“Clarence Jordan was a strange phenomenon in the history of North American Christianity. Hewn from the massive Baptist denomination, known primarily for its conformity to culture, Clarence stressed the anti-cultural, the Christ-transcending and the Christ-transforming, aspects of the gospel. He was an authentic product of the Bible Belt, of the rural, agrarian heartland, of the people’s church (he got his college degree in agriculture, graduating in the same class as Senator Herman Talmadge at the University of Georgia). Clarence pursued this tradition to its very end, ending at the top with a Ph.D. in the Greek New Testament from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.”
– G. McLeod Bryan
On Clarence Jordan and Koinonia by Joyce Hollyday
Koinonia members and workers take a mid-morning break each day, gathering for hymn singing and prayer. As they approach the last verse of “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” a tide of grins sweeps the room at the phrase, “When I tread the verge of Jordan, bid my anxious fears subside.” Once of the members, drawing out the pronunciation of their community’s founder’s last name, announces, “I heard somebody say, ‘When I tread the verge of Jurden.” Everyone laughs.
Being at Koinonia brings one’s sense of smell alive. The sweetness of spiced pecans from the candy kitchen and fruitcakes baking in the huge, partially solar-heated oven pervades the damp air. The door to the smokehouse, when opened, sends a pungent aroma into the air around it. The smell of fresh ink fills up the corners of the room where newsletters and mail order lists are printed. Outside, sweet grapes are ripe in the fields.
The singsong rhythms of the machines which print the newsletters rapid-fire and those that shell the pecans make their own hymn, but “treading the verge of Jordan” still echoes in the air.
This man Jordan seems to linger in the hearts of many, like the smell of sweet grapes lingers in the Georgia air. A rich history of the man and the community that was his dream can be drawn from those who knew him.
Perhaps the best picture of the history of the community comes from Jordan’s wife, Florence. A warm and dynamic woman, she talks jokingly of all the people who come to the community and ask, “Can Mrs. Jordan still get around?” When asked to talk about the early days of Koinonia, she responds with a laugh, “I can talk thirty-seven years’ worth…I never have lost my enthusiasm for Koinonia.”
Florence and Clarence Jordan met at Southern Baptist Seminary in 1933, where he was a student and she the assistant librarian. When they began to consider marriage, Clarence said to her, “If you want to be the wife of a pastor of a First Baptist Church, you don’t want to marry me.” And he shared with her his plans to go back to the deep South, which was his home, to use his undergraduate agricultural training and “do something for the poor.”
Clarence and Martin England, a former American Baptist missionary, found 440 acres of land in Sumter County, near Americus Georgia. Beginning to formulate a vision for a Christian farming community that could be a resource for the rural poor, Clarence and the England family moved there in the fall of 1942. The Jordans’ first son was born in September, so Florence stayed with her parents in Louisville and then with Clarence’s parents until April, 1943, when the house that Clarence and Martin were building was, in Florence’s words, “at least campable.”
Florence remembers that the switch from big-city living to “days of cooking on a wood stove, washing in the old iron pot, and carrying water were not easy. The land was a rather desolate-looking place, with some sagging barns, outbuildings, and sheds, one large, unpainted house , and two rundown tenant houses. But we were young and it was an adventure wit the Lord.”
They called this adventure Koinonia, from the Greek word which was used to identify the early church in Acts, which pooled its resources and shared the life of Jesus Christ in an atmosphere of reconciliation. This was the model for the fledgling farm. The particular reconciliation that was so desperately needed at this time and place was between black and white. The Koinonians hired a black man, a former sharecropper, to help with the farm. They all ate their meals together, and this breach of Southern tradition brought on the first hostility toward the community.
In a story that has been told many times, Clarence showed the courage and quick wit that became his trademark. A group of men came to the farm. Their spokesman said to Clarence, “We’re from the Ku Klux Klan and we don’t allow the sun to set on people who eat with niggers.”
Clarence glanced over at the western sky and noticed that the sun was creeping low. He thought a bit, swallowed a few times, and suddenly reached out, grabbed the man’s hand, and started pumping away, saying , “Why, I just graduated from Southern Baptist Seminary, and they told us there about folks who had power over the sun, but I never hoped to meet one here in Sumter County.” They all laughed, and nobody noticed that the sun had slipped down below the horizon.
Despite the hostility of white neighbors, the farm soon became a success. Clarence invented a mobile peanut harvester and established a “cow library,” through which poor neighbors could check out a cow for a period of time so that they could have milk. He built a deluxe chicken house that was the envy of the Koinonia wives, whose own houses were austere by comparison. The luxurious chicken quarters were the target of many jokes from the neighbors, but when Clarence began getting more eggs than anybody else, those same neighbors were soon asking him for advice.
Meanwhile, Clarence’s reputation as a powerful, uncompromising preacher was growing. As he traveled the country preaching pacifism, social justice, and community, he drew young people to the experiment at Koinonia…. “
Joyce Hollyday in © Sojourners, December 1979, Vol 8, no 12
Invitation: “They all ate their meals together….”
In 1942, the Jordans, another couple – Martin and Mabel England, who had previously served as American Baptist missionaries – and their families moved to a 440-acre (1.8 km2) tract of land near Americus, Georgia, to create an interracial, Christian farming community. They called it Koinonia (κοινωνία), a word meaning 'communion' or 'fellowship' that in Acts 2:42 is applied to the earliest Christian community.[2]
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"This man Jordan seems to linger in the hearts of many, like the smell of sweet grapes lingers in the Georgia air. A rich history of the man and the community that was his dream can be drawn from those who knew him." Joyce Hollyday on the bold faith-based cultural experiment in interracial community and farming in the 1940's in Georgia called Koinonia.
Racial segregation and Jim Crow laws ruled the South during the time Clarence Jordan had a vision of a different way to be and live together, and to support those in poverty in Georgia. This level of intentionality, rooted in Christian faith, offers both inspiration and example for today in the midst of systemic racism and structural poverty.