisville and fell in love and married Florence Krueger, a local librarian. He and Florence had four children, Jan, Jim, Eleanor, and Lenny.

Clarence also fell in love with the Greek, koine Greek, the everyday language in which most of the New Testament was written, “street Greek”. So when he was teaching or preaching, Clarence carried his Greek New Testament and he’d just translate it on the spot. He stayed on to earn his doctorate in that language, studying it to more fully understands the message of Jesus and the early group of disciples and believers. But he didn’t remain a scholar in that ivory tower because, while at seminary, he had to do some practicum assignments and he ended up working in African-American churches and started meeting people and saw their needs and had his heart changed. In 1942, during WWII, he met Martin and Mabel England, American Baptist missionaries to Burma who had returned to the U.S. because of the war. Clarence and Martin shared ideas and wondered aloud what it might be like to live in a way that replicated the life of the early church to see if it could be done – committed to nonviolence, economic sharing, and racial reconciliation. They were excited about the Sermon on the Mount. They said we gotta try this out – to see if we could live like the early church did.  After looking for a potential site to practice their ideals, they purchased a rundown farm in Sumter County in southwest Georgia, about 2 ½ hours south of Atlanta at today’s driving speeds. They purchased it “on faith”. Joyce Hollyday’s Clarence Jordan: Essential Writings contains Clarence’s re-telling:

            When we started that thing, we were supposed to pay the fellow twenty-five hundred dollars down. And Martin England, who was a missionary under the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society to Burma – he and I agreed on the common purse – we were going to pool everything – and I had the idea Martin was loaded. I don’t know why I should think that – [he] being an American Baptist missionary. But he talked “Let’s do this” and “Let’s do that,” and I said, “Yeah, let’s do,” and I thought he had the money.

            So when we finally pooled our common assets, we had fifty-seven dollars and thirteen cents – and both of us had resigned our jobs. But on the first day of November 1942, right on the button, we walked in that real estate office and put down that twenty-five hundred dollars. A fellow brought it to us, said the Lord had sent him with it. I didn’t question him, where he’d been talking to the Lord or anything like that. We’d take it right quick, before the Lord changed his mind. (Hollyday, pg. 18-19)

So Clarence and Florence, Martin and Mabel, and their kids moved to Sumter County Georgia. For the first five, six, seven, eight years, Clarence was still the “golden boy” -in demand as a preacher in the local churches. He also played the trumpet. But Clarence could talk and talk but when he “put flesh” on those words, there was a different reaction. One Sunday, in 1950, a man from India was visiting Koinonia so Florence and Clarence took him to church with them. Since the dark-skinned foreigner was a convert to Christianity because of the work of Baptist missionaries, the Jordans didn’t even think it would raise any issues with the members at Rehoboth Baptist Church, just up the road from the farm community. But the people at Rehoboth said, “We don’t allow ‘colored people’ to worship with us. The church felt the Koinonians were trying to “integrate” their fellowship and voted the next week to expel Clarence and Florence from that Baptist church. Tensions kept rising and the reason why they were kicked out of the church was not just because they brought a man of color into worship, it is because the word started getting around –“hey this guy not only talks this Christianity stuff but they’re eatin’ together at Koinonia. These black and white folk are eatin’ together and workin’ together. And that was the radical thing.” Clarence could talk all he wanted to about racial reconciliation –that didn’t matter- but when they started eatin’ together – that was the issue. And that was the crux of getting kicked out of the church

