Interview with the 2008
International Peace Award Recipient!

The Koinonia Community in Americus, Georgia, will receive the 2008 International Peace Award at this year’s Peace Colloquy. Colloquy co-directors Andrew Bolton and Jeannette Hicks and young adult ministry specialist Erica Blevins Nye spoke with Koinonia director Bren Dubay, chaplain Norris Harris, and community member Sarah Prendergast. Here is an excerpt.

Andrew: What called you to be part of Koinonia?

Bren Dubay

Bren: I have to say God called me here. I was in Texas, very happily so, never thought I would leave, and by chance a series of events led me to bring a group of students to do volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity. The day we were leaving, the volunteer coordinator insisted we come by the farm. We didn’t have time and were anxious to get on the road. I was taking another group of students to Costa Rica that summer, but being a polite Texan I said, “Yes, Ma’am.” We came out here and it had an impact on me. That was May 2003. I came back in November, bringing more students. By the last weekend of January 2004, I’d been offered the opportunity to come live here and do this work. In May 2004 I moved here. It was totally unexpected—and I don’t regret a minute of it, even when we can’t make things work around here.

Norris Harris

Norris: I worked at a furniture company, in shipping and receiving, and they started to close. I was going to the labor department and applying for unemployment and taking classes. One of the counselors said they had an opening for me if I could manage the farm. I said no, simply because furniture is kind of heavy and I thought about hundred-pound bags of pecans and said I wasn’t interested. He said it was a supervisory job. It was in Koinonia’s transitional period. I came out, and they had about ten applications, narrowed it down to three, then one—and that one ended up being me. I was involved with one of the other pastors in Americus, who was a director of Koinonia. I had other job opportunities but wanted to stay with Koinonia after I felt the warmth and the feeling of the people here.

Sarah: What initially attracted me was the idea of community more than anything else. I’d known about intentional communities since college and had always been attracted to the idea. My husband and I knew about Koinonia from friends who lived here briefly in the nineties, had gotten married here, and just loved it. At one point we asked them, “What’s that place about?” They said, “You have to go there; you’ll love it; it’s a great place for family and kids.”

We put it off for about a year but in that time we watched Briars in the Cotton Patch [A television documentary of the story of the Koinonia Farm] and then thought we really did need to go there. We came for a week-long visit and it just seemed like the right fit. At that time, our first daughter was a year old, and we were starting to settle in Cincinnati and realized that wasn’t where we wanted to be. We wanted to do something different, other than stay where both of us had grown up, before our kids started school. Being here has been transformative.

Looking back I would also 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 settling in to be here for quite some time. Being at Koinonia has allowed me to explore my spirituality in new ways and reconnect with the church, because I was pretty disconnected when we got here.

Erica: What have you found in this community that you couldn’t find elsewhere? (From a Young Adult perspective—read more of Erica's interview.)

Sarah: I found a lot of freedom. There are so many things 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 turning me on. Here at Koinonia I can do work I feel really passionate about. My husband gets to work in the garden full time. He feels that if we weren’t in community, we’d probably only have like an hour or two of daylight to go and do that sort of thing. Just having that element of freedom and flexibility is a big part of it. And that plays into the spiritual side of things, as well.

Erica: What about the intergenerational experience, which is often important to young adults?

Sarah: That’s another part of what attracted me to Koinonia. It hit me when there were a lot of college and high school students coming here and I couldn’t tell the difference very well. But it didn’t matter so much because being with people like this I don’t really think about ages most of the time. At Koinonia we have a person in almost every decade of life. I like it that way because of the wealth of experience and ideas. Sure, it can make things challenging sometimes because we think very differently because of age differences and whatever. 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 a conversation with a lot of kids who are in their pre-teen and teenage years who don’t know how to do that. There’s a woman my age who shares an office with a woman about to turn eighty. They are good friends and have proved there is a dynamic of respect across the generations, rather than just a “respect your elders” approach.

J. Reilly installs new glass in a neighbor's window as part of Koinonia's Heart to Heart home repair project.

Andrew: How do faith and spirituality find place in the practicality of Koinonia?

