For a boy like Greg, Koinonia looked as fun as an endless summer vacation. There were cows and pigs, tractors and trucks, wide-open pastures and wooded creek bottoms that begged to be explored. His Little Lord Fauntleroy days were behind him, as the matching brown suits went into a closet, rarely to be seen again. Now he was in a place where Huckleberry Finn would have felt at ease, a place where the grown-ups held their own worship services and didn’t seem to care whether their children came to Sunday school barefoot. “It felt like we had gone to another planet,” he said.
The planet had its perils. As Greg got to know the commune’s children, he started hearing stories about run-ins between residents of the farm and some of the locals—things that had happened in church or in town. He was too young to comprehend where the tension came from, but he grasped its consequences as readily as a boy learns not to poke at a nest of rattlesnakes. Some people, it seemed, did not like Koinonia.
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When the Wittkampers arrived, Koinonia was barely a decade old and beginning to come into its own as an experiment in Christian community. The farm occupied eleven hundred acres nine miles southwest of Americus, the seat of Sumter County, a history-haunted slice of the Peach State best known as the site of the infamous Andersonville prison camp, where nearly thirteen thousand Union soldiers died of illness, exposure, and starvation during the Civil War. At the heart of the property, facing Georgia Highway 49, sat a cluster of rustic cinder-block and frame buildings that might have passed for a World War II military encampment. About sixty people lived there—mostly ministers and missionaries, their spouses and children—in simple cottages and cramped apartments a short walk from the barns, cornfields, and henhouses where they earned their sustenance. The residents worked together, worshipped together, and ate together every day at noon when they were summoned by a clanging dinner bell. In essence, the Wittkampers were becoming part of a large, extended family of religious dissidents and principled misfits.
The Wittkamper family shortly before they moved to Koinonia:
(from left) Billy, Margaret, David, Greg, Will. Courtesy of Greg Wittkamper
The leader of the fellowship, in fact if not title, was a Southern Baptist minister named Clarence Jordan. He had conceived the community and persuaded most of its members, including Will Wittkamper, to come. It was easy to fall under his sway. Clarence was an imposing fellow who stood six foot two and had a paunch that testified to his love of country cooking. He may have sounded like a typical Baptist preacher, with his down-home drawl and his endless repertoire of parables and Bible verses, usually dispensed with folksy charm and a sparkle in the eye, but this was no Main Street minister. He espoused radical ideas about some of the region’s defining verities, a nonconforming worldview that took shape when he was a boy. Greg liked him instantly and felt safe and enlivened in his presence.
Clarence Jordan. Courtesy of Leonard Jordan
Clarence, as even the kids called him, came from a prominent family in Talbotton, a county seat in middle Georgia, where his father ran a bank and a general store. The Jordans (the name rhymes with burden, not the river in the Holy Land) had seven offspring, and Clarence, the middle child, was considered the contrary one. He read. He questioned. He argued. They called him Grump.
His conscience awakened, he explained years later, because of a disparity that troubled him. At the Baptist church the Jordans attended, his Sunday school class sang about Jesus loving the little children of the world, “red and yellow, black and white,” but Clarence could see that black people weren’t precious in the eyes of most white folks. Walking to and from school every day, he passed the county prison camp, where inmates were shackled and put to work on a chain gang. “I stopped and made friends with them,” he recalled. “They were almost all of them black men, but they seemed more alive, more genuinely human, than the people I met in church.” One August night when he was twelve, Clarence heard one of the prisoners being whipped. “His agonizing groans woke me up. It nearly tore me to pieces.” Even more unsettling was the knowledge that the warden of the chain gang, the man doing the whipping, was a member of the church choir. During a revival that week, he had impressed everyone with his spirited singing of the hymn “Love Lifted Me.”
As he neared the end of high school, Clarence considered becoming a lawyer so he could help secure justice for the downtrodden of the South. He changed his mind and enrolled in the agriculture school at the University of Georgia, hoping to improve conditions for the rural poor by promoting scientific farming methods. During his senior year, he decided that an ag degree wasn’t enough, that if he really wanted to better the world, he should become a minister. His understanding of what his faith demanded continued to deepen. Clarence had been training as a cavalry officer in the ROTC since he had begun college. Shortly after he graduated in 1933, he reported for summer camp and experienced an epiphany while he was perched atop a horse, sword in hand, poised to attack a formation of cardboard dummies. He couldn’t do it. He kept thinking about the fifth chapter of Matthew—“love your enemies”—and resigned his commission on the spot.
That fall, Clarence entered the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and found his life’s calling as well as his life partner. He met Florence Kroeger, a blonde, blue-eyed businessman’s daughter, in the library where she was working and married her after completing his master’s degree. He took a job directing an inner-city ministry but stayed at the seminary for a doctorate, studying the New Testament in its original Greek so he could “get it fresh from the stream,” as he put it, and understand the source of his religion. One word seized his imagination: koinonia. It appears in the scriptures twenty times and translates into English as a communion or a fellowship (which is why a smattering of churches use koinonia in their names). In the second chapter of the book of Acts, the word is used to describe a community of early Christians who sold their possessions, shared their resources, and lived together in unity. That’s what Clarence wanted. He fixed on the idea of forming a koinonia in the rural South where a band of believers could set an example for cooperative living, racial harmony, and better agricultural practices.
