Some of you may remember the book about this groundbreaking, hands-on version of the Christian message back in the 1940s through 1970. A guy named Clarence Jordan started a movement known as the “Koinonia Farm Experiment” in southern Georgia in 1942 during World War Two. He had the radical idea that the faith Jesus was talking about should apply directly to our daily work and lives. The idea caught on and out of those who joined in came a number of programs in the south. Naturally enough such concerns and activities got the group into a whole host of difficulties, especially with the Ku Klux Klan.
The details of how this community worked and what they accomplished are spelled out in the book by Dallas Lee entitled The Cotton Patch Evidence. The New Testament Greek term “Koinonia” means “fellowship” or “community”. The main drive of the movement was to improve and enhance the work of poor farmers in the South, the vast majority of whom were black. The Koinonia folks were themselves almost entirely white, so this mission was hobbled from the out-set by the standard segregation laws of that time. More to the point, the work was downright opposed and undercut by the common values of most southern farmers as well as the Klan itself.
However, there were a number of significant supporters among the white churches, notably Will Campbell and President Jimmie Carter, as well as numerous church groups throughout both the South and the North. In essence, what Clarence Jordan sought to do was to undercut the strangle hold the raciest people en of the south had on the lives and livelihood of black farmers. He and his cohorts continually sought for and applied techniques and programs that fought against the racist policies of Southern cities and states, as well as the Federal government. The evidence was then spirit-filled Government, whenever the racists policies contradicted those of Biblical Christianity.
One of the more well-known quotations from the pen of Clarence Jordan is: “Never did Paul or Peter or Stephen point to an empty tomb as evidence of the resurrection. The evidence was the spirit-filled fellowship.” It would seem clear that Dallas Lee, the writer of the book The Cotton Patch Evidence, used this quotation as the inspiration for the book title. Jordan himself, like many of those who chose to work with him, was something of an academic dropout, after having earned several theological degrees at more than one theological Seminary, several of which were Southern Baptist.
After many tumultuous years the Koinonia movement fell on harder times. It was then that it received a second breath of wind from a Northerner named Millard Fuller. Fuller revitalized the energy of Clarence Jordan and things became alive again. Things for the Community continued on until Clarence Jordan’s death in 1970. Indeed, it even continued on under fresh leadership and continues on still today In Americus, Georgia under various fresh leadership and with increasingly new products.