Bren: We pray throughout the day communally and I’m sure individually. We have a rich spiritual life here at the farm, but on the weekend we all go to various churches—Catholic, Mennonite, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Quaker. And so we also have a spiritual life in the greater Sumter County area. Every morning we begin gathering from 7:30 to 8 o’clock for silent meditation. We have a building designated as our chapel, though we like to think of the whole farm that way. During the day at 10:30, 3:30, and 8:30 a bell rings and we pause at whatever we are doing to pray. At noon, which is a big time for us, we gather to break bread together. About 12:25 we have devotions again. At 5 o’clock we gather in the chapel and sing. Monday through Friday we have this going on. The bell continues to ring on the weekend, and on Sunday night we have potluck.

Norris: Since 1994 it seems like I’ve done a million and one sermons at Koinonia. Part of that was a low period here. Two or three of us kept it going. I found a balance between my church life and Koinonia life and my service-to-community life. The balanced life here is, I think, grace and what I do for others that makes that happen. I also serve as the president of what is basically a collection of pastors—AME Methodist, United Methodist, Episcopal, Baptist, and Pentecostal. Every month I represent my church, but mainly represent Koinonia. They might not understand what I preach to Koinonia, but they would know it’s based on what I’ve been told about Christian faith and what we believe in Jesus the Christ.

Bren: We have a great, vibrant internship program. When our interns come, one of the community members becomes the spiritual companion for that intern for their three-month internship. All of us here in the community are encouraged to have a spiritual companion. One of the interns from last fall petitioned to become an apprentice in the community. Although she’s now an apprentice, she and I still are sharing that spiritual companionship. We have study sessions and are always having some kind of class or discussion groups. There’s no time when the Spirit isn’t really at Koinonia.

Andrew: When Koinonia lost its way in the 1990s, some people predicted its closing. How has the community found renewal in recent years?

Beth Greaves working on a Heart to Heart project.

Bren: From my perspective, God has remained very faithful to Koinonia. If you look at Koinonia with just human intelligence, there have been multiple times it should have disappeared. Why in the world is it still here? I think because God wants it to be here. The change in the nineties was done for noble reasons. It was an experiment to get more local people involved. But the original mission was for a group of people to come together and live this alternative way, a way described in the Acts of the Apostles. Everybody is welcome, but not everyone is going to say yes or be called to this specific way of life. We are all called to different things. I think God just kept sending the right people. Norris is one of them. He hung on through some dark times and didn’t leave. There are always people here who are inspired and won’t give up. When things came to the darkest hour at the end of the nineties, there happened to be people here, and others have continued to come until now, who are committed to communal living.

I think there is going to be far more than just two or three still here in twenty years. The last dozen years there’s been a revolving door here. Now we have a way to nurture people to discern whether they are called here. When people decide to stay they are going to be here until God calls them somewhere else, whether that be to death or back to Texas or wherever.

Andrew: This community has birthed others, the so-called “children of Koinonia,” the most famous being Habitat for Humanity. Do you keep in touch with them?

Bren: Definitely. We hear people sometimes talking about Koinonia sowing seed, but I would say God has sowed the seeds. People have a longing and come to Koinonia for spiritual renewal. Every once in a while these incredible communities and organizations are born out of Koinonia. Yes, we are in touch with Habitat. I’ve given devotions there and so has Norris. Usually every few months I have at least an e-mail exchange with Jonathan Rexford, their new CEO. We are still close to the Fullers, who have gone on to found the Fuller Center for Housing. They are very supportive. I do retreats at Jubilee Partners, and they come and visit here from time to time to help us with various things. It’s a wonderful family to belong to.

Erica: I’m curious about how you connect work issues with larger, even global questions. How do you facilitate that?

Bren: If you work on being rooted in the gospel, then service will naturally come out of that. In many organizations it’s the other way around. So often, activists forget to pray. We try to pray and go, pray and go.

Sarah: The first year living in community is intense, because you bring your whole self with you. This is part of what renews people, but over a longer period of time a lot of difficult things come up. It took me almost two years of being here to really say “I’m ready.” People come here and on their first day they are so excited and say they’ve been looking for this their whole life and want to stay forever. At one point we might have said, “Stay, great.” Now, it’s “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.