While he was finishing graduate school, Clarence befriended a minister from South Carolina who was thinking along the same lines. Martin England was back from Burma, where he had been serving as a Baptist missionary with his wife, Mabel, until the outbreak of World War II forced them to leave. He and Clarence talked about forming a koinonia for months and began scouting rural properties in central Alabama, where the demographics and history seemed fertile for their venture. They weren’t far into the search when one of Clarence’s brothers turned their attention to Sumter County, Georgia, sixty miles south of Talbotton, where he knew of a farm available for the reasonable price of $8,000. Clarence and Martin inspected the place and loved it. As they were beginning to raise funds, a contractor from Louisville who had supported Clarence’s mission work handed them a $2,500 check for the down payment. No one seemed to mind that the money came from profits the benefactor had earned building facilities for the US Army.
The two ministers moved onto the property in November 1942, leaving their wives and young children behind for a time as they formally established Koinonia Farm. They had their hands full; the place was practically derelict. About a fourth of the gently rolling terrain was taken up by worn-out cotton fields that were deeply rutted, the topsoil eroded in places to hard red clay. The rest was pasture, scrubby pine woods, and swampy bottomland. Fences were down. Equipment was in disrepair. The barn was falling in. There were three tenant shacks and a farmhouse that was barely habitable. The men moved into a back room and started breaking ground for a winter garden. Once, when their mule team escaped the barn, they took turns hitching themselves to a plow. “I believe I’ll make a better farmer than mule,” Clarence wrote his wife. When Florence came with their two children the following spring, she could see that their n
ew life in Georgia was going to be challenging. “I mean, it was a sorry place,” she said. “There was no running water—really primitive. But it had potential.”
The newcomers got busy. They repaired fences and terraced the fields. They planted peanuts and grain and set out fruit and nut trees. They managed to find building materials in the midst of wartime rationing and constructed new housing. They pooled their finances and instituted a communal system. After a couple of years, the Englands were recalled to missionary service overseas, but others heard about Koinonia and came to take their place: several college students, a conscientious objector, a minister and his family. Before long, there were a dozen people living on the farm.
One of the families who arrived during the late 1940s grew particularly close to the Wittkampers later: Conrad and Ora Browne and their children. Con was a midwesterner and had been a conscientious objector like Will, but in World War II, when he was forced to participate in risky military tests exposing him to diseases and exploring how much cold a person could endure. He went to divinity school at the University of Chicago and was a recently ordained Baptist minister when he heard Clarence speak at a conference. Utterly captivated, he persuaded his wife, a nurse, to give Koinonia a try, even though neither of them knew the first thing about farming. “I was a real tenderfoot, slight and bespectacled, with no upper-body strength,” Con said. “I’d barely cut a lawn. I’m sure Clarence heaved a sigh of relief when we came.”
Unlike some religious communities, Koinonia never intended to cloister itself from the outside world. Clarence envisioned it as a rural cousin of the urban ministries he knew, reaching out to improve the lives of its neighbors materially and spiritually. To that end, he introduced himself to area farmers and learned from them as he imparted modern methods from the agriculture school. He organized classes on fertilizer and soil conservation. The community started a “cow library,” in which poor families could borrow a cow, return her when she was milked out, and then borrow another one. There was a vacation Bible school for children and Bible studies and hymn singings for adults.
The most successful outreach program was the farm’s egg and poultry business. Clarence noticed that hens in southwest Georgia didn’t produce many eggs, so he researched the matter and introduced another breed that could tolerate the heat better. Other farmers started keeping hens, and Koinonia sold their eggs in a cooperative marketing arrangement that Con took charge of. The enterprise landed Clarence on the cover of The Southeastern Poultryman magazine—a minister with a different kind of flock.
Funny thing about those eggs: they came in cartons with a logo that showed two hands—one white, one black—clasping in friendship. In segregated Sumter County, that raised a few eyebrows.
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Clarence Jordan liked to call Koinonia “a demonstration plot for the kingdom.” As long as he was demonstrating something that had to do with farming, people around Americus usually didn’t object to the communal outlier in their midst. But Clarence’s vision was much broader than agriculture. He wanted the fellowship to exemplify Christian brotherhood, to light a candle in a darkened room, and he knew very well that doing so might antagonize some of their neighbors. “It scared the devil out of us to think of going against southern traditions,” he admitted. “White men could disappear as easily as blacks. But were we going to be obedient or disobedient?”
The tension between conviction and custom materialized early on when Koinonia hired a black man to help work the farm. Rather than make him eat by himself on the back stoop, as most people in rural Georgia would have done, he was welcomed to take his midday meal with the others. After word got around that the new people were mixing races at the dining table, a group of men stopped by to explain the way things worked in their part of the world.
“We’re from the Ku Klux Klan,” their leader told Clarence, “and we’re here to tell you we don’t allow the sun to set on anybody who eats with niggers.”
