Young Adult Interview with the 2008 International Peace Award Recipient!

Koinonia Vision Love through service to others Peace through reconciliation Joy through generous hospitality Koinonia Mission We are Christians called to live together in intentional community sharing a life of prayer, work, study, service and fellowship. We seek to embody peacemaking, sustainability, and radical sharing. While honoring people of all backgrounds and faiths, we strive to demonstrate the way of Jesus as an alternative to materialism, militarism and racism.

Meet Sarah from Koinonia

The 2008 Community of Christ International Peace Award Recipient is the Koinonia community. This award winner is a community of people, rather than an individual, because we want to lift up an example of people who live and work together in peace, for the good of all.

I'm Erica Blevins Nye, Young Adult Disciple Formation Specialist for Community of Christ.  I talked to Sarah Prendergast, a young adult who lives at Koinonia with her family and serves as the community's Administrative Coordinator. I interviewed her about her experience there and her thoughts about giving up typical young adult lifestyle.

Learn more how Koinonia operates and their philosophy.

How did you learn about Koinonia? What led you there?

Sarah: What initially attracted me to Koinonia was the idea of community more than anything else. I’d known about the idea of intentional community starting in college, and I had always been attracted to it. My husband and I, were in Cincinnati, Ohio, and we knew about Koinonia from some friends of ours who lived there and had gotten married there in the 90s, and just loved it. So at one point we just asked them what’s that place about? They said, “You have to go there - you’ll love it! It’s a great place for families and kids.”

We put it off for about a year, but in that time we watched The Briars In The Cotton Patch. Then we thought, “We really do need to go there!” So, we came to visit for a week - and it just seemed like the right thing, and the right fit!

At that time our first daughter was a year old, and we were starting to settle in Cincinnati. We realized that wasn’t where we wanted to be right then. We wanted to do something different than stay where both of us had grown up, before our kids started school and that sort of thing.

What did you find in this community that you couldn’t find in the world outside of it?

Sarah: I found a lot of freedom being here. There are so many things that we would dream of doing when we were in Cincinnati. I’ve worked a lot of different jobs. I have a degree in English, but my professional life wasn’t really turning me on. So many of the fulfilling things that I wanted to do in life would probably require having another job on the side, and not really having time.

Here at Koinonia I can do work that I feel really passionate about. We can master it and hopefully teach it to other people. Like my husband - he works in the garden full time. He feels that if we weren’t in this community we would probably only have an hour or two of daylight to do that sort of thing.

I think that just having that element of freedom and flexibility here is a big part of the experience. That plays into the spiritual side of things, as well. I never encountered Christians who said you have to believe a certain way or you’re going to hell. I encountered Christians who said, “We love you. Come and sit and eat with us, and just talk about things.” We don’t have to worry about pressure or judgment.

How has the life with the Koinonia community affected you spiritually?

Sarah: Being here has been very transformative. Looking back at the whole thing I would have to say that God called me here, but I didn’t know it at the time. Now I really do view this as my life calling, and we are actually settling in to be here for quite some time now.

Being at Koinonia has allowed me to explore my spirituality in new ways and kind of reconnect with the church because I was pretty disconnected when we got here. I think I was seeking that - part of what drew us here was the fact that unlike so many communities that are simply about being sustainable within themselves, Koinonia has an aspect of service and the spiritual side of things. And the fact that it’s Christian, but that we were really allowed to say, “Well, we aren’t comfortable with Christianity”, and the people still welcomed us to be here. I think that has really allowed us to then kind of gravitate back towards Christianity.

That’s my own experience here, and it’s been really wonderful.

Tell me about the intergenerational experience.

Sarah: That’s another part of what attracted me to Koinonia. Actually it hit me when there were a lot of college students and high school students coming here, and I couldn’t very well tell the difference. It didn’t really matter so much, because of I don’t really think about ages most of the time.

At Koinonia we have a person who was born in almost every decade. The generations are pretty well spread out, and I like it that way because we have such a wealth of experience and ideas. It can make things challenging, because we think very differently at times because of age differences.
I just love it. There is a family here with three children who are home schooled and have been raised here. They will sit with the adults and have conversations that a lot of kids who are in their teen-age years that don’t know how to do.

And there’s a woman my age who shares an office with another woman who is about to turn eighty! I was just thinking about it. The two of them are just good friends. They prove that there is a dynamic of respect across the generations - rather than just respect your elders. I feel like we really do respect each other and see each other as individuals and equals. I think it is unique and I really love it!

How do you participate in activism and peace-building for the larger world while in this small community?