In 1956, Clarence “sponsored” two black students to attend a business college in Atlanta. When the newspaper carried the story that this white man from outside Americus was trying to “integrate” the University system, “all hell broke loose”. A grand jury was impaneled to try to close Kamp Koinonia that the community ran in the summer with black and white children participating together. The County Commissioners claimed the camp had health code violations. (From their perspective, it wasn’t “healthy” for blacks and whites to be together.)  The GA Bureau of Investigation (GBI) was asked to investigate these “race mixers” and see what “illegal” activities they might be charged with. The Klu Klux Klan held a rally and a long line of cars drove out to Koinonia to intimidate and get the Koinonians to move. Finally, they tried to disrupt the community economically.  The local produce stand run by the community was dynamited. An economic boycott was declared and Koinonians could not buy or sell anything in the entire county. Members had to travel 45 miles to Albany to purchase parts for the tractor, groceries and gas. They couldn’t purchase seed. The chickens who provided eggs to sell for community income had to be slaughtered because they couldn’t sell the eggs. And ultimately the economic boycott got to a point where they also threatened anyone who would consider selling anything to them so when one of the businesses in town talked about selling some feed to Clarence and the community, that business was dynamited as well.  People supportive of the work of the community came from all over to try to help out because the community was under seige. There were bullets flying at night. Clarence, because he was speaking around the country wrote to friends saying “help us out”. There were stories about the violence directed at the community in Life, Time, and the Saturday Evening Post. Some sent money as support. Others came. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement took her turn on “night watch” duty during Holy Week in 1957 and had a flashlight shot out of her hands. Fortunately she wasn’t killed or injured but she was frightened by the experience. When asked if she wanted a coat or a blanket because she was shaking, she replied, “that ain’t cold – that’s scared!” Shots were fired into many of the community buildings. And that was the reality Koinonia faced late in the fifties and into the early sixties. Community members were called “communists, nigger –lovers, …”  I’d encourage you to get copies of what Clarence wrote or listen to some of the tape recordings made by him during this time to hear some of these powerful stories.

Finally, the community started a mail-order business in order to survive economically because it would be protected by federal agents (post office) rather than the local “law-enforcement” people who were in collusion with the Klan. The motto for this mail-order business of selling fruitcake, pecans, and peanut products was “Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia!” Insurance companies dropped their coverage – even Lloyds of London would cover Koinonia - so Koinonia turned to the wider community asking people to pledge money, $25, $50,  as a form of “common insurance” in the event of a need arising due to the boycott and violence. Out of that also came the idea which became the idea for a “Fund for Humanity” which I’ll get to in a minute.

After the physical violence died down by ’63, people started to leave. By 1968, only the Wittkamper family and the Jordans remained. Clarence died in 1969 just as the first house under the new housing ministry was being completed. He was working on his Cotton Patch translation of the book of John when he slumped over from a heart attack. He was 57.

Clarence’s Theology and Ideas

There are several words or phrases that Clarence Jordan used that help summarize his theology. The word Koinonia is a term used in the Greek New Testament which described the early church and has been defined as “fellowship”, “community”, and refers to the practice of “holding all things in common”. So when the Jordans and the Englands wanted to begin their “experiment” they thought this term could help capture what defined the early church – that passion of holding all things in common, of loving one another, of being in fellowship with one another, and being on fire with the Holy Spirit.

As a student of agriculture, Clarence often used the term “demonstration plot” where farmers use test acreage to show the efficacy of various brands of seed, fertilizer, or farming techniques. So, you’d set up a demonstration plot and plant five rows of corn with one seed or fertilizer and then plant another five next to it with the competing brand, and so on. Clarence said what we need is a demonstration plot of God’s Kingdom. We need to see if it is going to work out. We need to try it. We need to live it. So that’s what Koinonia was to be: a demonstration plot – a visible manifestation of what the Kingdom of God, the Reign of God, might look like.

When translating the New Testament directly from the Greek while preaching, Clarence said that the word metanoia, used to describe the early part of John the Baptist’s and Jesus’ ministries as “repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” is a terrible translation because metanoia is not about “feeling sorry for getting caught doing wrong” but is much closer to the English word metamorphosis. A caterpillar doesn’t get sorry because he’s about to become butterfly, he’s getting prepared for a new way of life, his day of liberation. Metanoia/metamorphosis is changing so you can get equipped for the new order. “Change your whole way of thinking because the new order of God’s Spirit is impinging upon you!” So, the decision to follow Jesus is not one of getting sorry, being repentant, as much as it is rather getting equipped to be about the loving relationships, the sharing, and the reconciliation that Jesus is a part of.

Clarence talked a lot about faith and there are these wonderful, pithy quotes of his like “fear is the polio of the soul” Jordan often contrasted faith with fear: “Fear is the polio of the soul which keeps us from walking by faith.” “Faith is not a stubborn belief in spite of all evidence but rather a life lived in scorn of the consequences.” He said what faith is is “betting one’s life on the unseen realities”. They are still realities – they’re just not seen – and it is our job to make those realities visible by the way we live our lives.  Clarence used the phrase incarnational theology to remind us that we have to live out our beliefs in our everyday practice. Theology isn’t just an academic exercise but has to inform how we live. He talked about incarnational evangelism in that our lives speak more than our words. We give witness to what we believe by how we live our lives. We speak more with our lives than with our words, “turning our convictions into deeds.”

