merefaith: two friends on pilgrimage

The second week at Koinonia upped the workload and we began to get acclimated to full days on the job and in the sun. We interns replaced part of the bakery roof, dug trenches, and worked on irrigation in the pecan orchards. Tuesday saw some welcome rain for farmers in the area and we spent the day baking bread and bagging pecan and peanut products for sale. Unfortunately, Tuesday was also the day that we had originally scheduled to get up at 5 am so that we could work on the roof before it got too hot and then quit after lunch. But this is a farm and we must accept that our work remains ever at the mercy of nature's whims.

Spiritually, I believe that my week has been beneficial in pushing me to more prayerfully seek out my own willingness to serve as God calls. This Wednesday evening I went with a community member to a church in town for a viewing and discussion on the movie “Hotel Rwanda.” The discussion terribly frustrated me, for when the moderator asked what our responses should be in situations like this, the other people gave answers not as Christians, but as Americans. “Write our ambassador to the UN” and such. The discussion evolved to talk about the character of “our society” (again, the American society, not the global Christian fellowship) and concerns about security. Nothing was said about how we live out the Gospel as the Church until I spoke. I do believe that the Christian response to a situation like Rwanda is different, however. It cannot be intervention by force of arms, but the kind of risky immersion that allows for witness by word and deed to the love that is stronger than all fear and hatred. Such immersion is at the heart of groups like the Christian Peacemaker Teams, Word Made Flesh, and a number of intentional communities. But later that night I concluded that it would be a lot harder to call congregations to such an openness of discipleship if I had not myself abandoned comfort or security in pursuit of faithfulness. Last summer I thought about what it would be like, say, to run off to Lebanon. Perhaps this summer God may begin showing the way to the next step after the mere entertaining of ideas.

This openness may be the end result of what Clarence Jordan called “incarnational evangelism.” For Clarence, the Incarnation made good news a fact, and Pentecost made the Church the effective visible body through which Jesus operates in the world today. Commenting on 1 John in a sermon, Jordan asked,

How can you evangelize except from the standpoint of the incarnation? How can you go and say to people, “That which we would like to know – that we declare unto you. That which is not a reality among us, we declare unto you – a brotherhood which we cannot practice.” How dare we preach, how dare we evangelize, from any standpoint except that of the incarnation!

In other words, if there is to be genuine evangelism, the Christian must fully embrace that which we so readily excuse through misuse of “metaphor” and “context.” These are both important for appropriately understanding the Bible, but Clarence knew full well that they create a sanitized and harmless Christianity when they make discipleship less than complete. But perhaps the greater danger, and the greater tragedy, comes not from explaining away such commands as “love your enemies” or “go,” but knowing exactly what they say and never taking up their challenge.

The tragedy of Rwanda only deepens for followers of Jesus Christ when we hear that 80% of the country in 1994 was Christian by profession. Before the genocide that land was considered a great success story of missions. After the genocide it became a monument to the failure of shallow, numbers-driven revivalism. It is tempting to blame the missionaries, but in reality they failed to truly convert Rwanda because they came from churches that themselves needed new conversions. The way forward is both simple and difficult – it is to practice the brotherhood we preach and live the real faith which, as Clarence Jordan put it, “is not belief in spite of evidence but a life in scorn of the consequences.” And for that to happen evangelism will always begin with ourselves.

Labels: Koinonia

Posted by Chris Schelin at Sunday, June 17, 2007 | Permalink | Comments

I have now spent about half a week getting acquainted with the current work and community life of Koinonia Farm and there is still plenty of orientation to go. Since Monday each day has been divided in two, with half of it consisting of a a sit-down introduction to some aspects of Koinonia and the other half devoted to working in one particular area. So far we have helped with administration, the bakery, and the actual farmland. Over the remaining two days the interns will assist with maintenance and with the Koinonia Community Outreach Center.

First and foremost I should explain more about the history and philosophy of Koinonia. It all started with the vision of Clarence Jordan (pronounced “jer-den”), a Georgia native who studied agriculture before sensing a call to ministry and earning a PhD in Greek New Testament at the Southern Baptist Seminary. Clarence quickly came to recognize the “radical” nature of the Gospel when it is fully lived out, and sought to found a Christian community with a way of life that would stand as an alternative to materialism, racism, and militarism. He and his wife, together with another fairly young couple, bought some neglected land and established Koinonia in 1942.

Clarence understood Jesus Christ as calling for “partners” to join in the Kingdom of God, or, as Clarence called it, the “God Movement.” Deep in the segregated South this partnership would transgress social codes as Koinonia deliberately opened the door to African-Americans for community membership and made sure they received equal financial standing. For the first ten years or so the surrounding population in Sumter County viewed Clarence and Koinonia as weird but mostly harmless. Perhaps the most ardent segregationists simply refused to believe that black and white sat together at the dinner table on a Georgia farm.

After Brown vs. Topeka in 1954, however, traditionalist whites reacted forcefully and violently to any threat to their “cherished way of life,” while others accused Koinonia of being Communist. The KKK rallied in Sumter County and motorcaded to Koinonia with 90 cars, hoping to intimidate Clarence into accepting a very low offer for the farm and leave. Koinonia's roadside produce stands were firebombed and drive-by gunshots barely missed the heads of children inside the farm homes. Beginning in the late 1950s a local economic boycott kept the community on the verge of annihilation for nearly a decade, and one Americus merchant who dared to sell to the farm lost his store to a bomb.

