2008 Peace Award Address
The Story of Koinonia Farm
Bren Dubay

President Veazey, members of the Community of Christ, thank you for this privilege. Suzan Hudson, Cathy Loving, Kendra Friend and Jeanette Hicks, you’ve treated us so well. Thank you for all your help. And I especially want to thank Andrew Bolton for finding a way to send an e-mail no matter where you were in the world offering guidance and wisdom as we’ve prepared these many months to make the journey from Americus to Independence. President Veazey, on behalf of our fellow community members at Koinonia Farm, Norris Harris and I gratefully accept the 2008 International Peace Award.

Co-founder of Koinonia, Clarence Jordan — I like his translation of the fourth Beatitude: “They who have an unsatisfied appetite for the right are God’s people, for they will be given plenty to chew on.” I’m particularly fond of the word chew. We’ve always had a great deal to chew on at Koinonia Farm. This honor you’ve given us is going to keep us chewing for quite some time. A peace award … and the theme of this Peace Colloquy — “Signal Communities: Hope of Zion.” Hope. There’s an abundance of hope at Koinonia, hope found in its formative days, in its history, and in our present-day life together.

In an interview Clarence Jordan once gave, he was asked about peace and social justice; he was asked, "What sort of advice do you have for people ... what’s the best thing we can do to help the world be a better place in which to live?" Clarence responded, "Before we can do anything, we have to be something. Our actions have to spring from our inner character."

Koinonia is rooted in being an intentional Christian community, with the belief that if we follow the teachings of Jesus, we will do work that helps our neighbors. We will do works for peace, do works of mercy, do works of social justice. We, at Koinonia, are formed by our shared life, by the history of those who came before us and by the Gospels, especially by the Sermon on the Mount, and we strive to have our actions spring from them. We cannot deny that we’ve been shaped, in particular, by the inner character of Clarence Jordan.

Inspired by the description of the early church in the book of Acts, Clarence and his wife Florence along with Martin and Mabel England founded Koinonia in 1942 in Americus, Georgia, as an experiment in Christian living. At an early age, Clarence faced a choice whether or not he would live a life based on hope. He was a good southern boy. Born in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia, in 1912 — one of ten children. His father, a successful businessman, started the town’s only bank and owned its only general store. Clarence was a member of the privileged class.

As was often the case in those times, church was central to this strong southern family. And Clarence noticed at an early age what too many of us often notice within the church—that what is taught is often not what is lived. In Sunday school he sang, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” The lyrics sounded like the Prince of Peace. But Clarence noticed that the red, yellow, black, and even some of the white children didn’t seem precious in everyone’s sight. It did not escape his young eyes that the black children were not precious to hardly anyone he knew.

The Jordans’ backyard adjoined the backyard of the county jail. As a preteen Clarence took to taking a shortcut through the jail yard on his way home from school and he made friends with some of the prisoners. The cook took a particular liking to him and gave him fatback and corn bread every afternoon. No better way to capture the heart of a growing boy than food. Clarence talked with men who were chained together at the ankles, and he saw that most of them were African American.

During a revival meeting on one hot, humid night when he was twelve years old, Clarence answered the call and joined the church. The choir sang and one voice stood out above all the rest. The warden of the county jail sang in a rich, deep bass “Love Lifted Me.” At this revival when Clarence joined the church, the song on everyone’s lips and filling everyone’s heart was “Love Lifted Me.”

That night he went home happy. Jesus had called him and he had answered yes. But when he heard the screams coming from the county jail behind his house, Clarence’s joy turned to something else. He knew about the device called a stretcher — a prisoner’s feet tied down, arms tied up over his head, someone pulling the rope stretching the arms until, sometimes, they were pulled out of the shoulder sockets. A prisoner was being stretched that very night, and Clarence recognized his screams. He knew the prisoner by name; he had talked with him many times. And Clarence knew the man pulling the rope. It was the warden who only hours before had been singing “Love Lifted Me.”

Likely we have all felt the way Clarence felt that night. There are so many reasons simply to walk away from Christianity if we pay attention to what many people in the faith are doing. The same can be said for Islam, Judaism, or any religion — even secular institutions. At twelve years old, Clarence had a choice between cynicism and hope. He was outraged at God. He shook his fist at God. But as he did so, a thought came to him, “This is what man is doing to man. This isn’t what God is doing.”

So Clarence landed squarely on the side of hope. He wanted what humans were doing to humans to change. As he grew, he zeroed in on farming as a way to help his neighbors He understood that the systems of sharecropping and tenant farming held both poor blacks and poor whites in bondage. Putting his hope first in agriculture, he went off to the University of Georgia to earn his undergraduate degree. But he wasn’t to begin farming immediately. Something within him stirred, and he traded the plow for the pulpit—at least for the time being. God had called him again, this time to the ministry.