Clarence reminded us that the New Testament was originally written in a language that the common person could understand. For us to better understand the message of the Gospel, it needs to be translated into our time and culture – thus Clarence’s “Cotton Patch” version. He translated the texts into 20^th century Southern vernacular so local folk could relate to the stories and concepts. The New Testament was written in the everyday, common, street Greek and its not all this flowery language – it’s the language the common people would understand – and it was written in a local time and a local place so to translate it into our time and place today, we have to help people understand what the geography was like, what the relationships were like, and so in the Cotton Patch translations you find the story of the Good Samaritan was recast as a white businessman traveling from Ellaville to Albany. Now Clarence’s listeners would know there was one town between those two places – Americus. So when the businessman is robbed and beaten and left for dead on the outskirts of Americus and first a traveling evangelist and then the gospel choir director pass by the victim, the man who stops to help is a local black farmer in an old beat-up pickup truck. He helps bandage the victim and takes him to the hospital. When Jesus asks his listeners “who was the neighbor to that man?” (the “Good Samaritan”), we get, “Ooh, I don’t want to answer that question. It was the nigg … - I mean it was the colored man …” The Good Samaritan in the context of the 1950s and 1960s in the South, and today, is that poor African-American brother, is that man on Death Row, is that homeless person down the street, is that person with mental illness – that’s the Good Samaritan for us today. So that’s what Clarence helps us understand with his Cotton Patch translation.

The virgin birth for Clarence Jordan was less about whether or not Mary was sexually “pure” but the proper emphasis on the story was the idea that her offspring was “sired by God”. Clarence complained that the church too often over-emphasized the deity of Jesus, obscuring the radical concept of the humanity of God. Clarence talks about the ancient church heresy of Gnosticism – of only seeing Jesus as divine and he said the real error of the church is seeing that God has taken on humanity and as Clarence translates it, “The Word became flesh and God parked his mobile home next to ours” adding, yeah, and the black bastard drove down the property values. That’s where the Gospel comes home for Clarence.

When Clarence spoke about the resurrection, he said:

            The good news of the resurrection of Jesus is not that we shall die and go home with him, but that he has risen and comes home with us, bringing all his hungry, naked, thirsty, sick, prisoner brothers [and sisters] with him. … The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of his transformed disciples. The crowning evidence that he lives is not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled-away stone, but a carried-away church. (The Substance of Faith pg.28-29)

That’s the incarnation.

The Communities of Koinonia

The Koinonia Community was really two separate experiments. From 1942 until 1968, it was known as Koinonia Farm. Koinonia Partners was the name of the community that existed from the dissolution in 1968 until the mid-1990s. The Koinonia Farm community, designed to be a demonstration plot, had a strict policy of personal divestiture before joining. You had to give your money away – it couldn’t be given to the community. Clarence remarked that if you gave it to the community, you would either want to have a greater say in how things were run or the community would be tempted to sit around and “talk about theology all day” rather than working. “Give it away and then come join us.” Community aspects included shared meals and shared work. The common purse was the vehicle for economic sharing – you didn’t have your own possessions, you shared economically. There was an expectation of a commitment to gospel nonviolence based on Jesus’ dictum to “love your enemies.” And the term that Clarence used before many of us were educated in the late 60s by our sisters to use inclusive language, Clarence talked a lot about “brotherhood” and what he meant by that was that equality of all of us but being in relationship with each other, and for Clarence, especially that meant in the South healing that racial divide.

Although the original expression of the community in 1942 expected a life-long commitment – you were in it for the long haul- by 1968, only two families remained. So obviously, with a lifetime commitment, something changed but that was the original intent. Numerous conscientious objectors to the Korean War came because it was a safe haven for people who refused to fight or the draft could receive a respite and hospitality. People supportive of the witness for racial reconciliation during the turbulent 50s and 60s came and went. By 1968, with only two families left, Clarence asked what should we do. Clarence deemed the demonstration plot of this community a failure. Clarence had given up on community being able to happen in that time and that place and he was ready to pack his bags and head to Atlanta to finish his Cotton Patch version and continue the speaking engagements which became a regular endeavor. But, you know, Clarence’s speaking would not have been the same – because the power of Clarence’s speaking was always backed up by that demonstration plot. Even the failure of it could be said “here is a place where we’re trying it out, where we’re trying to live it out, where we’re trying to incarnate it” – you can’t talk about the incarnation if you’re not trying to do it. 

