Koinonia Farm: Living Out the Gospel and Breaking Racial Barriers in Southern Georgia

Our Topic for Today:

• A look at one example of an organization/ministry in southern Georgia which has been applying the teachings of Jesus in contemporary society since 1942..

Koinonia Farm is an intentional Christian community in southern Georgia which strives to be a “demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God.” Members attempt to "live the gospel of Jesus" through modeling their actions on the words and actions of Jesus. 

Founded in 1942, their efforts to live the gospel were a break with the prevailing culture of the time and were fiercely challenged by many citizens of Sumter County GA, many of whom attempted to destroy the farm and scare off its residents. Through the 1950s and early 60s, Koinonia remained a witness to nonviolence and racial equality as its members withstood firebombs, bullets, KKK rallies, death threats, property damage, excommunication from churches, and economic boycotts. Koinonia and its members suffered greatly. But Koinonia survived and continues operating today.

Some of the causes and ministries Koinonia has been involved in over the last 60+ years include civil rights, prison ministry, racial reconciliation, peace activism, early childhood education, youth and teen outreach, affordable housing, language training, sustainable agriculture, economic development, home repair, elders programs, and more. Today, Koinonia remains committed to treating all human beings with dignity and justice, choosing love over violence, sharing according to need, not greed, and stewardship of the land.

Current members of Koinonia Farms offer the following description of their work:

•  Koinonia Farm is a Christian community located in Americus, Ga. We strive to live a simple, peaceful, shared life and believe in the brother and sisterhood of all humankind. In its early existence, Koinonia’s very presence challenged racism, militarism, and materialism.

• Our commitment to racial equality brought bullets, bombs, and a boycott in the 1950s. We survived and have since given birth to outstanding organizations such as Habitat for Humanity International, Fuller Center for Housing, Jubilee Partners, Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, and many more.

• The Koinonia mission: We are Christians called to live together in intentional community sharing a life of prayer, work, study, service and fellowship. We seek to embody peacemaking, sustainability, and radical sharing. While honoring people of all backgrounds and faiths, we strive to demonstrate the way of Jesus as an alternative to materialism, militarism and racism.

• Most of all, Koinonia is an intentional Christian community striving to be a “demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God.” Members “preach” Jesus’ gospel through the way we live. We choose to model our shared life after the early Christian communities as described in the Acts of the Apostles, not to withdraw from the world but rather to serve God and humankind more fully.

Visit the KOINONIA website

A Brief Overview of the History of Koinonia.

The farm was founded in 1942 by two couples, Clarence and Florence Jordan and Martin and Mabel England, as a “demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God.” 

For them, this meant following the example of the first Christian communities as described in the Acts of the Apostles, amid the poverty and racism of the rural South.  Koinonia members divested themselves of personal wealth and joined a "common purse" economic system. 

They envisioned an interracial community where blacks and whites could live and work together in a spirit of partnership.

Based on their interpretation of the New Testament, Koinonia members committed to the following precepts:

1. Treat all human beings with dignity and justice
2. Choose love over violence
3. Share all possessions and live simply
4. Be stewards of the land and its natural resources

Other families joined, and visitors came to “serve a period of apprenticeship in developing community life on the teachings and principles of Jesus.” Koinonians, visitors, and neighbors farmed, worshipped and ate together, attended Bible studies and held summer youth camps.  In Koinonia's first year, curious neighbors visited England and Jordan to warn them that they were violating local customs by eating meals with their black day laborers. Other Sumter County residents criticized Koinonia for welcoming conscientious objectors during World War II (1941-45).
. 

Founding member Clarence Jordan held an undergraduate degree in agriculture from the University of Georgia and wanted to use his knowledge of scientific farming “to seek to conserve the soil, God’s holy earth” and to assist Koinonia’s neighbors, most of whom were African-American sharecroppers and tenant farmers. 

Jordan and fellow founding member Martin England were ordained ministers and professors. Jordan held a doctorate in New Testament Greek. Part of their vision for Koinonia was to offer training to African-American ministers living in the area. For the first few years of the Koinonia experiment, Jordan in particular was welcomed to preach and teach in local churches. Though the demands of farming in those early years did not allow time for formal training of others, Jordan used these visits to both black and white churches to offer guidance.

