Sundays at Harvard-Epworth

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A Reflection by Kristen Grauer-Gray

This week’s reflection is written by Kristen Grauer-Gray, who spent time living and working at Koinonia Farms this past winter.
 

In the fall of 2012, I was living in an apartment in an old dormitory in rural Mississippi. My landlord was a Mennonite who had a fascinating and eclectic library of Christian books. After a long day of teaching—and with a long night of lesson planning ahead—I would take a break and flip through the books. It was there that I met Clarence Jordan.

Clarence Jordan has been called a saint in overalls, a prophet in blue jeans, and also a troublemaker and a communist. He was the founder of an interracial, pacifist Christian community located in southern Georgia, just down the road from Jimmy Carter’s hometown. Clarence grew up white and wealthy in a segregated town. In Sunday school, he would sing about Jesus’ love:
Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight

Jesus loves the little children of the world

Then he would step out of the church into a segregated world and watch all the good church members treat the Black children as if Jesus didn’t love them the same as the White children. The hypocrisy bothered him deeply. It didn’t lead him away from Christianity, but rather deeper into it. After studying for a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, he enrolled in seminary and became a scholar of New Testament Greek.

As Clarence read the New Testament in its original language, he became fascinated with the idea of koinonia. Koinonia means a community where all goods are shared, just like the early Christian community described in Acts 2:44-45: 
All who believed were together and had all things in common
They would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
Clarence believed that this is how Christians are meant to live—in a community of fellowship with radical sharing of goods, worship, and witness. He also believed that we should not just sit and wait for the Kingdom of God to come. We are supposed to build it by our actions.

And so he decided to build a pacifist, interracial community that would exemplify the radical sharing of koinonia. In 1942, Clarence and his fellow minister Martin England bought some farmland in southwest Georgia and set about building a community. They named it Koinonia Farm. The members of the farm shared their goods and money in common. They lent out cows to neighbors in need of milk. They trained local farmers in better agricultural techniques. They also invited their Black neighbors in for meals and paid Black farmhands and White farmhands equally. Within a year, a Ku Kux Klan delegation had arrived to threaten their lives. By the 1950s, their farmstand had been blown up, the local merchants were refusing to sell goods to them, and KKK members shot bullets into their houses at night. Clarence remained through all of it. He wrote: “Faith is not belief in spite of the evidence, but a life in scorn of the consequences.” He lived by the words that he wrote.

I pray for the faith to follow in Clarence Jordan’s footsteps and not only worship Jesus in words, but also to follow him into a life in scorn of the consequences. I invite you all to my adult forum this Sunday at 10 am to learn more about Clarence Jordan and the history of Koinonia farm.

(And if you want a preview or can’t make it Sunday, there’s an excellent documentary about Koinonia Farm here: https://youtu.be/zhVx7qkO67g)

 Preview YouTube video Briars in the Cotton Patch: The Story of Koinonia Farm | Full Movie | Andrew Young