In Praise of Koinonia Farm

On the day after his 100^th birthday anniversary, on 7/30/12 I posted a blog article titled "In Praise of Clarence Jordan.” This article is about Jordan’s Koinonia Farm which is celebrating its 80^th anniversary tomorrow (on 11/26), and I am posting it in deep appreciation for their decades of faithful work. 

Clarence Jordan was a farmer with a Ph.D. in theology. Born in 1912 in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia, about 90 miles south of Atlanta, Jordan graduated with a degree in agriculture at the University of Georgia in 1933. The following year, he was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister.

Then, in 1938 Jordan earned a Ph.D. in Greek New Testament from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, and four years later he started Koinonia Farm near Americus, Georgia, about 65 miles south of where he was born.

Clarence Jordan sought to be a “demonstration plot” farmer. An article in the December Sojourners magazine is titled “The Radical Southern Farmer White Christians Should Know About.” In that piece, Jordan is cited as saying,

While I love books and have a passion for knowledge, I have thought the real laboratory for learning was not the classroom but in the fields, by farming, and in interaction with human need.

So, the 440-acre Koinonia Farm, named after the Greek word for fellowship and joint participation, was designed to be a “demonstration plot” of the Kingdom of God in the here and now of southern Georgia.

According to the Sojourners article, Jordan conceived of the farm as being

cooperative and communal ... interracial, controlled by investment of time (life), rather than capital; based on the principle of distribution according to need; [and] motivated by Christian love as the most powerful instrument known to [people] for solving [their] problems.

Clarence Jordan has recently been hailed as the preacher of “the inconvenient Gospel.” Just last month a book containing some of Jordan’s writings and sermons was published under the title The Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race, and Religion. 

Issued by Plough Publishing House on October 25, I bought a Kindle copy that day and read it before attending (on Zoom) the book launch event sponsored by Plough on Oct. 28.

One of the three panelists on that webinar was Starlette Thomas, a young Black pastor and journalist. Her opening remarks were largely the same as the Introduction that she authored for the book. Starlette’s explanation and praise of Koinonia is also printed in the Autumn 2022 issue of Plough.**

Koinonia Farm has had influence far beyond southern Georgia. In the 1970s not long after Jordan’s death in 1969, Koinonia Farm began to market some of his sermons on long-play vinyl records—and I listened to some of those, with considerable delight, in Japan.

I had heard of Jordan and Koinonia Farm while a seminary student (at Jordan’s alma mater) in the 1960s, but it was after hearing his sermons preached with a captivating southern drawl, that I became a big admirer of Jordan and what he had done in Georgia.

The influence of Jordan and Koinonia Farm expanded beyond Georgia in other, more important ways. Millard Fuller (1935~2009) was a self-made millionaire by age 29, but he gave up his wealth and moved to Koinonia Farm in 1968, where he and his family lived for five years.

Under the name Koinonia Partners, Fuller started Habitat for Humanity in 1976, and in 1984 he enlisted Jimmy Carter as a hands-on supporter—and Jimmy and Rosalynn continued to do volunteer work with Habitat into their 90s. (The Carter home in Plains was about ten miles from Koinonia Farm.)

The number of people currently living at Koinonia Farm (see their website here) is small, but they are valiantly working to keep alive Clarence Jordan’s vision of maintaining a demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God. For that, I remain deeply grateful.

And in reflecting upon Koinonia Farm’s existence for 80 years now, I am challenged to think about how June and I, and our church, can be more intentionally a part of a demonstration plot for God’s Kin-dom.

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** Starlette’s article is titled “The Raceless Gospel,” a concept she constantly emphasizes. She is director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative at Good Faith Ministries and host of the Raceless Gospel podcasts.

Note: In addition to the new book about Jordan issued last month, I highly recommend Dallas M. Lee’s excellent book, The Cotton Patch Evidence: The Story of Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm Experiment (1942–1970), first published in 1971 (3^rd ed., 2011).

Do I Stay Christian? Pondering McLaren’s New Book

In an appendix to the book that I wrote telling the story of my life up to my 82^nd birthday, I have several “top ten” lists, including one of “theologians and/or philosophers.” Although he is neither a professional theologian nor philosopher, the youngest person on that list is Brian McLaren (b. 1956).

