We have come to the Koinonia Community some nine miles south of the town of Americus, Georgia on Rte. 49. Koinonia is a community started in 1942 as an “experiment in Christian living.”

It was started by the late Clarence Jordan, his wife and another family. And it would soon become the backwater version of Montgomery, Alabama in the Civil Rights Movement.

“Koinonia was a beacon for those who believed in racial equality,” said former president Jimmy Carter, who lives some 15 miles from Koinonia in Planes, Georgia.

Why it was a beacon is because in the highly segregated South, Blacks and Whites lived and worked together on the farm at Koinonia. “Black folks were as good as White folks,” Jordan said.

This sentiment made the “Nigger lovers and communists” at Koinonia a lightening rod for years of boycotts, protests and violence.

On February 24, 1957, 100 Klu Klux Klan members rallied and burned crosses outside of Koinonia, according to a documentary on Koinonia titled “Briars in the Cotton Patch.”

For years there was frequent drive by shootings. One night, three Koinonia children were sitting up in bed listening to a story. Machine gun bullets penetrated the wall behind them – with three whistling between their heads.

Six inches to either side and those children would have been dead, one Koinonia member recounted. (Miraculously, no one was ever killed.)

However, there were regular beatings as Koinonia members ventured to town and were met by bigoted toughs with brass knuckles, and the like.

Amidst the boycotts of Koinonia’s farm produce, the protests and the violence, offers were made to Clarence Jordan to sell the property. Yet Jordan declined, believing abandoning the experiment would be akin to “selling his soul.”

Through it all, Jordan continued to work the farm, share the stuff of life in community with Blacks, with Whites, and he wrote. In a small shack in an isolated part of the farm he wrote his “Cotton Patch” series of books.

These were refreshingly down to earth, common sense translations of the Bible, using modern, American language and Southwest Georgia ‘gritty sweaty’ lingo. And he had a way of cutting to the heart of a Bible passage.

In the book Cotton Patch Parables of Liberation, Jordan addresses the parable of Lazarus the beggar and the rich man (Luke 16: 19-31.) The “average Joe” cliff note is there is a rich man who “dines sumptuously” each day, while Lazarus lies at his gate going without each day because the rich man is indifferent to Lazarus.

The rich man dies and goes to Hell.

Lazarus dies and goes to Heaven.

Later into eternity, the rich man looks up from Hell and sees Lazarus being comforted by Abraham. And there is a big chasm between them that can’t be crossed.

Abraham (in Clarence Jordan’s words) explains to the former rich man why the chasm can’t be crossed:

“Boy, you remember while you were alive you got the good things (the good jobs, schools, streets, houses, etc.), while at the same time Lazarus got the leftovers. And now he’s got it made, and you’re scorching.”

Jordan’s point was that, for instance, segregation in his part of the South was the chasm between the much more well off Whites and the poor Blacks.

In this day the embodiment of the parable would be people living well off and more safely in the suburbs, while the Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Whites… continually dodge hunger, drugs and bullets in the inner cities of America.

While there is no physical fence between the suburbs and the inner city, there is nonetheless a chasm that indeed keeps people out.

Shortly before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. and his family moved to a Black ghetto (North Lawndale) in Chicago in 1966 to bring attention to poverty and segregation in the north. According to a recent Newsweek article, today in North Lawndale 60 percent of those over 18 have had some kind of involvement with the criminal justice system, with the number much higher among men. More than 40 percent of North Lawndale households have incomes of less than $15,00 a year.

Self-destructive behavior and the gangster culture are rampant – because so many here, as Clarence Jordan would most likely note – can see no way to the other side of the chasm.

As Lazarus could see no way to the other side of the rich guy’s gate.

"average Joe" Schriner writes about common sense(and "common good") from the back roads of America.