During the 60s Millard and Linda Fuller came to stay at Koinonia and an idea suggested by Clarence became the catalyst for their creation of Habitat for Humanity, which is now headquartered in downtown Americus, Georgia. Jordan passed away in 1969 but the farm carried on. During the 1990s the community became organized more like a corporation and was seen by the rest of the county as a kind of social service agency. The members now consider that a regrettable period and are striving to reaffirm Koinonia as a spiritually-centered community that can be, in Clarence's words, “a demonstration plot for the God Movement.”

Koinonia will identify itself as an “intentional Christian community.” The phrase sounds unusual when one first hears it – most people intend community in one way or another, and members of a church choose to be there on purpose. This term tries to describe a community made up of people self-consciously seeking to live in close connection and proximity, share resources, disciple and enable one another, eat and fellowship together frequently, and model a way of life that pushes back against consumerism and individualism. Imagine a monastery with both genders and no celibacy requirement, but still possessing common work, vision, and living space. The devaluation of money is still prominent – one Koinonian has told me that at least technically she lives below poverty level. The similarities to the old orders are strong enough that the current movement of intentional communities is sometimes dubbed “the new monasticism.” Now the Church has periodically seen efforts at renewal take the form of intentional communities: the Jerusalem Church in Acts 2, the original monastic orders, the Bruderhofs and Hutterite communities of Germanic Europe, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's secret Finkenwalde seminary in Nazi Germany. At 65 years of age Koinonia happens to be a kind of forerunner to this latest effort at restoring authentic community.

So this is some of the history and the vision that drew me to Koinonia and that inspires its permanent members. I look forward to the regular rhythms of daily prayer, the spiritual companionship, and (I hope) even the hard work! I also especially hope that the next few months will be a time of some reflection and insight that I can take with me into pastoral ministry as I seek to help churches live out faithfulness to the gospel through communion, peace, and discipleship.

Labels: Koinonia

Posted by Chris Schelin at Wednesday, June 06, 2007 | Permalink | Comments

I have arrived at the Koinonia community, Clarence Jordan's 65-year old Christian farm cooperative in southern Georgia. So far my internship has involved weeding, eating, and destroying worthless old paper records. Plus there was the behind-the-scenes tour, the hornet sting on my pinkie toe in my first few minutes outside after unpacking, and the numerous mosquito bites, fire ant bites, briar thorn pricks, and other elements of God's green, good, and sometime annoying creation. What shall become of this city boy in the red clay? Stay tuned!

Posted by Chris Schelin at Monday, June 04, 2007 | Permalink | Comments

I have arrived at the Koinonia community, Clarence Jordan's 65-year old Christian farm cooperative in southern Georgia. So far my internship has involved weeding, eating, and destroying worthless old paper records. Plus there was the behind-the-scenes tour, the hornet sting on my pinkie toe in my first few minutes outside after unpacking, and the numerous mosquito bites, fire ant bites, briar thorn pricks, and other elements of God's green, good, and sometime annoying creation. What shall become of this city boy in the red clay? Stay tuned!

Labels: Koinonia

Posted by Chris Schelin at Monday, June 04, 2007 | Permalink | Comments

I'm currently reading a book entitled _Phenomenology of Language_. It is a most interesting study on what language as a phenomenon is and how it is used to express meaning. It's given rise to a number of questions in my mind.

Language, as Dr. Kwant puts it, and I am inclined to agree, is the way in which two parties express a reality to each other. For example, when I say the sentence "Eric and Craig are sharing a bottle of wine and conversing." I am using those words to express an external reality. Those words can be said in different ways, or even use different words, or even use different languages (verbal or not), but the reality is the same, that we are drinking wine and talking with each other. Simply put, the meaning is not dependent on the language used to describe the reality. Perhaps a better example would be in the field of science in terms of perhaps describing the structure of a human toe nail cell (something I know nothing about). The reality is external and not dependent upon the language, in that there is a nucleus, mitochondria, etc within the cell and also in describing the interaction of the internal parts of the cells. This can be seen through the verifiability of the facts by different people.

So if we take the above as true, that things have meanings outside of their language, the way of describing the reality for the purpose of expressing the meaning (at this point I do want to say that I think it is very possible and often the case that language itself can import meaning into the situation, if for no other reason than that there are symbols. But I do not feel that this is necessarily always the case, as in saying that "the table is made of wood."). If there is an underlying meaning. A reality which we are attempting to describe with language, then what does it mean for things to have meaning in and of themselves, for the reality to exist without external interpretation? Is the reality always so for the situation at hand (will the toe nail cell have a nucleus regardless of my saying it does?)? What does it mean for meaning to be not dependent upon the perceiver or interactor?

I want to say that if the meaning is external to the viewer, then there is a certain rigidity to the world and that even if we describe something differently or contrary to what we experience, etc, then there is a certain truth present that transcends the individual. I do not want to go as far as saying that it says that there is absolute truth as a result of this yet, but what does it mean to say that there is meaning regardless of us?

Posted by Craig Baker at Sunday, June 03, 2007 | Permalink | Comments