Currently I am slightly revising and updating that book I wrote for my children and grandchildren, and I have just added McLaren’s 2022 book, Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned, to my list of top ten 21^st century non-fiction books. 

No, I am personally not considering giving up being a Christian. Neither do I include myself among the doubters or disillusioned, although I am often disappointed with how so many Christians have lived and are living.

But certainly there are many thoughtful people now who have already left Christianity or are seriously thinking of doing so. With my lifelong interest in Christian apologetics, I was most interested in seeing what McLaren would say to those who have left, or would like to leave, the Christian faith.

The book has three parts: the first is “No,” ten chapters giving reasons for not staying Christian. Part II is “Yes,” ten chapters giving reasons for staying, and Part III is “How.”

There is much of considerable value in McLaren’s book, but I am not attempting to review his book here or to summarize the wealth of ideas worth thoughtful consideration. (I have made a page containing some of McLaren’s important statements, which you can access here.)

The ninth reason McLaren gives for not staying a Christian is “Because of Christianity’s Great Wall of Bias (Constricted Intellectualism.”) Although he has brief paragraphs about seven other biases, in that ninth chapter he mainly considers the “confirmation bias,” and it is worth pondering.

“Confirmation bias names our brain’s tendency to reject anything that doesn’t fit in with our current understanding, paradigm, belief system, or worldview,” writes McLaren (p. 67). This bias, he contends, has skewed the thinking of many Christians about nuclear war and ecological crises.

Perhaps this is the reason Mommsen failed to deal with ecological overshoot, which I wrote about in my July 5 blog post.

Mommsen, the able editor of Plough Quarterly, certainly is not “guilty” of the errors of the conservative evangelicals who believe the (eminent) “second coming” of Jesus will take care of the problem of ecological overshoot (although they haven’t used that term).

As far as I know, Mommsen has not written about the “rapture,” which has been emphasized in much conservative Christian eschatology. nor does he write explicitly about the second coming of Jesus. ⁺⁺

But perhaps Mommsen’s belief in rather traditional ideas about God acting in “supernatural” ways to consummate the world as we know it, maybe even in the lifetime of people now living, is the reason he overlooks overshoot—and the same is likely true for most traditional Christian believers.

On the other hand, perhaps it is Mommsen’s belief in the Kingdom of God (KoG) that blocks his acknowledgment of overshoot.

Emphasis on the KoG has been a central emphasis of the Bruderhof from the beginning, although he/they have not committed the “liberal” error of thinking that if we just work hard enough, we humans can “bring in” the Kingdom of God on earth.

Perhaps “confirmation bias” of Mommsen and others, traditional and liberal, has prevented serious consideration of the collapse of the world as we know it.

That collapse is projected by scientists based on their investigation of facts rather than theological (or ideological) beliefs that would skew their thinking because of confirmation bias.

(Of course, scientists are also sometimes biased, but generally they are far quicker than religious believers to recognize and correct those biases.)

In his next-to-last chapter, McLaren begins a prayer for overcoming the confirmation bias with these words: “Source of all truth, help me to hunger for truth, even if it upsets, modifies, or overturns what I already think is true” (p. 210).

This is my prayer also.

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⁺⁺ My March 25, 2015, blog post was titled “Do You Believe in the Rapture?” and it has had more than 3,000 pageviews (!) as well as far more comments than usual.

** Some of you may be interested in watching (some or all of) a YouTube interview of McLaren and his book I have introduced above: Do I Stay Christian with Brian McLaren: One Question with Pastor Adam.

 

Overlooking Overshoot

As most of you know, I am a big admirer of the Christian group known as the Bruderhof and am a regular reader of Plough Quarterly, their excellent publication. However, I have both appreciation for and some serious questions about their Summer 2022 issue titled Hope in Apocalypse. 

“Hoping for Doomsday”

Peter Mommsen, the great-grandson of Eberhard Arnold (1913~82) who was the founder of the Bruderhof, is the able editor of Plough Quarterly. I have often been helpfully informed and challenged by his perceptive editorials.

