I was struck by the stories of Martin Luther King and the early SCLC and Jordan’s Koinonia Farm community. I can’t identify a better narrative, including theological analysis, of the issues at stake and in play re: church and state when we look at these two stories through the eyes of Marsh.
He talked about how shortly after King had invited Jordan to come and speak at Dexter Avenue, the two took contrastingly different paths:
The next year, King left his one and only tenure as a parish pastor, to work full-time for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, while Clarence Jordan, despite his harsh and exceedingly precient judgments on the white evangelical church, came to a noti on of Christian community so extreme in its rigor and discipline that it risked becoming as insular and obsessed with purity as the segregated churches he loathed. The differences between the two ministers then intensified. From King’s perspecitve, Koinonioa Farm simply became irrelevant to racial reform in the South, to the massive legal changes necessary for a more just nation. From Jordan’s perpecitve, King became a parody of his former self, a man of non-violence who relied on the men of great violence for his well-being, a politician (and not a very good one), whose pastoral energies were lomg spent.
No doubt, as the new civil rights leader, King had little choice but to broaden his scope, fortify his leadership, and forge ahead into complex political terrain. But as a profressional organizer with a staff postion in his father’s church in Atlanta, King was no longer accountabnle to the Dexter deacons of the world, proud people who kept his feet to the fire on moral rectitiude. …King’s new freedom to operate must have no doubt felt liberating after years of negotiating the scrupulous Dexter crowd; but in Jordan’s estimation it was freedom purchased with a moral cost.
Jordan believed that the only way authentic change could transpire in southern race relations was through “incarnationl evangelism,” and that meant making Christian truth concrete in community and in shared life with the excluded and the oppressed. Evangelism at its highest, Jordan said, is “based not upon a sermon, not upon a theory, not upon an absraction, but upon the word of God become flesh and dealing with us, and restoring us to our right minds.”
The Beloved Community by Charles Marsh pp. 55-56.
Two figures in Christian history in my own era (actually just prior to my coming of age) who deeply challenged me as a college student, and who awakened me to that first glaring contrast between God’s Kingdom and the Kingdoms of this world, and the church standing mostly with the kingdoms of the world and the cultures that grew up under them. Racism and the complicity in it that so dominated the churches that Jordan’s “God Movement” could not be seen except where this, as the first of the barriers that must be overcome, were challenged and set aside to make room for other challenges like economic realities. It was King who ended his life aiming at the violence of war and the injustices of poverty (and it was probably one or the other or both that led whoever was responsible for his assasination to decide that enough was enough). Both these men battled these three massive demonic forces: racism, violence, and poverty (and both realized how each of the three lived in residence with the others, and that they were interrelated.
I listened to hours and hours of Clarence Jordan lectures on tape while a college student, and it was impossible to miss Jordan’s incranational evangelism. “You don’t take the name of God in vain with your lips, you take it in vain with your life”
