Clarence Jordan was the wonderful apostle, the "ex-Baptist" founder of Koinonia Farms and Habitat for Humanity. I fell in love with Clarence Jordan's "Cotton Patch Version of Paul's Epistles" when I was a teenager. Here is the online version of his
Cotton Patch Version of the Gospels.
It's a paraphrase that makes the scriptures more relevant to sharecroppers, blacks, and the poor. I love how instead of "principalities and powers", it reads "sheriffs and judges", authority figures the common people can more readily relate to and identify.
I just discovered two sources of Clarence Jordan sermons as mp3 audio files.
One is the
Clarence Jordan page on his Koinonia website.
On my computer, I had to click on the sermon title, maximize the player page that comes up, then right click within that page to Save File As on my hard drive.
The other source is the
Index of Downloads/Clarence Jordan on Trip Fuller website.
Just right click on the sermon titles below to Save File As on your hard drive or left click to play them.
More about
Clarence Jordan:
Theology in Overalls:
The Imprint of Clarence Jordan
© Sojourners, December 1979, Vol 8, no 12
by G. McLeod Bryan
Clarence Jordan was a strange phenomenon in the history of North American Christianity. Hewn from the massive Baptist denomination, known primarily for its conformity to culture, Clarence stressed the anti-cultural, the Christ-transcending and the Christ-transforming, aspects of the gospel.
He was an authentic product of the Bible Belt, of the rural, agrarian heartland, of the people's church (he got his college degree in agriculture, graduating in the same class as Senator Herman Talmadge at the University of Georgia). Clarence pursued this tradition to its very end, ending at the top with a Ph.D. in the Greek New Testament from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Clarence, like Martin Luther King Jr., another young Georgian with a Ph.D. to emerge a couple of decades later, rejected both his contemporaries' theological liberalism with its easy hope in human progress and others' Niebuhrian new-orthodox realism.
That North American Christianity of the time could produce a Clarence Jordan and a Martin Luther King Jr. is remarkable; that they both originated in Georgia, among Baptists, is something of a miracle. Clarence was jailed with King at Albany, where he reminded a young black freedom-fighter in the next cell, who had just received his draft call, "Well, you're going to stay in jail for that too, aren't you?"
Taking the evangelical, Bible-centered tradition, Clarence, forever reading from the Greek version so thoroughly worn in his outstretched hand, uncovered for his hearers the radical ethic. Clarence forced them to take the grassroots autonomy of the free church seriously.
Within the local church all were equal: young and old, black and white, male and female, rich and poor, learned and unlearned. The division between clergy and laity, between work and worship, he reminded them, did not appear in their tradition nor in the Scriptures which they honored as the sole guide of faith and practice.
Clarence took theology and ecclesiology and scholarly Bible study from the classroom and carried it to the people. He worked through his ideas in his books, the "cotton Patch" versions of the New Testament scriptures, and The Sermon on the Mount.
He writes in the introduction to a Cotton Patch version: "Another reason for a "cotton patch" version is that the Scriptures should be taken out of the classroom and stained-glass sanctuary and put out under God's skies where people are toiling and crying and wondering; where the mighty events of the good news first happened and where they alone feel at home...With my companions along the dusty rows of cotton, corn and peanuts, the Word of Life has often come alive with encouragement, rebuke, correction and insight. I have witnessed the reenactment of one New Testament event after another until I can scarcely distinguish the original from its modern counterpart."
His was a theology of the working class, of the farm worker, the most neglected laborer in the United States -- like Jesus, from the peasant class.
Clarence was himself such a farm worker, all his life, a man of the soil who, in the years before blue jeans became a symbol, wore his dirty overalls with pride.
The humility which characterized this side of Clarence's personality was part and parcel of his whole life, a fact which certainly enables his writings to match the best in the classical devotional genre. Nor did he allow his far-out Christian social witness (in peace, race, economics) to become boastfully cause-conscious. Every aspect of Clarence was a fruit of the Spirit.
The thrust of Christianity for Clarence was Christ incarnate in koinonia (the redeemed imitating Christ in the redeemed community).
In his version, Hebrews 11:1 translates: "Now faith is the turning of dreams into deeds."
For Clarence, as for Tolstoy, the imitatio Christi works: go the second mile, give the extra coat, settle matters outside the law, live peacefully with all. The Sermon on the Mount ethic is meant for this world, not for some interim, not for judgment upon us.
The communitarian model, Clarence often said, is a pioneer model, preparatory for the future of all peoples on earth. For the moment it may seem no more than a far-fetched island in the midst of oceans of dominating countercultures, but one day the whole world will adopt this model of Christian community.