I was dissatisfied, though, with his six-page editorial in the current issue of Plough. It is titled, “Hoping for Doomsday: The times are troubled. That’s why we need the promise of apocalypse.”

While Mommsen writes some about the possible disastrous effects of climate change, he seems to think that it is less a threat to humanity than the potential destruction of earthly life as we know it because of nuclear war.

After briefly looking at those two apocalyptic threats, he writes,

one day homo sapiens will go extinct, with or without our help through carbon emissions or nuclear war, and the game will be over. At least that is what current scientific models foretell. Perhaps it will be at the next round of global glaciation, predicted in a hundred millennia or so . . . .

What he goes on to say in that paragraph is what I learned in the 1960s. But, and this was my dissatisfaction, he makes no reference to what some scientists (and others) have said in recent years about ecological overshoot.

In passing, Mommsen does mention Don’t Look Up! the movie I wrote about in my Jan. 25 blog post (see here), but he makes no reference at all to the frightening phenomenon of overshoot.

Ecological overshoot occurs when human demands exceed what the earth’s biosphere can provide through its capacity for renewal. According to some ecological scientists, the industrial world is nearing the overshoot apex and will soon begin to collapse, an irreversible phenomenon.

For a good introduction to this matter, see Michael Dowd’s video Overshoot in a Nutshell: Understanding Our Predicament and also YouTube talks (such as this one) by William Rees, professor emeritus of British Columbia University. These articulate what some scientistic models are now foretelling.

(Rees, b. 1943, is primarily known for creating the ecological footprint concept. Wikipedia, here, gives a good, brief introduction to Rees and his academic work.)

Mommsen’s failure to make any reference to the concept of ecological overshoot and the work of thinkers such as Dowd and Rees is a major deficiency in his editorial.

Why is Overshoot Overlooked?

A main reason is doubtlessly unawareness. In spite of valiant efforts by Dowd, Rees, and others to warn us of the perils of overshoot/collapse, there is little public awareness of that real and present danger.

My “Google alert” for overshoot in recent weeks has yielded surprisingly few “hits.” There are some pertinent articles found at EcoWatch (such as here), but these important essays are read by relatively few people.

Most, I’m afraid, don’t know (and don’t care?) about what is likely to happen before the end of the present century.

But some are aware (to varying degrees) of overshoot but find the idea unbearable. Some who do know at least something about overshoot just don’t want to think about it, because it is too upsetting to consider.

Perhaps a major reason overshoot is overlooked by many, especially serious Christian thinkers such as Mommsen, is that the possibility of such is unthinkable.

Earlier this year, Brian McLaren’s new book Do I Stay Christian? was published. While he does not say a lot about overshoot, he does mention the concept and makes a passing reference to Michael Dowd.

The seventh chapter of McLaren’s scintillating book deals with “Christianity’s great wall of bias, which includes the “tendency to reject anything that doesn’t fit in with our current understanding, paradigm, belief system, or worldview” (p. 67).

Perhaps this helps us understand Mommsen’s lack of serious attention to overshoot.

Much more needs to be said about this—and I plan to write at least a little more about it soon.

The Dignity of Rural Life: In Appreciation of Millet

Last year I learned more about, and was impressed by, Jean-François Millet when I read “To Plow His Furrow in Peace: Jean-François Millet’s art taps his peasant roots to honor the dignity of rural life,” a major article in the Spring 2021 issue of Plough Quarterly.** That became the seed for this blog post.

Millet (1814~75) was born in rural northwestern France, and his most famous work is “The Angelus,” an oil painting completed between 1857 and 1859.

The painting, which the Plough author says you may have seen “hanging in some grandma’s living room,” depicts two peasants bowing in a potato field to say a prayer, the Angelus, that together with the ringing of the bell from the church on the horizon marks the end of a day’s work. 

I don’t remember when I first saw a reproduction of this painting, but I’m sure it was when I was still a Missouri farmboy.

Two earlier paintings by Millet are also widely known and appreciated, perhaps especially by rural people: “The Sower” (1850) and “The Gleaners” (1857).