Sarah: At Koinonia, we are at the dawn of exploring the ideas of permaculture. A very brief explanation: it’s just a combination of the word “permanent” and “agriculture”. It’s a concept that everything is related, and everything has a role in the eco-system. It is an attempt to look at nature and replicate it in the way we garden and care for the land in order to produce the maximum amount of food on a small space, to make it accessible to everyone, and hopefully to eliminate a lot of the work that is involved in conventional farming. We talk about eliminating fertilizers and chemicals by building up the soil and using what is already there. Producing more of our goods on site is a big part of our current outlook and approach. We are trying to have less of an environmental impact locally and globally.

One thing we are concerned about is the amount of disease in Sumter County. So much disease is directly related to the food that people eat. At Koinonia our goal is to grow our own food - from fruits to vegetables, to the meat that some of us consume. But then we share it with our neighbors. That’s what Koinonia is! We say we have enough to share - so share it! Community supported agriculture: having locally grown food and having it available for others.

How do you see God working with the community here?

Sarah: I am into the idea of faithfulness - that God has remained faithful to Koinonia and also it was sometimes a faithful one or two members who helped to carry it. It is obvious to me that again we were supposed to make it through all the struggles over the years. Even in the past two years since I’ve been here I’ve seen miracles happen. It’s as small as just somebody just stepping up to do something when we didn’t know how it was going to get done.

There are times where we were having electrical problems in our pecan plant, and the very person to fix it shows up without any warning. Times when money was really tight, and money just appeared. So you know, those kinds of things happen. It’s miraculous to witness, it has strengthened my faith, and it gives me great confidence in what we are doing. So, even when it looks kind of messy, or we’ve all forgotten about something that’s really important, it all comes back together. And you know it doesn’t take very much from us in the grand scheme of things. Basically we have to say, “Hey God! Help!” And help is already there.

Often people, including young adults, like to get involved in service work that is trendy or where we can see immediate or direct results of our effort. Koinonia doesn’t sound like instant gratification. What’s the draw?

Sarah: The emphasis I think here at Koinonia is that you are rooted in the Gospel. And if you really work on being rooted in the Gospel, naturally out of that will come Service. A lot of organizations it’s the other way around. It’s all about doing something – activism. Yet so often activists forget to stop and pray. So we try to pray and go; pray and go.

In my experience the first year is very intense to be living in community. You bring your whole self with you, and are more easily confronted with it in community, I think. This is part of what renews people, but over a longer period of time there are a lot of difficult struggles that come up. So, I really found it helpful to have a year and a half or two years of being here to really discern and say, “I’m ready. Yes, I take this as my calling.”

A lot of people come here their first day and they are so excited. They say, “I have been looking for this my whole life! I want to stay forever!”

At one point we might have responded, “Stay! Great!” Now, we say, “That’s wonderful! Come walk this way of life with us. Here’s what we need to do and let’s keep talking about this.” It is really a great model I think.

I think the time element is really important because we certainly have a honeymoon period at Koinonia that does come to an end. The commitment is a lot like marriage!

Being here at Koinonia it becomes completely obvious that everything is interdependent, because each community member plays very specific roles. When somebody is gone we’re constantly wondering, “Why does it get so crazy when somebody is gone or when several of us are gone?” It’s because we are reliant upon each other for our functioning and each of us is important from the person who makes sure all the bills are paid, to the person who is cleaning the toilets, to the person who is out making sure our orchards are maintained. The person doing lunch, the person preaching the sermon - everything is so important!

The spiritual side is very well integrated into everything we do. I’ve never been in a place where prayer is just so natural. Where people just gather themselves and pray so often.

Is there a process for mentoring people as they settle into the community?

Sarah: For our internship program we will put the word out and that program has a beginning, middle and end. I never think of it as recruiting for people to join the community, because that is between the individual and God. But we will recruit people to come and be a part of the internship program. As interns they have a very defined program of prayer, works, service and fellowship. And they have a spiritual companion. Our thinking is most people will feel drawn to become Interns, experiencing this way of life, for a very concentrated amount of time. Then they will move on out into the world. But they will be watered by whatever it is here that we have at Koinonia. Currently, we have six Interns for spring; five have petitioned to become “Apprentices” which is extremely exciting for us.

We have encouraged our fellow community members never to recruit or to strong-arm someone into joining the community because that needs to be a calling. As Apprentices, this next nine months they are going to be living the life here at Koinonia. They attend classes, they come to community meetings, but they no loner have a defined program.

Later, if someone decides to become a “Novice” for a year, they again have a defined program of prayer, work, study, service & fellowship. A novice is considered a provisional member. They need to feel called by God to be here. By that point the Novice feels very deeply into the life of Koinonia. They are really discerning and really listening to hear God’s voice whether or not they are called to become “Stewards” [long term members] here at Koinonia.

The “Steward” considers their participation to be a calling and it is for the long haul until God calls them somewhere else.

Of all the yummy snacks that are made at Koinonia Farms or sold in the catalogue – which is your favorite?

Sarah: Fair Trade Chocolate!