While attending seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Clarence “fell in love with the Greek,” as his wife, Florence, often declared. One word in particular caught his attention: Koinonia. It means “community, holding all things in common, fellowship, commune.” The koinonia is what that first small band of believers in the New Testament called themselves. Though Clarence went on to earn a Ph.D. in New Testament Greek, school wasn’t all studies for him. He spent time serving urban African-American communities. Now his hope shifted to activism, to working for a cause, for the inner city poor. But something began to haunt him. He recorded this revelation in his journal:

The thing that just bowled me over was the realization that whites had the very things that I wanted blacks to have, and the whites were living in such a hell. Why should I feel that blacks would be in any less a hell if they had these things? There had to be something extra somewhere. I was driven in a desperate search for spiritual resources.

He came to believe that the spiritual resources he was looking for could be found in the koinonia—a group of people living, working together, and sharing all things in common, demonstrating a life rooted in the gospel, putting their hope in God. Service would naturally flow from there.

So in 1942, the two young couples, full of this hope, bought a broken-down farm in southwest Georgia and there a koinonia was born. Brother and sisterhood, nonviolence, and economic sharing were to be its fundamental guidelines. Farming was to sustain it. Clarence’s degree in agriculture would finally be put to good use. The community’s work for peace and social justice was to be carried out in small acts, in every day service to others. The Jordans and the Englands picked the poorest county in Georgia, and moved to a farm to be neighbors to the sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

They quickly learned that being a good neighbor works best when it goes both ways. Clarence had book knowledge about agriculture but lacked the practical skills. The story goes that each morning he and Martin would climb up on the roof of the farmhouse to see what their neighbors were doing in the fields. Then they would climb down and do the same thing. They acknowledged and respected the wisdom of their neighbors, they listened to them, talked with them, became friends and things began to happen.

Clarence was walking in the cornfields one day and met a young woman who he learned had five small children. “Where do you get the milk to feed all these children?” he asked. There was a long silence, then the young mother answered, “Well, Mr. Clarence, when it’s hard, we try harder.”Koinonia had cows. So, that very day, the farm started a cow lending library. Neighbors would check out a cow. When the cow went dry, they would bring it back and get another one. Without any fanfare, they had been provided a means to give their children milk to drink. It was a very practical action, springing from the inner character of this little band of believers living on this little farm in Georgia. The community tried to live the way of Jesus, tried to carry it out in everyday life. If they sang “Love Lifted Me,” they wanted to mean it.

There were many seemingly small acts of kindness, but the Koinonians weren’t without their detractors. From the beginning, their black neighbors were invited to be part of the Koinonia, eating, working, and sharing lives with their white neighbors, which was against the law in the Jim Crow South. Some people seemed willing to overlook the fact that the Koinonians were breaking the man made laws — maybe because Clarence was a popular preacher and speaker. He had a way of saying things that caused people to frown and to squirm, but mostly, in those early days, they smiled and nodded. The real hostility was to come later.

In 1950, Koinonians brought along a young man – a university student from India to church one Sunday. Mistaken for a black man, this incident led to the expulsion of the Koinonians from membership in the church. It wasn’t until 1954, however, that the hostility erupted into physical violence. That year, the Supreme Court heard Brown v. Board of Education and ruled in favor of the integration of public schools. The violence against Koinonia was to begin shortly thereafter — shootings, bombings, fences cut, dynamiting, trees cut down, sugar in gas tanks. Drive-by shootings became the nightly routine at Koinonia. But the people of Koinonia did not return violence for violence. Instead, they put up streetlights and stood guard, armed only with flashlights. They believed that their presence in the light might deter people from coming and shooting. It was a miracle no one was killed.

It wasn’t the physical violence that ultimately brought Koinonia to its knees, but rather, it was the economic boycott. No one in Sumter County or even the surrounding counties would do business with Koinonia. They couldn’t farm anymore. There was good cause to lose hope, but they chose to start a mail-order business instead. Clarence had a great sense of humor and used it to respond to the horrendous situation. He coined the direct mail-order business’ advertising phrase that we still use today, “Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia.”

When the violence began, some sixty men, women, and children were members of this experiment in Christian living. Some were still there when the worst of the violence began to subside in the late fifties, but, due to the economic boycott, by 1963 there were only three families left — the Brownes, the Wittkampers, and the Jordans. By this time, the farm could not support even three families, so at a community meeting it was decided the Browne family would leave. Twenty-one years into the experiment, where was the hope? What did living peacefully, what did attempting to live social justice rather than simply talking about social justice get them?

Though Atlanta must have looked attractive at this point—Clarence actively sought to sell the farm and move there—he stayed put and paid attention. Using Southwest Georgian vernacular, he wrote the Cotton Patch version of a portion of the New Testament. He preached, gave lectures, and was invited to present workshops at many places around the country.