What I did not know until I read the Plough article is how Millet was criticized. The author says that Millet’s “rustic paintings met with a great deal of negativity from critics and Parisian society. The truthfulness with which they depicted rural people and rural life was labeled mere ugliness.”

The sophisticated city folks thought that art should depict “dignified things, like lords and ladies and historical events and Greek myths and things like that. It was not for poor people.”

But by his paintings, Millet continued to depict the sacredness to be found in ordinary rural life. And in the concluding words of the Plough essay, to this day Millet’s “works remain a reminder of the worthiness of the ordinary worker who lives an ordinary life.”

My father was born in rural northwestern Missouri 101 years after Millet’s birth in France, and while not a “peasant” such as those depicted in Millet’s paintings, he—and his father—were “common” farmers, and from them I learned, and came to appreciate, the dignity of rural life.

On Aug. 15, 2020 (my 82^nd birthday), I posted a blog article titled “My Old Missouri Home,” and I won’t reiterate here what I wrote then, but it was in part about “the benefits of being a farmboy.”

What I didn’t say in that article is that I learned about the dignity of rural life from my father and his father. Grandpa George lived on a farm in Worth County (Mo.) all of his life except for a brief period in the early 1910s, and my father (d. 2007) did the same except for the years from 1935 to 1945.

There were exceptions, but they and most other farmers like them, were good, honest men who worked hard to provide for their families, who were kind and helpful to their neighbors, and who didn’t get into harsh verbal conflicts with anyone (except maybe on a few rare occasions).

Yes, 80~100 years after Millet, they embodied the dignity of rural life that the French artist painted so beautifully, and I remain grateful for what I learned from them.

But what about now? The world is much different now than when Millet painted “The Angelus” in 1857—or when my father bought his farm in 1945. I am afraid, though, that the dignity of rural life has deteriorated in the last forty years.

“Talk radio” (such as The Rush Limbaugh Show from 1988 until Limbaugh’s death in 2021) and, to a lesser extent since it requires cable, Fox News augmented the polarization of the general public, including and perhaps especially rural Americans.

When 80% of the people vote the same way, as they did in many of Missouri’s (and other states’) rural counties in 2016 and 2020, perhaps that indicates a notable loss of the dignity of rural life to the polarizing forces in contemporary society.

That dignity has been tarnished in recent years by the MAGA majority demonizing those with opposing political views and many of those in the minority 20% feeling alienated from their neighbors/friends.

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** Back in 2016, I posted “Following the Plough” on a Blogger.com page. Few have accessed that page, so if you would like to know more about Plough Quarterly and the Bruderhof community that produces it, click on this link.

The Bruderhof: Celebrating a Century of Christian Discipleship

In 1920, Eberhard and Emmy Arnold founded a Christian community in the Weimar Republic (Germany). That community came to be known as the Bruderhof, the German word meaning “place of brothers.” 

Emmy & Eberhard Arnold

The Bruderhof Through the Years

The Arnolds started their first community in the little German town of Sannerz, about 50 miles northeast of Frankfurt. Amid their outspoken opposition to the Nazi regime in the 1930s, Eberhard suddenly died in November 1935 at the age of 52.

Because of their anti-Nazi stance, the Bruderhof had to leave Sannerz in 1937. They moved briefly to Liechtenstein and then to the Cotswolds in England. Since they were Germans, the Bruderhof faced harassment there in the early years of WWII, so they then moved to Paraguay in South America.

In 1954, the Bruderhof moved again, this time to New York, and the number of their communities began to expand. After moving to the U.S., they were headed by Eberhard and Emmy’s son Johann Heinrich from 1962 until his death in 1982 and then by grandson Johann Christoph from 1983 to 2001.

The Bruderhof Today

Currently, there are 28 Bruderhof settlements on four continents with about 3,000 members. They are all trying to live out the vision that the Arnolds began with in 1920.