Clarence thought a minute and then broke into a grin. “I’m a Baptist preacher and I just graduated from the Southern Baptist seminary. I’ve heard about people who had power over the sun, but I never hoped to meet one.”
The men went away scratching their heads. Other matters weren’t as easily defused with humor.
Koinonia noticed that the county didn’t provide school buses for black children during the war, so the community used some of its gas rationing stamps to transport them to classes. That didn’t sit well with local farmers who wanted young blacks to work their fields, not hold down school desks. One man was so exasperated that he wrote a letter to Clarence’s father in Talbotton, informing him that his son was stirring things up. Mr. Jordan was elderly and infirm, and Clarence was so riled by the intrusion that he drove to town and confronted the letter writer. “I try to follow Jesus, and he has taught me to love my enemies, but I don’t see how I can do that in this case,” Clarence told him. If he ever bothered his father again, he warned, “I’ll just have to ask Jesus to excuse me for about fifteen minutes while I beat the hell out of you.”
The threat of fisticuffs swung both ways. Around the time Clarence was raising his hackles, a friend of his from the Baptist Student Union at the university, D. B. Nicholson, wrote Mr. Jordan about the reception his son was getting in Sumter County. While many appreciated his efforts to improve agriculture, they also felt he was “trying to go too fast in bucking the traditions of the community.” Nicholson said the Jordans had already been snubbed by not being invited to a barbecue that everyone else had been invited to. He knew of one school board member who refused to speak with Clarence because he was afraid he might lose his temper and take a swing at him.
The most hurtful confrontation between Koinonia and its neighbors came, inevitably, in a house of God. Soon after they moved to Sumter County, the Jordans became members of a small church on the road to Americus, Rehoboth Baptist. Florence led a Sunday school class while Clarence sometimes preached or led songs. Others from the farm joined the choir, and a young couple got married there.
As Koinonia’s views on race and pacifism became more widely known, some church members began to resent people from the commune. A group of deacons finally asked them to stop coming. They ignored the request and kept showing up. The incident that caused the final rift was almost comical. One Sunday morning in 1950, Con Browne went to church with a college student who was visiting from India and wanted to witness a Protestant worship service. Members took one look at his dark skin and thought Koinonia was trying to integrate their church. A delegation promptly visited the farm and told Clarence and the others not to return. Then a letter arrived announcing a congregational meeting to decide whether to strike them from the membership rolls. The resolution, which charged Koinonia with “advocating views and practices contrary to other members,” passed by a wide margin—although not without some angst. Florence Jordan, who attended the meeting, heard weeping in the pews.
One of the deacons came to see Clarence after the vote to confess that he felt awful about what had happened. As Clarence told the story, the deacon couldn’t sleep and kept imagining a choir singing “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” “Brother Jordan, I was there,” he said. “And worse than that, I was helping do it.” He asked for forgiveness.
Clarence extended his hand. “Man, I grew up in this section. I know how people feel about it. I forgave you before it ever happened.”
When the deacon asked whether God would forgive him, Clarence said he didn’t know, that was between him and his maker. It was the first encounter in a pattern that would become familiar in the coming years: people expressing sympathy for Koinonia in private but lacking the courage to say anything in public.
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Will Wittkamper was twenty years older than Clarence Jordan and came from a different part of the country and a different religious background. But he had traveled a similar spiritual path—
albeit his was rockier—and it was that like-mindedness that eventually drew the two together and led Greg and his family to Georgia.
Will had been a pacifist since he grew up on a farm in the flat corn country of central Indiana. He was in his midtwenties when the United States entered the First World War and his draft notice came. After he refused to report for induction, the sheriff found him in a field cutting oats and arrested him. Will expected to die in prison or be executed and asked the authorities to make sure his body was returned home. The local newspaper, the Tipton Times, interviewed the detainee and pronounced him “mentally off on religious matters.” Will did little to dispel the notion. “I have always been a queer fellow, a freak and perhaps a fool for what I have done,” he told the reporter. “I am sorry but my religion stands above all to me.”
Will was taken to Camp Taylor in Kentucky and put to work busting rocks into gravel with a sledgehammer. Released after the war, he returned to Indiana and enrolled at Butler University and then continued his studies at a Disciples of Christ seminary in Indianapolis. He lived with his parents for years after college, helping to run the farm, preaching and teaching school on the side. He left for a time, during the early days of the Depression, to join a religious community that was trying to get off the ground in Colorado, but a bank foreclosed on the land and the effort failed. Will didn’t have much use for capitalism after that. He was well into his forties when he departed home for good, in 1938, to become pastor of a Disciples church near El Paso, Texas.
It was there that he met his wife, Margaret Gregory, a Methodist missionary assigned to a community house ministering to Mexicans on the Texas side of the border. She came from Norfolk, Virginia, where she had sold Avon products and took other jobs to help support her seamstress mother and her four brothers after her father died. Like Will, she felt a spiritual calling at an early age and held similar convictions about war and brotherhood. Once, when she was attending Ferrum College in Virginia, she asked her mother whether she could bring a young woman home for semester break. Mrs. Gregory was alarmed when the friend turned out to be a light-skinned black woman.
The Class of '65 Page 2
