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).