On their www.bruderhof.com website, the Bruderhof introduces their communal way of life and their Christian vision:

Love your neighbor. Take care of each other. Share everything. Especially in these challenging times, we at the Bruderhof believe that another way of life is possible. We’re not perfect people, but we’re willing to venture everything to build a life where there are no rich or poor. Where everyone is cared for, everyone belongs, and everyone can contribute.

We’re pooling all our income, talents, and energy to take care of one another and to reach out to others. We believe that God wants to transform our world, here and now. This takes a life of discipleship, sacrifice and commitment; but when you truly love your neighbor as yourself, peace and justice become a reality. Isn’t that what Jesus came to bring for everyone?

The Bruderhof’s Plough

In 1920, Eberhard Arnold started a publishing company that has long gone by the name Plough Publishing House. In the early years of the Bruderhof, their livelihood was supported by the books written and published by Arnold. 

Now located in Waldon, New York — and on the Internet at www.plough.com —Plough has published numerous worthwhile books, and since the summer of 2014 has also published Plough Quarterly, an outstanding periodical. The current editor is Peter Mommsen, a great-grandson of Eberhart and Emmy.

Two of my favorite books published by Plough are Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard (1999) and The Gospel in Tolstoy (2015), which I read before posting my Nov. 20 blog article about Tolstoy.

I am especially fond of the Quarterly, and early this week I received the Winter 2021 issue (No. 26); the theme is “What are Families For?” The ecumenical nature and diverse viewpoints presented in each Quarterly make it a valuable publication, and I read it “from cover to cover” each time.

The delightful new issue contains six main feature articles written by a New York Times columnist, a female member of the Bruderhof in Australia, a Catholic Cardinal, a Haitian woman poet, a teacher of Christian history, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who died just last month.

The issues of Plough Quarterly now have 112 pages and contain many beautiful images and appealing artwork. Thus, it affords much viewing as well as reading pleasure.

In addition, each morning I enjoy reading Plough’s “Daily Dig,” short meditations that Plough sends by email—and which can be subscribed to (here) for free. This week’s “digs” have included brief passages by Karl Rahner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Madeleine L’Engle.

Hearty congratulations to the Bruderhof for their century of faithful Christian discipleship! 

Jean Vanier (1928~2019) and his meritorious life dedicated to living in community with people who had serious mental and/or physical “disabilities” was the topic of my Sept. 10 blog posting. This article is about one of Vanier’s main emphases: doing things with rather than just for people with serious needs.

In Harmony with Vanier

In his L’Arche homes, Vanier and those who followed his example, modeled what it means to treat people who have physical needs with respect. They chose to live with people who had serious mental and/or physical “handicaps,” not just to provide homes where they could be taken care of.

Before I learned about Vanier and L’Arche, I heard about similar institutions in Japan, institutions very much in harmony with the L’Arche movement Vanier began in France in 1964.

Two years before Vanier started the first L’Arche home, Fukui Tatsu’u (福井 達雨), a 32-year-old Japanese man, founded what became Shiyo Gakuen (止揚学園) as a home for physically challenged people.

Fukui, a 1956 graduate of the Department of Theology of the renowned Doshisha University in Kyoto, remained the head of Shiyo Gakuen until 2015.

During the years I taught at Seinan Gakuin, Fukui-sensei was invited many times to be the guest speaker during the “Christian Focus Week” special chapel services at the university and the junior-senior high school. He always emphasized doing things with the “needy,” not just doing things for them.

In 1976, Hisayama Ryoikuen (久山療育園), a similar facility, was established in the outskirts of Fukuoka City. Their emphasis from the beginning has been “living with” (tomo ni, pronounced toh-moh knee, in Japanese).

Doing something for others is expressed in Japanese as tame ni (pronounced tah-meh knee). These similar words express a great difference—and the former continues to be admirably modeled by Hisayama Ryoikuen, Shiyo Gakuen, and Jean Vanier’s L’Arche homes. 

From a Hisayama Ryoikuen poster emphasizing "living with"

In the Spirit of Vanier

I don’t know if he was influenced at all by Jean Vanier, but Chris Arnade is a fascinating man who spent a considerable amount of time in the 2010s living out the spirit of Vanier by constant contact with the “underclass” of American society.

