More Koinonia

Right at the moment I am loving Koinonia enough to want to move it, or at least to wish that there was something like this closer to me. I'm having amazingly stimulating conversations with people and am just delighted to find that people really run across the theological spectrum here--from pretty solidly Evangelical (hell, atonement theology, the whole bit) to very liberal (me--Bible not innerant, no hell, etc.). What I find fascinating about the New Monasticism Movement is just how theologically diverse it is. One the one hand you can find queer Catholic anti-nuke anarchist activists like I did at Trinity House and on the other you can find people who quote Bible verses at length, preach against premarital sex, and wonder if I might be headed for hell because I don't think the question of Christ's divinity really matters all that much. But both of these people are living the same sort of life--renouncing material goods, embracing non-violence in thought, word, and deed, hating the way the U.S. has become so materialistic and imperialistic. They're both seeking to live how Christ lived, to take him seriously in his call to sell all possessions and give to the poor and follow him. They live lives of simplicity and generosity in community. I spent the afternoon (in 90+ degree humid weather) trying to dig fence posts (seriously not my calling in life) and talking to said Evangelical and just LOVING it...finding in him such a deep thirst for understanding who God is and how to live like Christ, such a deep desire for love and peace, that I felt real respect and honest interest from him as I talked about my different understanding of faith. I felt no hostility or judgment. People here seem to be finding a way to live in community (with lots of squabbles and problems but also lots of love and joy) alongside those with very different viewpoints but joined around the figure of Christ and this radical way of living that Christ represents--a way of love and peace and justice and hope. My Evangelical friend (though I'm not sure how he would identify--his theology struck me as solidly Conservative Evangelical but I imagine he might object to the label) says he's trying to figure out what it means to live as a citizen of the Kingdom of God, and that seemed like a great description to me of what I've seen in my travels so far--people who want to say that there's another way of being, another way of living that neither the U.S. nor the church has figured out. They want to say that there is a higher reality that can permeate this one and help us to found communities based on real love for one other, based on sharing what we have with one another, based on caring for the poor and the oppressed. Both communities I've been to draw heavily on the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain to inform their way of living, and that seems to cut across what might otherwise be insurmountable theological and political difference and bring Republicans and Anarchists and Radical Leftists and Evangelicals and liberal Episcopals and agnostics together in a way of being together and loving together.

I've also been learning more about the history of Koinonia. And WOW. Wow. I wish this story were told more. It's such a moving part of the civil rights movement. I can't possibly do it justice, and plan to buy the documentary I watched recently to share with people when I get home, but here are a few highlights: Clarence Jordan was a Southern Baptist preacher in Georgia who had gone to school in agriculture out of a desire to help poor sharecroppers in the South learn to better utilize the land and move out of poverty. He became a pacifist early on as a result of his study of the life of Jesus, and after getting his doctorate in Greek and New Testament became convinced that the concept of Koinonia (meaning having all in common) that is often addressed in the NT was essential to Christian living. In 1942, horrified by the brutal racism and poverty around him, he decided to start a cooperative farm where blacks and whites would work alongside one another, earning the same wage, and having all in common. They would learn together the best agricultural practices and support one another and live off of the land, selling off surplus to support the farm. So, in 1942 in the depths of the rural south, this white Southern Baptist preacher with a PhD in Greek and New Testament starts a farm/pacifist interracial Christian community--years and years before the civil rights movement really began and years before segregation would end. I LOVE it--this white southern guy studies his Bible and concludes that he's supposed to live another way and so he just does it. He defined faith not as the ability to believe in things with little evidence (that's foolishness, he says), but rather as the ability to live without fear of the consequences.

And of course there were consequences. Though the farm went on with relatively little resistance for a few years, trouble began when white Koinonia members started bringing people of color into their white churches. Pretty quickly all members of Koinonia were barred from nearby Rehoboth Sounthern Baptist (Clarence had been banned previously for his views on racial equality and pacifism). The white children of Koinonia were banned from local schools for fear that they would corrupt the morals of the other children. When a court forced the schools to let the children in, the children were beaten, ostracized, and taunted for their four years there. I saw several interviews with them that reminded me of the experience of the Little Rock Nine, some of the first African-American students to integrate an Arkansas public school. The farm was targeted by the KKK, and families often had to hide under beds as bullets came through the walls. Nobody would buy or sell from Koinonia, but eventually the story of Koinonia got out and support came in from elsewhere. Some members of the community were evacuated out of fear for their safety, but many people refused to leave, saying they would rather die than back down and stop living the way they believed Christ called them to live. The farm and its way of life--blacks and whites living, working, and worshipping alongside one another and caring for the poor and needy in surrounding communities--continued, and eventually as racial violence died down and poverty and the housing crisis became pressing local concerns, the community became the birth place of Habitat for Humanity. Clarence Jordan died at 57 (can't remember the date) of cardiac arrest but the farm continues. The community who live here keep Jordan's legacy alive and study his writings regularly, seeking to live like Christ and continuing on Jordan's vision. Now, though, the peace and justice focus is less a community focus and more something individuals do in their own ways. Still, though, they seek to embody a different way of being that seeks out peace and justice for all people. What I'm most moved by in the story of Koinonia is that before the culture around him had begun to shift at all, he just started to live as he believed Christ called him to. He just started something new. He thought about what the kingdom of God should be and sought to help bring it to earth. And he did. He created a space in the deep, deep south where whites and blacks lived in harmony and love with one another long before it was acceptable or even legal to do so. When he began the farm, he an idealistic view of what might happen and how it might be received and was deeply pained by the truly violent, hateful reaction he got, but that didn't cause anything to change for him. Instead he and the other whites who were a part of the farm chose to give up their privelege--chose to give up their option to be safe, to not feel the affects of racism, to not be in harms way--in order to live with and love their black brothers and sisters. I think this might be a viable model for those of us who are white and privileged as we think about social change. I may not be able to understand a truly oppressed person's world enough to come up with a viable model to "fix" it (nor is it morally ok for me to seek to come in and do so), but I can choose to enter into community with those who are most disadvantaged in my world, to seek to live with them and share with them, to give up the comfort I get to experience from being distant, unaware, white. I can choose to be in community with the homeless like those at Trinity House do, really getting to know them and care about them and share life with them, or perhaps it's migrants or LGBTQ people...But what I love about what Jordan did is that it was so, so radical and it showed the possibility of another way of being to a world that didn't believe that white-black communities could or should exist. All the work that was done (and is still being done) in the civil rights movement to change laws was absolutely necessary, but even before any of those successes happened, Jordan chose to live as Christ would have him live. Often I feel like the structure has to change for any real progress to happen, and of course that's the ultimate goal, but I need to be reminded that I can live differently even in the midst of unjust world, and, in fact, that is precisely what Christ calls me to--not just to work to change the world, but, in fact, to begin that new world right here and right now, being a peace-maker, being a citizen of the kingdom of God here on earth where the love of Christ reigns--this topsy-turvy kingdom where the first is last and the last is first, where the persecuted and the oppressed are now the happy, where the rich give up everything to gain their souls, where the most despised inherit the earth, where violence and division and hatred have no place.