Then, in 1963, along came Millard and Linda Fuller. Like Norris, did they find the place or did the place find them? What we know is that they came to stay for an hour, but stayed for a month and joined in a dialogue with Clarence and others at Koinonia. Five years and many conversations later, the Fund for Humanity and partnership housing was born. The dream was to build homes for people in the area, charging no interest and making no profit. Koinonia built 192 houses, and, out of this work, birthed Habitat for Humanity.

Before the first of those 192 houses was completed, though, Clarence Jordan died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-seven. Terrorism and economic boycott had not killed Koinonia. Would the death of its leader? Cynics said, “Yes.” But hope prevailed once more. People continued coming, and Koinonia continued living its central ministry of hospitality. To this very day people come, and incredible things happen—people are renewed, organizations are born. And always, always there is a handful of people staying put and paying attention. One in particular, Florence Jordan, stayed put and paid attention until her death in 1987.

The 1970s saw the return to farming, the start of cottage industries. Many conscientious objectors to the war in Viet Nam did their community service at the farm, and it was a time of great activity surrounding the Civil Rights Movement. The mail-order business flourished. Yes, times were good in the 70s and 80s, but then came the 90s and yet another shift that threatened to lead Koinonia away from hope.

In 1993, for noble reasons, Koinonia changed the experiment a bit. Throughout its history, Koinonia’s neighbors had been mostly African American, but no African Americans had chosen to join fully as members of the koinonia, to give up all of their possessions and permanently take on this way of communal living as their own. Community members were white, and the few employees that Koinonia had were mostly African American. So in 1993 Koinonia shifted the focus from service growing out of communal life to service coming from a social service business. The common purse was set aside, everyone was put on salary and more people were hired. The hope was that if Koinonia added additional employment and leadership opportunities, more of its African-American brothers and sisters would become more actively involved.

The shift to a nonprofit corporate structure didn’t work. The unity that had existed disappeared as the spirit of partnership and cooperation gave way to a hierarchical structure of employer and employees. The board of directors hired a series of executive directors from outside the Koinonia community who were not successful in generating the sort of income necessary to sustain a large staff. Financial and spiritual crisis engulfed Koinonia.

Within a year of the change, nearly all of the Koinonians who had come to the farm to live communally—some had lived there for fifteen, twenty, thirty years—were gone. By 1999, it was discovered that the farm was a million dollars in debt and foreclosure was imminent. Any self-respecting cynic would have shut the place down. But hope won out again. People rallied, and the debt was paid off. But how was Koinonia to go forward? Again, a handful of people stayed put, paid attention, and had faith that a way would open.

In May 2003, by accident I dropped by Koinonia for 45 minutes. Now, Norris will tell you that it was no accident. But I’d never heard of Koinonia. I had no interest in stopping by some farm in the middle of nowhere. I’d been in Americus for a week with a group of students volunteering at Habitat for Humanity and I was anxious to return home to Texas. But when the volunteer coordinator would not take no for an answer and my upbringing wouldn’t allow me to be rude … at least not out loud … I responded like any polite Texan and said, “Yes, m’am, we’ll go to the farm.” Again, this was May 2003. By the last weekend of January 2004, I was named the executive director and moved to Georgia in May 2004 — one year after dropping by for 45 minutes … I’m still pinching myself. So, like Norris I came to Koinonia in the conventional way. Or was it so conventional?

Koinonia continued to struggle, but we held tight to the hope our founders passed on to us. We quadrupled our prayer times. We asked for a way to open. Like that friend mentioned in the eleventh chapter of Luke—the one who goes to a neighbor at midnight asking for a loan of three loaves of bread—we persistently knocked on God’s door. “What do you want next from Koinonia?” we asked. “How can we best serve in the twenty-first century? We are your servants, oh Lord. What do we do with this unsatisfied appetite for the right?” We were hungry for the answer to these questions, and the answer that came to us was this: “Keep working, keep praying, and keep inviting others to join you. Be obedient and return to the original vision.”

So we have. In 2005 after many long discussions and a whole lot of praying, we recommitted ourselves to communal living. I, like Norris, am what we call a steward, a full member of the koinonia serving as one of its servant leaders, promising to stay put and pay attention. In 2005, we began a process — we studied our history, accessed the present, we prayed — this process was to lead us to put into words Koinonia’s mission and vision for the 21st Century. We didn’t know it would take us three years to complete the task — ahhhhh, the downside to living in community: long meetings.

Nearly seven decades after the Jordans and the Englands began this demonstration plot for the kingdom of God, we still have an unsatisfied appetite for the right, and we still continue to live in hope. For you in the Community of Christ and in other faiths we celebrate and prayerfully support your journey to also be Zion, demonstration plots of the kingdom, signal communities of hope. There is plenty for all of us to chew on. If travels ever bring you to southwest Georgia, come chew with us. We’d love to have you visit us. And when you do we hope you see us demonstrating this mission and this vision we adopted in 2008 by the way we live. Thank you.