This is a part of a sermon that is on ethicsdaily.com, and describes Clarence Jordan, a man whose work was introduced to me and our youth group by our Youth Minister at the First Baptist Church of Owensboro, Kentucky, in the summer of 1974. Soon after that, he took some of us down to Koinonia Farm. Jordan’s “Cotton Patch” translations set the gospels in the South, where Jerusalem was Atlanta, Rome was Washington , DC, and the trek to the temple in Jesus’ youth where he stayed behind and worried his parents, was the Southern Baptist Convention. Jordan and Koinonia were often recipients of nightime visits by the KKK, who didn’t think tooo highly of a Christian community where people of different races worked together.
From a sermon on EthicsDaily.com entitled The Confessing Movement
Ryon L Price
21 August 2005
Mtt. 16:13-20
What does “kingdom†mean? Simply put it is where the king reigns. Clarence Jordan, in the Cotton Patch Gospels, his down on the farm, colloquial translation of the gospel texts, called it, “the God movement†(The Cotton Patch Gospels, xiv). For Jordan the kingdom was where God is moving in the hearts and lives of people living in community with one another.
In 1942, after graduating from seminary with a PhD in New Testament Greek in addition to his agricultural science undergraduate degree, Clarence and his wife Florence along with another couple moved to Americus, Georgia seeking to live in radical Christian community with one another. There they founded Koinonia Farms. Intent upon embodying the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, they committed themselves to the radical qualities of koinonia – meaning fellowship. On Koinonia Farms Clarence and the other members of the fellowship practiced equality for all peoples, the rejection of violence, and the sharing of all possessions. In short, they were seeking to live as the book of Acts tells us the first generation of Christians lived – in radical fidelity to the making of the kingdom of God among them.
For Clarence Jordan and that brave band of saints, the gospel was not something merely to be passively received. To confess Christ was to become a part of the making of the new community. It meant to bring the kingdom come. The church was not a place where like-minded people come merely to eat casseroles and reminisce about the old days. Instead, what gathers and binds the people of God is their common future. Their common destiny to be made new in the resurrection of Christ. Death has been defeated and all its power robbed. Our future is peaceable life with one another and God forever and eternity.