These practices were a break with the prevailing culture of Jim Crow-era Georgia, and were challenged by many citizens of Sumter County, most intensely during the 1950s, and with diminishing intensity for years thereafter.  In 1950 the Rehobeth Baptist Church, just a few miles north of Koinonia, voted to remove the names of six Koinonians from its membership roll because church members perceived that the Koinonians  were trying to integrate the church.


A boycott of the farm occurred during the mid-1950s. The local Chamber of Commerce met with the Full Members of The Farm to request that Koinonia sell its property and disband. The 1950s also saw acts of sabotage and threat such as dynamiting Koinonia's roadside produce stand, firing shots into the compound, and threatening phone calls and letters. 
The local Ku Klux Klan drove a 70+ car motorcade to the farm as an act of intimidation. Koinonia members discerned that their religious views called them to bear these acts nonviolently; members responded by writing editorials to the local newspaper clarifying the farm's position, maintaining an unarmed watch at the entrance to the community during the nights, and other acts of nonviolent witness.

As a way to survive in hostile surroundings, Koinonia members created a small mail-order catalog to sell their farm's pecans and peanuts around the world. The business's first slogan was "Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia!" The business evolved to include treats made in the farm's bakery. The Koinonia Catalog business continued after the boycott concluded, and still constitutes the largest source of earned income for Koinonia.

Koinonia: Birthplace of Habitat for Humanity

As the threats of physical violence dwindled in the late 1960s, Koinonia was at a crossroads. Local violence had tapered off, and now only two families were living on the farm, including the Jordans. The Koinonians found themselves searching for a renewed focus, unsure whether Koinonia's end had come, when Clarence received a brief note from Millard Fuller, asking “What do you have up your sleeve?”

Millard and Linda Fuller had spent a month at Koinonia several years earlier, shortly after the threat of a failed marriage caused the couple to recommit their lives to God and give away their wealth. Millard had been a millionaire businessman, and his enthusiasm seemed to inject a new spirit into the community. After a series of meetings with Millard and other friends of Koinonia, a new direction for Koinonia emerged.

Clarence Jordan and the others held a deep concern for their neighbors and noticed the poor quality of housing available to them. They initiated a project to help build decent, affordable homes. Changing its name from Koinonia Farm to Koinonia Partners, the community launched several innovative partnership programs, chief among them Koinonia Partnership Housing, which built affordable homes for low-income families living in shacks and dilapidated houses. Using volunteer labor and donations, Koinonia built 194 homes from 1969 to 1992, which families bought with 20-year, no-interest mortgages. Mortgage payments were placed in a revolving Fund for Humanity, which was then used to build more houses. With both rich and poor contributing capital to the Fund and building houses together, Clarence saw his vision of Partnership become a reality. Of the homes built, 62 houses sit on Koinonia's land, forming two neighborhoods that surround the central community area; the remaining houses are located in the towns of Americus and Plains.

Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity, talks about his years at  Koinonia Farm in this excerpt from Guideposts Magazine:

That day we also met the farm leader, Clarence Jordan, who had founded Koinonia in 1942. He told us how the interracial community had at first thrived by selling eggs and produce at a roadside stand until the Ku Klux Klan organized a boycott against its products and terrorized its residents during the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the time we arrived Koinonia had shrunk to just a handful of people.

From that visit on, Linda and I couldn't get Clarence Jordan's vision for a sharing Christian community off our minds. For the next few years I traveled and spoke extensively about the needs we had seen in Africa. I also helped to launch a $10 million fund-raising campaign for a small black church-related college in Mississippi. In June of 1968 we returned to live at Koinonia. We were slow in learning it but this was God's answer to our prayers.

The first thing we did with Clarence Jordan was to reorganize the farm under the name Koinonia Partners—partners because we would be in partnership with God and with one another. Our first order of business was to construct simple but serviceable homes on 42 lots we laid out on the farm property. These houses were intended for low-income families who were living in tar-paper shacks nearby.

Had any realtor looked at our plans for financing, he would have said we were crazy. We resolved that we would be guided by a Biblical principle laid down in Exodus 22:25. We would charge no interest on our mortgages and make no profit. Furthermore, we would have low monthly payments, spread out over 20 years. Payments would be plowed back into a fund to build more housing.

When we started Partnership Housing in 1968, we didn't have the money to build one single house. What did we do? We prayed about it. And, having prayed, we asked other people to help, and we started building on a shoestring. We took Jesus at His word—literally. And we prayed—literally—asking that the money would come in. And it did.

