2 of 3

Jordan was trying to live out racial reconciliation long before others were. It wasn't on many people's radar in 1942.

Here is another character who has been written out of the civil-rights movement. So many of the civil-rights workers I've interviewed over the years, particularly student activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the church-based people in the Deep South said Clarence was their brother. He offered retreat when they were tired, when they needed to rotate out of action for a weekend or a week. They often went over to Koinonia and enjoyed their good food and their abundant table with fresh vegetables and pies, and the time to relax and make retreat.

Jordan is not written into the story because he's not a civil-rights organizer. His idea of racial reconciliation was that it must first happen in the body of Christ. It must happen in these intentional ways, in communities that are willing to bear witness to reconciliation and to suffer the consequences.

People look at Koinonia and they say, "They're irrelevant. They did nothing. They made nothing happen." And yet, that is such a truncated way of seeing the story. What Koinonia shows us is another compelling way for Christians to engage the social order.

It's an amazing story, and Clarence Jordan was a great Christian. Like so many of these radical Christians, he died a virtual stranger in his hometown. There were only a few people at Jordan's funeral.

How have white evangelicals failed in the creation of beloved community?

That question is the reason why 12 years ago, I veered slightly away from the more conventional academic track I was on, writing monographs and essays and philosophical theology. I became haunted by memories of my evangelical upbringing in the South. Why was it the case that white evangelicals who raised me and nurtured me, and gave me gifts and skills and passions that I will forever cherish, remain indifferent, if not contemptuous, toward the sufferings of African Americans under Jim Crow?

That question has been explored in social scientific, cultural, or historical studies of the South, but I knew that there was a theological explanation. It had to do with the way we were thinking about our relationship to Jesus, and our identities as Christians. I think one of the most plaguing problems is the way in which we have often defined salvation and the Christian life in terms that are almost solely focused on the fate of the individual soul at the expense of what John Perkins likes to call a holistic faith. Bonhoeffer said that when Jesus calls a man or woman, he calls that person out into the anguish and complexity of the world.

The Christian life and the new being that I am in Jesus Christ is incomplete until we begin to live out our discipleship to Jesus in the fullness of our social selves. I think the individualism that is still a part of some white evangelicals has made our witness fairly narrow.

You're nearly quoting Carl Henry.

I think this points to the fact that, while I say this, there has been an even more rich and powerful countermovement within the evangelical subculture of understanding the fullness of faith and making those connections between the salvation of the individual soul, which is not an unimportant thing, and building the kingdom of God.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

February (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49