During the height of racial tension in mid-20th century America, one unique experiment near Americus, Georgia, offered the nation a remarkable picture of Christian community in radical contrast to the culture of segregation. The name of this experiment was Koinonia, a 400-acre farm organized in 1942 by Clarence Jordan alongside his wife and like-minded friends with the hope of modeling how to implement a first-century vision of Christian living into a 20th-century context. Although the Koinonia farm — together with his popular book series on The Cotton Patch Gospel — earned widespread attention for Jordan, the foundations of his successful ministry can be traced back to his student days at Southern Seminary.
Jordan arrived in Louisville in the fall of 1933 with an urge to preach and depleted financial resources due to the Great Depression. Measuring himself against his student peers, the agrarian-trained Georgian sensed his appearance inadequate, noting in his journal, “At first I mistook the students for professors. Everyone looked so distinguished I thought surely he must be a prof.” Described by his peer Dale Moody as a real-life approximation of the “L’il Abner” comic character, Jordan promptly channeled his cultural uneasiness into studious dedication, with particular attention to New Testament Greek. He gained such a proficiency in the language that he became a tutor in assisting other students and earned his Ph.D. in 1939 with a thesis titled “The Meaning of THANATOS and NEKROS in the Epistles of Paul.”
In the midst of his scholarship, Jordan found time to practice an active ministry, as well as build meaningful relationships. In 1936, he married Florence Kroeger, an assistant at the library. Clarence worked various jobs in his early student days, eventually serving part-time pastorates in five Kentucky churches. During his doctoral studies, he taught English New Testament to African American students at Simmons University and invited some of his students to lead dormitory prayer meetings in Mullins Hall. Cultural pressure forbade allowing these students to participate in meals at the seminary dining hall, so the Jordans hosted suppers in their own apartment.
Clarence’s most influential ministry opportunity in Louisville came through his involvement in the Long Run Baptist Association. Working primarily in the city’s West End, Jordan ministered in a dangerous and impoverished context beyond the gaze from most white Americans, and he developed rapports with various African-American churches. He received a promotion to the association’s full-time superintendent of city missions in 1940, a position which took him out of the immediate context of the inner city, much to his disappointment. In 1941, the Union Gospel Mission — one of the city’s most notable rescue missions since its establishment in 1885 — became an official entity of the Long Run Association under Jordan’s administration.
Then headquartered at First and Jefferson Street, the Union Gospel Mission had a strategic ministry location in area known as the Haymarket district, surrounded by a three-block radius of bars, night clubs, gambling halls, pornography, and prostitution. Jordan recruited Henlee Barnette — future Baptist ethicist-in-training at Southern Seminary — to pastor the mission while he continued to lead through administration, encouragement, and evangelism until his departure from Louisville in 1942 to plant his Koinonia farm.
Jordan’s interpretation of the Gospels and Acts compelled him to live a lifestyle that many of his academic and ministerial peers considered radical and idealistic, perhaps too impractical for any implementation in society. Ultimately, his desire for an approximate replication of the early Christian communities led him away from his work in Louisville so that he might have more freedom to practice his ideals. Nevertheless, his contemporary critics certainly admired his passion; SBTS missions professor H. Cornell Goerner surmised: “I can never quite get away from the gnawing suspicion that, if enough of us would agree to create and live consistently within a true New Testament Koinonia, we could make it work, and it would change the world!”
The life of Clarence Jordan was a one of remarkable boldness. Though current generations of seminaries may not concur with all his hermeneutical conclusions, many student ministers can receive instruction from his ministerial passion for his local context. More information on Clarence Jordan and the Union Gospel Mission can be viewed at the Archives & Special Collections office within the James P. Boyce Centennial Library.
Endnotes
1Dallas Lee, The Cotton Patch Evidence (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 15.
2Henlee H. Barnette, Clarence Jordan: Turning Dreams into Deeds (Smyth & Helwys, 1992), 97. Annual Catalogue of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1938-1939.
3Lee, The Cotton Patch Evidence, 16-17.
4Ibid., 19-21.
5Ibid., 21-22.
6Ibid., 22-23. Long Run Association of Baptists in Kentucky, Annual Session (1940), 13.
7Long Run Association of Baptists in Kentucky, Annual Session (1941), 30-34.
8Barnette, Clarence Jordan: Turning Dreams into Deeds, 2-5.
9Quoted in Barnette, Turning Dreams into Deeds, 93.