Arnade (b. 1965) earned a Ph.D. in physics and then worked with a Wall Street bank for twenty years before becoming a freelance writer and photographer. In 2012 he began visiting a neighborhood in the South Bronx where he became friends with homeless people, sex workers, and addicts.

Arnade then traveled over 150,000 miles around the U.S., spending time with “back row” people in American society. Based upon his experiences, earlier this year Arnade published a book titled Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.

I first learned about Arnade’s book by reading Peter Mommsen’s excellent interview with Arnade published in the Summer 2019 issue of Plough Quarterly. That interview and the book are both very impressive.

The first chapter of Arnade’s book is titled, “If You Want to Understand the Country, Visit McDonald’s.” He spent countless hours in McDonald’s restaurants talking with the people who are frequent visitors there.

Arnade concluded that many of the people he found at McDonald’s felt “excluded, rejected, and, most of all, humiliated.” He recognized that society has “denied many their dignity” (p. 284)—thus the title, and thrust, of his book.

At the end of his interview with Mommsen, Arnade emphasized, “Take time to listen to people. Give them respect.”

While most of us can’t, or won’t, choose to live in a L’Arche home or a similar institution, we can choose to spend more time with “needy” people of various sorts, seeking to show them dignity and respect by doing things with them rather than just doing something for them.

From "Just War" to "Just Peace"

New Year’s Day has come and gone and it's already in the fifth day of 2017. But do you know that January 1 was not only New Year’s Day but was also the Catholic Church’s World Day of Peace (WDP)? In fact, this year was the 50^th anniversary of the WDP. 

The Pope promotes nonviolence 

For this year’s WDP observance, Pope Francis chose the theme “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace”.

John Dear, a Catholic priest and peace activist (whom I wrote about here in 2014), has pointed out (here) that the Pope’s message on New Year’s Day was the Catholic Church’s first statement on nonviolence ever made. 

The Pope emphasized, “To be true followers of Jesus today also includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence.” He goes on to state, “The name of God cannot be used to justify violence.” (Click here to see the Pope’s entire message.)

In his WDP message Pope Francis said, “I plead for disarmament and for the prohibition and abolition of nuclear weapons.”

Those important words by the Pope were made public last month about two weeks before the PEOTUS (foolishly? dangerously?) tweeted, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

The long “just war” position

The term “just war” was introduced by Augustine of Hippo in his early fifth century book The City of God. It was later articulated in depth by 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas. At present, it is outlined by four conditions in the formal Catechism of the Catholic Church. 

(See here for a brief statement of “the traditional elements” in what the Catechism calls the “‘just war’ doctrine.”)

A major problem, though, is this: the leaders of every country that is at least somewhat culturally Christian thinks that all wars they engage in are just wars. When have you ever heard the political leader of a Western country admit that their country’s war activities were not just?

When will you ever hear that? My guess is, Never.

In February 1991, then-President Bush sought to assure the American public that his proposed Gulf War conformed to the historic principles of Just War theory.

(It is perhaps noteworthy, however, that Bush II did not use that same language with regard to the Iraq War; although he would never admit it, perhaps he harbored doubts about his presumptive war being just.)

Death kneel for the “just war” doctrine?

There have always been opponents of the just war doctrine. Erasmus of Rotterdam, for example, wrote (in 1508), “The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.”

Now, however, key leaders in the Catholic Church have spoken against it. “Death Knell for Just War: The Vatican’s Historic Turn toward Nonviolence” is the title of John Dear’s article in the Autumn 2016 issue of Plough. (Click here to see that important article.)

(And if you are interested, see this link for an article I wrote last summer about Plough.)

Dear’s article was about the Vatican’s Nonviolence and Just Peace Conference held in April of last year. That seminal meeting issued a document titled “An Appeal to the Catholic Church to Recommit to the Centrality of Gospel Nonviolence.” That appeal included a call for the Church to no longer use or teach “just war theory.”

The Pope seems to have followed that guideline in his World Peace Day message.

My prayer is that all Christians, and others, will heed the recent Catholic call for movement from “just war” to “just peace” and will seek to sanction only nonviolence as the style of politics for peace.