However, the group of friends Clarence called together in 1968 to help discern the future developed the idea of making Koinonia into a service organization which featured “Partnership Industries” as a way to continue to build bridges between whites and blacks in rural Sumter County Georgia. Despite the fact that the reorganization of Koinonia did not anticipate the reforming of an “intentional Christian community”, many of those who came to join this service organization in the early 70s were looking for a change and wanted to experience an alternative lifestyle, to challenge the structures of society, to deepen relationships and had been inspired by the stories of the witness of Koinonia during the late 50s and early 60s. There developed a distinction between “Resident Partners” (those who had moved to Koinonia from elsewhere to be part of this ministry) and “employees” (mostly local black folk who participated in Koinonia activities for wages but did not choose to live in community-owned buildings). Although the original design of Koinonia Partners called for all the workers to be “partners” and share in the decision-making as well as the risks (profits or loss), many of the local residents preferred to have a steady income as wage-earners rather than as “partners” in a risky business venture.

The “Partnership Industries” over the years included farming row crops and fruit and nut trees, a mail-order business with a bakery selling pecan and peanut products, fruitcake, and books and tapes of Clarence’s work, a short-lived sewing industry selling shorts and slacks, a handcrafts and pottery industry, an Early Childhood education program with a pre-school and nursery, and a housing ministry which served as the fore-runner of what became Habitat For Humanity.

The organization was designed as a hierarchical structure with a “Director” appointed by the Board of Directors and s/he made decisions affecting the industries and also decided who could stay and do what jobs. As more people arrived who were interested in “community”, this old structure needed changing. Under the leadership of Don Mosley, the Director position evolved into a “Coordinator of Activities” for business and economic decisions, a Residency Committee for determining who could stay, a Fellowship Team responsible for the worship and community life, and a Housing Committee for who lived where-type of decisions. Decentralizing the leadership and helping share the responsibilities became the new model for community.

Expectations for membership as a “Resident Partner” both echoed and differed from the expectations of the previous community venture. Instead of a life-long commitment, prospective partners would commit to remaining “into the indefinite future” (with no plans to leave within 2-3 years). It was recognized that God might “call” people elsewhere so even though departure of fellow Resident Partners was somewhat akin to divorce, it was recognized that a lifetime commitment was not realistic for this community. Instead of total financial divestiture, partners were expected to live off the resources of the community while you were there, not owning their own cars or houses. Although no Social Security-type wages would accrue to them as Resident Partners, those who came with pensions or retirement savings were not instructed to give them up. It was assumed that the community would endeavor to meet your financial and medical needs out of its “common purse”.

Besides a clear expectation that all prospective Resident Partners were committed to a general understanding of Christian discipleship, taking the life and teaching of Jesus seriously, the membership covenant also included five additional commitments:

• Nonviolence – Jesus’ call to love one’s enemies was seen as a central aspect of the Gospel.
• Economic Sharing – the common purse (as modified above) was also a central value.
• Racial Reconciliation – partners made a commitment to work on building bridges over the racial divide. Eating the common noontime meal together was an important public demonstration of this.
• Simple Living – later modified to be identified as “compassionate living” meant a desire and action to consume fewer of the world’s resources while living in relationship to others with less abundance. Instead of striving for “purity” (eating only organically, vegetarian, biking instead of driving, …), compassionate living also takes into consideration relationship building in the process.
• Service to others – although some communities are designed for self-help, contemplative or monastic orders, or other purposes, Koinonians were pledged to be engaged in service to others as a primary expression of their Christian commitment.