Koinonia, the agrarian Christian community he founded near Americus, Georgia, was practicing "small is beautiful" long before any economists were recommending the return to decentralized, home-craft industries, simplified living, and subsistent economy.
But far deeper than the physical rearrangements of these externals, Clarence saw that the community must have its birth in the rebirth of the spirit. Humankind cannon live in true community without true conversion.
Clarence's message was bifocal: directed to the world, as a practical plan to reorganize its social structure, directed toward evangelical Christians to remind them of the extent of the mission of Christ.
Had not his own Baptist forbears, been drowned, banned, and jailed for their faith?
Hubmaier thrown into the lake at Zurich, Bunyan 18 years in the Bedford prison, and Williams and Holmes whipped and banned -- all these suffered from their fellow Protestant Christians.
Clarence reminded his culture-conforming evangelical brethren that the Christian who intends to live like Christ must not only contend with the world but with the compromised church itself. In his own experiences he endured John 16:2-3: "They will no longer consider you members of the congregation and the time will come when the ones that kill you will think they do God a favor."
For years following 1956, Koinonia farm was so harassed by shootings, burnings, bombings, beatings, that little could be produced and marketed.
A boycott against the farm was so effective that few seeds and little fertilizer or fuel could be purchased. No sales could be made, so that thousands of the chickens had to be slaughtered wastefully. The farm's roadside store, after being fired upon and dynamited, was burned to the ground, and more than 300 of the pecan trees chopped down.
All this property damage was aside from the attempts on the lives of those at Koinonia. On May 26, 1957, members of the Sumter County Chamber of Commerce called upon the community, begging them to leave the county. It is understandable that Clarence could preach in his memorable sermon "The Substance of Faith," "God is not in his heaven with all well on the earth. He is on this earth, and all hell's broken loose."
The following letter, which I received from Clarence on March 13, 1959, best reflects the profundity of his faith:
"I remember the night Harry Atkinson and I were on our way over to the roadside market after we had received word that it had been bombed and was burning. When we came over a hill we could see the fiery glow on the horizon, and this ignited a burning in my heart. I was scorched with anger, and I'm sure if I had known who had committed the act, there would have been considerable hatred in my heart. At that time I doubt that I could have distinguished between anger and hate.
But as I had occasion to think, I realized that the hate was rooted in a consuming possessiveness. True, I had given up personal possessions, only to find that I had transplanted it from an individual to a group basis. The market was our property; together we sweated to build it; and now it was burning, and I was too. The damned culprits have destroyed our property, I thought. And I hated their guts. Later I had the same reaction when various ones, including myself and my children, were shot at. The so-and-so's were trying to take our lives from us!
The solution to this soul-destroying condition came only upon the recognition that neither property no lives were ours but God's. They never had really been ours in any sense of the word. We hadn't even "given them back to Him" -- they were His all along. And if this was the way He wanted to spend His property and His people in order to accomplish His purposes, why should we pitch a tantrum?"
Throughout the whole of this experiment, marked by growth and tensions, Clarence and his family lived by deliberate choice in the same over-the-kitchen apartment; they never opted to move to new or more commodious living quarters. They never asked for special favors.
Here again Clarence's witness speaks to two areas of continuing Christian concern: the role of the nuclear family and the place of women. Unlike the saints of old, who so often took religious vows, including celibacy, or who like the Pilgrim left his family crying at the gate in their abandonment, Clarence, Florence, and his children went through this witness together. Florence was an equal and contributing founder of Koinonia; her presence was uniquely determinative of its direction.
The cream of Clarence's theological insights has taken a long time to reach the top of North American religious thought.
As proof, his books sell better now than when he lived; Koinonia thrives now, whereas at the time of his death it had almost faded away. Today Southern Baptist institutions which had banned him from speaking on their campuses during the turbulent '40s and '50s vie with each other to establish institutes and lectureships in his honor.
Koinonia was a forerunner of the simple, shared lifestyle. Clarence's peace emphasis reemerged in the anti-nuclear movements, and his racial reconciliation in the civil rights movement. His theological imprint is stamped heavily upon our times.
Yet Clarence, unlike the big guns of 20th century theology -- the Barths, the Mertons, the Elluls -- did not cultivate the theological stance and discourse. In fact, if he was not exactly anti-theological, he certainly did not interpret his calling to engage the theological minds of his generation. His humor often turned on spoofing formal theology. Therefore he is seldom found in the learned journals.
Unlike many of the professional theologians, Clarence did not disdain the local church. Yet, paradoxically, he is perhaps the only one of his rank to be expelled from his local church (expelled incidentally, nor for being less moral than the congregation, but for being more moral).
Never seeing Christ as the founder of ecclesiasticism, he remained forever after, in his own words, "an ex-Baptist," a member of the confessional and universal church.