We finished building houses one at a time, and soon families who had spent their lives in shacks moved in. How touched I was to visit an elderly man in his new home and hear him tell me, "When it rains, I love to sit by the window and see everything all wet. I'm sittin' in here, dry, and it ain't rainin' on me."

Clarence Jordan died suddenly in 1969, but by then he had lived to see his dreams for Koinonia reborn. By 1972, our first Partnership Housing project, Koinonia Village, was nearly finished and we laid out sites for 32 new homes in another section.

[source:  http://www.guideposts.org/prayer/how-prayer-helped-millard-fuller-build-habitat-humanity ] 

Although Clarence Jordan died in 1969, just before the first house was completed, his vision continued, as other community members carried on his legacy. The Fullers remained at the Farm, guiding the first 4 years of Koinonia’s partnership housing program before moving to Africa for 3 years to establish a similar program abroad. In 1976, they returned to Americus and founded Habitat for Humanity International, now a worldwide housing ministry with affiliates in every state and in more than 50 countries. Modeled after Koinonia's original "partnership housing" program, Habitat builds houses with families in need, then sells the houses to the families at no profit and no interest. To date, Habitat for Humanity volunteers and homeowners have built more than 100,000 houses around the world.

The Koinonia spirit also led to the founding of other organizations such as 

• Jubilee Partners in Comer, GA (a community that welcomes refugees from war-torn countries), 
• New Hope House in Griffin, GA (assisting families with loved ones on death row, as well as advocating the abolition of the death penalty) and 
• The Prison & Jail Project in Americus, GA (an antiracist, grassroots organization which monitors courtrooms, prisons and jails in southwest Georgia).

 Koinonia became known as a place of “seed sowing,” giving life to organizations in the making, but equally and perhaps more importantly to countless individuals renewed and transformed by time on the farm. This legacy continues today: in 2005, the Fullers left Habitat for Humanity and founded The Fuller Center for Housing, which also seeks to create affordable housing solutions for impoverished families worldwide. Their first meeting was held at the Koinonia Community Outreach Center.

A Chronology of Koinonia Farm

Late 1940s	Interracial Bible studies for neighbors.
Summer 1943	The Tree House is the First building completed on Koinonia grounds, it was occupied until 1990.
Late 1940s-1953	Bible study - mainly for children. Housing and friendship offered to alcoholics and draftees.
1950	Jordan family and other Koinonian's excommunicated from Rehobath Southern Baptist Church for views on racial equality. 14 Adult residents.
1950-1953	Successful farm endeavor. Beginning of active resistance by the outside local community to Koinonia. First written pledge to the three principles and one another in community. Increasing numbers of residents and volunteers.
1953	Beginning of youth clubs. Will & Margaret Wittkamper arrive.
1954	School desegregation suit, increased hostility. Drought brings lower yields and first irrigation system.
1955	Plot purchased on Route 19S, and a produce stand is built. Interracial summer camp held.
May 1956	Clarence signs as alumnus sponsor of two black college students.
June 1956	Health Department closes summer camp. Boycott of Koinonia products by local business community begins - continues until the mid-1960s.
July 1956	Produce stand is attacked.
Nov 1956	Shots fired into Koinonia homes from highway. Row crop farming suspended.
Jan 14, 1957	Produce stand bombed and destroyed. Clarence writes to Pres. Eisenhower. Many leave to move north for safety, especially children.
Feb 1957	Klu Klux Klan holds a rally and drives to Koinonia to threaten more violence unless farm is sold. Clarence Jordan receives letter of support from Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mar 1957	Grand Jury investigation held.
Apr 1957	Mail-order business begins with the slogan "Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia." On Easter Eve, while Dorothy Day and another member of the community did sentry duty at the entrance gate, their parked station wagon was peppered with shot from a shotgun. Fortunately no one was injured.
May 1957	Business of local merchant who sold to Koinonia bombed. White citizens ask Clarence to leave the county.
1958	5 to 8 people remain. Clarence records a tape telling the Koinonia story.
1960	Wittkampers sue to have children admitted into Americus High School.
1962	Plot on Route 19S sold.
1963	Only 4 adults remain on the farm. Clarence begins translating the New Testament directly from Greek into contemporary southern dialect.
1964	Civil Rights Act