However, by the early 90s the community struggled with its identity. The original goal of the partnership industries was never realized as most of the people of color expressed interest in working for wages rather than getting involved in the risks and meetings that joint management would entail. Habitat for Humanity became a viable reality thus lessening the uniqueness and need for Koinonia’s housing ministry. The state of GA began to offer public kindergarten programs, making a valuable part of the KCDC (Koinonia Child Development Center) less necessary. The pottery had fallen into disuse after the primary potter left. It became more difficult to inspire new community members to get excited about marketing fruitcake and candy as part of the push for more mail order sales prior to Christmas and the dissonance between running a fall-oriented business and preparing for the advent of a radically socially-justice-oriented Messiah continued to cause tensions between “ministry” and “business” or self-sustaining endeavors. Koinonia always had great difficulty in attracting people of color to join the Resident Partnership so when the Board tried to address this failure in 1993 by ending the common purse and made all those working for Koinonia “partners”, within a few years the community had completely disappeared.

I don’t wish to end on such a negative note because despite, once again, the ideal of community ending in “failure”, the experience of participating in Intentional Christian Community at Koinonia was, for me, a time of deep spiritual formation, challenge, and inspiration for which I will be eternally grateful. One only needs to look at the level of violence and hostility directed toward them to realize how radical Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Communities were. So I’d like to conclude with a reiteration of Clarence’s key ideas followed by my own “lessons learned” from my sixteen years in community.

Key to understanding Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia movement was taking Jesus seriously. There are four things that I wish to lift up as essential to Clarence’s ideas. Community, economic sharing, love of enemies, and, to steal Bonhoeffer’s term, the cost of discipleship.

Clarence said we have to demonstrate reconciliation by living in Community, by eating together, by working together, crossing all those lines that divide us: racial/gender/educational/generational. Whatever lines are set up, we need to cross them. We need to be reconciled and we need to demonstrate that reconciliation by eating together and working together, worshipping together. Economic sharing: for Clarence, materialism is one of the greatest sins of the American culture. By imitating the common purse of the early Christian movement, Clarence called for a radical disjuncture with the individualistic capitalistic ethic. Setting up the Fund For Humanity, setting up alternative structures, no-interest loans. Clarence even had a “cow-lending “library” where if your cow went dry, you borrowed another cow and you swap them out.  Also, peacemaking, love of one’s enemies: Peacemaking is essential to the character of God so it must be a characteristic of God’s people. It is a critical component of discipleship – especially in a nation which threatens the entire creation with its militarism and “the bomb”. Koinonia’s main contribution in the arena of nonviolence was in response to the attacks and constant threats it faced in the late 50s and early 60s. In the post-boycott era, when there was less physical hostility – there was still psychic hostility – it was some of Clarence’s disciples, especially Ladon Sheats and others took this discipleship commitment to nonviolence to a new level – nonviolent resistance to war and the arms race. Ladon helped mentor me and helped mentor many of us in this area.

I don’t think Clarence was ever thrown in jail for “protesting” (although he may have been jailed briefly while being harassed by the local “law enforcement” [sic] officials – he never deliberately went to jail like Dr. King did in protest - BUT he certainly inspired a lot of others to take those risks. In one of his sermons on “The Mind of Christ in the Racial Conflict”, Clarence questioned the process most churches use in selecting a pastor.

            Actually, we’re looking more for an octopus from the seminary than we are a prophet from God. I think we ought to begin to investigate not so much how many years [one} has spent in the seminary diddling around on a doctoral thesis, but how many years s/he’s spent in jail, because somehow or other a [person] is better able to get up a sermon in a cell than in a church study. (Substance of Faith pg. 111)

And, taking a page from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Clarence always stressed the cost of discipleship. Following Jesus will cost you everything, but in the process, you gain a whole new “family”. Yes, you will get phone calls at 2AM threatening your life, getting threats, you will be visited and questioned by the FBI. Actually, in my case, it was usually Christine who answered the phone at 2 or 3 AM when I received death threats prior to blocking the nuclear train in 1985 when it came through Montezuma, GA. When we took the full-scale model of the electric chair to the Courthouse lawn in Americus every time the State of Georgia scheduled an execution, we would get phone calls at night or people would drive by and yell at you or spit at you. When the FBI came to inquire about why I refused to cooperate for the renewed military draft registration, I politely refused to answer their questions in front of the Koinonia volunteers working with me in the fall of 1982. In Clarence’s time he said if you haven’t been called a communist, you aren’t worth your salt. And so Clarence would say to us today, if you haven’t been called a terrorist, if you haven’t been called a bum, if you haven’t been called an agitator, you probably ain’t worth your salt.

