Queenie clearly remembers the first time she realized that all whites might not have the same high regard for her as those at Koinonia. When walking to school as a first grader, a car with four white teenage boys inside drove up alongside her. She doesn’t remember the words they yelled, but she remembers the bottle one of them threw.

“It landed right in front of me and broke. Some of the pieces flew up and got me. I wasn’t cut bad. I was just real scared.”

If you were to come today to visit Koinonia Farm and take a tour, you’d see the house that is known as “the first Habitat house.” It was a house built by and for Queenie’s parents, Bo and Emma Johnson.

“I think my daddy was the first person Clarence ever hired to work full time on the farm. Koinonia didn’t have much, but what they had, they shared. My daddy and my mama wanted to buy a house. They went and talked to Clarence about it and next thing you know, daddy, Clarence, Millard and my mama were picking out the exact spot where they were going to build a brand new house. We were over excited.

“The day they moved in, well, it was a day full of just the purest joy. I was all grown by then, but it was like I was a little child. We were all busy unpacking stuff and laughing. My mama, daddy, brother and sister were running all over the house talking about who wanted which bedroom, who was going to be where. There was some arguing, but everybody was really happy. It was so happy.”

Though we now call that house “the first Habitat house,” that title was a long time coming. It would still be almost a decade before it became clear that Bo and Emma Johnson’s house was the beginning of an international movement. In 1963, when Millard and Linda Fuller first visited Koinonia, they heard about the home repair and house building projects the community had taken on over the years. As a young teenager, Millard had spent a summer helping to build a home for a neighbor. The seed had been planted and had been watered in both Clarence and Millard’s lives. When the Fullers returned to Koinonia in 1968, Millard and Clarence began to talk and dream of a project that was bigger than helping out a neighbor here and there. Bo and Emma were the catalyst for turning that dream into a deed.

Eventually, Koinonia set aside enough of its farmland to build two neighborhoods of some 60 homes — Koinonia Village and Forest Park Village. The land and houses were sold with non-interest loans and the willingness of the home owner to be a part of the build, the “sweat equity” concept. All told, Koinonia built 192 houses on the farm and in Americus and Plains, Georgia, before passing on the hammer.

“From my mama and daddy’s house to Habitat for Humanity building houses all over the world. I’m so proud of that,” smiles Queenie.

She said she never gave it a thought when she was helping her family move into that first house that some day it would be a neighborhood and she, too, would purchase a home in it.

“Oh, my, yes, I remember that day. The day my two little children and I moved into our home. To buy my own house, that was a dream come true.”

By this time, a neighborhood park had been built, and it is this park and the children that Queenie remembers so vividly.

“Seems like there was always a birthday party for some little child. We’d celebrate it in the park. There was a real nice playground there for the children. We’d play volleyball. Baseball sometimes. Millard was a great volleyball player. Like Clarence was before he died.* Millard would have us all laughing. We’d have a big old barbeque. People from Koinonia were always there. Those were happy times.”

Throughout her younger days, Queenie returned again and again to Koinonia to enjoy her friends there.

“Can’t think of my childhood without thinking of Koinonia. I played there, went to Bible school there. Clarence or one of the good folk from Koinonia would come around in a wagon to pick all us children up and take us to the farm. We’d have fun all day long.”

As a teenager and young adult, Queenie often became part of the seasonal help that Koinonia was able to hire from time to time.

“But like my daddy, they just couldn’t do without me being there all the time. They couldn’t do without my good cooking,” she shares with a hearty laugh. After 32 years at Koinonia, Queenie hung up her apron in July, 2005. She returns to the farm often to visit.

Today Koinonia no longer builds houses. As the home building ministry grew, the community realized that to keep up with the growth, it would have to sacrifice the original vision — that of being a small intentional Christian community modeled after the description of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles and helping out its neighbors according to the needs and challenges of the times. It was decided that some in the community would leave to nurture and grow home building in a separate organization while others remained at the farm to carry on the original vision.

Though Koinonia no longer builds houses, it continues to help out its neighbors with home repairs.

“I like the name of that program Koinonia has,” Queenie says. “It’s called Heart to Heart. That says it. Neighbors helping neighbors. From my mama and daddy’s house to Habitat for Humanity building houses all over the world. For sure, I’m so very proud of that. I’m happy, too, that Koinonia is still here, still helping its neighbors. Heart to heart.”

*Bo and Emma Johnson’s house was under construction when Clarence Jordan died suddenly of a heart attack on October 29, 1969.