In the community in Minneapolis where I live now, where we have turn-over, you always end up “reinventing the wheel”. We now recognize that people will always “come and go” so we’ve developed what we call a “turn-over file” so the next person who does this job or task has notes to follow how it was done before. So Neela can create such a file for Anniversary celebrations at Open Door so when you celebrate your 30^th or 50^th Anniversaries, you can see what Neela did to organize this weekend. Well, here is my “turn-over file” for my years at Koinonia – my “lessons learned” that I’ll pass on for what its worth. Not in any particular order, just some thoughts that came to me about my sixteen years in the south Georgia “commune”.

Community is the best way to end the schizophrenia in many of our lives – we have to learn to work and worship with the same group of people – and that’s the key to community is when you worship with the same group of people you work with, you build that bond. Lessons learned (in no particular order- these are the thoughts that came to me this morning): 

1. Leadership in community must be named, recognized, and held accountable. Every group will have leaders but those who aren’t named and recognized can’t be held accountable.
2. One must deal with the issue of “leaving community”. In our mobile culture, people come and go but in intentional community this is a hard reality which causes feelings of betrayal, abandonment, failure. And the longer one stays before leaving makes it feel something akin to divorce. When Christine and I left Koinonia – she after 20 years and me after 16 years – we we’re ready for the grieving process that we underwent and that the remaining community underwent. Clarence said it is a demonstration plot. Gandhi said it’s an “experiment with truth”. We have to give ourselves to these experiments and sometimes we are going to fail. Let’s confess it and move on. A community must learn to creatively deal with these transitions. Ritual might be helpful in this process just like when members join.
3. It is essential to resolve conflict within the community in positive ways instead of avoiding it and hoping it disappears.
4. The community focus and energy must be kept on the mission or else petty differences will work at your destruction. And that’s one of the bitter lessons for us at Koinonia is when we lost the focus. When Habitat started gaining credibility in the mid-80s and our housing ministry was no longer “cutting edge”. When the state kindergarten program made the KCDC less essential. When we tried to find people to “market” – encouraging people to buy more fruitcake and candy products to sustain us economically, we lost our values. And, in so doing, when you lose your sense of mission, then you focus on discussions over owning pets, how much or little (if any) meat to serve at common meals, whether co-ed use of the sauna is OK, … and those petty differences surface and it will only accentuate your differences rather than draw you together.
5. Vision and renewal are essential for the long haul. You have to have people calling out that vision, that renewal. That is where the Bible Study, the inspirational teaching, the mentoring, the pastoral help, all is essential for community. Where there is no vision for the future, the community flounders and dies or becomes irrelevant.
6. Stewardship of common property is difficult in an ownership society. Just because someone has a PhD in an esoteric academic field does not mean one is exempt from checking the oil level on the community-owned car. It’s hard because we are so used to private ownership. When it is common ownership, who takes responsibility for the maintenance, the upkeep? Cleaning the toilets – that’s the common property. 
7. Intergenerational aspects of community life are both a challenge and a blessing. One of the real blessings of living at Koinonia was being able to raise your kids with alternate grandparents, alternate aunts and uncles, peers – having that inter-generational aspect was such a gift. But, “We tried that - and it didn’t work” coming from a veteran of community (especially a founder) can kill a conversation with newer members. Elders in a community can be a wonderful blessing but can also be a drag on new endeavors.
8. Be open to change and growth. Gandhi called his life “experiments with Truth”. Beware of complacency and living on the laurels of the community’s past (now mythological) history. Remember, if you are faithful to the Gospel, you will be attacked. The Domination System, the system that runs the powers today, is always threatened by that faithful response to the Gospel. You will be attacked. If all speak well of you, you must not be clear enough about your collective discipleship.

Koinonia gave tangible evidence to the Open Door Community in its founding that intentional Christian community with economic sharing was possible. The Open Door, in exchange, continued to remind Koinonia not to get too comfortable or complacent. I think the relationship between these two communities was one of symbiosis, of giving and receiving. Together, we enabled each other to be more fully representative of the Body of Christ. For that I give thanks to God for you all and celebrate with you your 25 years of struggle and joy.