G. McLeod Bryan

Fifty Years of Memories

Few persons in the world have had their own personalities and careers altered by Clarence and Florence and Koinonia as I have. I met them through Edna Earl (my wife to be) at Coker College in 1942. I returned to the south with a Ph.D. from Yale in 1948 to get reacquainted with them at Americus, upon taking up a professorship at Mercer University. (I challenged the Mercer authorities and lost on their banning Clarence as speaker.) At the Morehouse Summer School of Religion, Clarence and I were the only whites to share the platform. (We were both by then persona non gratis to the Southern Baptists but nonetheless paid by them for our contributions to the Summer School, since Morehouse took SBC mission money and spent it on us!) I framed the letter and formed the committee that challenged the Georgia Baptist Convention to rebuke Rehoboth Baptist Church for its ecclesiastical violation and unethical behavior in casting out Koinonia members even the Jordan children. And lost again.

But all over the world I have met and have explicated Koinonia and Clarence and Florence. In Berlin, on the east side, in 1954 the Christians who gathered around me wanted to hear more about Koinonia. Lecturing in Switzerland (1968), Nigeria (1959), South Africa (1959, 1964, 1990), Kenya (1961), Zambia (1964), London (1978) wherever I have been in the world trying to explain the Christian impulse, Koinonia has been at the center of my lectures, my writings and my books. Now in retirement I'm still heading a Koinonia off-shoot: Koinonia Southern Africa (I wrote up this connection in a recent published article you may wish to see.)

My article in Sojourners. December 1979 (their annual Christmas issue devoted to some one incarnating Christ), on the tenth anniversary of Clarence's death provoked a young free-lance TV team to come by our home. After days of consultation and sharing, Gail eventually got the money (I assisted her) and produced "Enough to Share.'t The earliest photos in that documentary are from my files.

During our early" dark days" in Georgia my wife and I were kept alive by our regular visits and contacts with Clarence, Florence and Koinonia. We formed a satellite Koinonia on Mercer campus, which in those early days after the war attracted the more mature students. We imitated Koinonia as best we could: complete openness, joint bank-account, shared "poverty" vacations at the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen camp near Black Mountain, a round-robin newsletter, placement of our Koinonia members in service roles all over the nation, etc. To my own blood children and our Koinonia children, Clarence and Florence were always role-models and constantly in appearance, either on Koinonia grounds or where we were gathered in prayer, witness, services, etc. We were a part of Koinonia-at-large, especially in the crisis days of the fifties --during the burnings, the dynamiting, the abusive threats, the boycott, the jailing, the court-cases, etc. The most offensive side of the larger communities' rejection of Koinonia was the cooperation of the law --the surveillance of the nation's so-called security agents, and the FBI files. It was my first encounter with the real threat that authentic religion poses for militaristic nationalism. Writing years later, I could say that the anemic culture religion of the South, mainly Southern Baptist, could produce the nation's greatest enemies, all pursued by the F.B.I.: Clarence, King, Campbell, Finlator, Baptist preachers all so dangerous to the powers that be. (When I related this to my life-long friends laboring for Christ behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, they could hardly believe it, but were nonetheless consoled that the Christ-message of the Sermon on the Mount is just as vital in the "free" West as in the "unfree" East!)

So you can see that Koinonia gave me a workable handle on my world of seventy years (72 by the time this appears in your book of memories). I will conclude with two simple stories. When I was laboring with Clarence at Morehouse, my wife and me were so poor I didn't have enough clean white shirts to last during those hot sessions. Clarence always had an ample supply. I enquired how he managed, coming from the poverty of Koinonia. He answered: "It's simple. I just commandeer all the white shirts from my neighbors that fit my collar size." The other story pertains to my wife and I thinking of joining Koinonia. It was the emptied tin cans used for water-glasses at meals and the emptied round nail kegs we sat on, which most reminded us of the austere life we would be choosing. Also my wife was worried about the claustrophobic life of the wives. I mentioned this to Clarence. He replied by asking how much she traveled during the year. (Of course rearing small children and having a husband on a low salary she didn't have much of a showing.) Clarence said, "Choose any woman/wife at Koinonia and I'll tell you how much she travels. "Each choice we made outdistanced my wife!

I'm glad we saw Koinonia in its deprivation at the beginning; I'm glad we had a chance to stand beside Koinonia in her trials; I'm glad I shared with Clarence and Florence the souring of their dream in the days before his death; I'm glad I have had a chance to see Koinonia resurrected in the seeds they planted.

Teaching a honors seminar on Utopia at Wake Forest University in 1964, I invited Clarence to come to North Carolina to address the Wake Forest students. As I remember about a dozen from the whole campus showed up to hear this Voice in the Wilderness. Twenty years later we brought to the same auditorium (seating 2400) the musical, "Cotton Patch Gospel", and the place was packed. The man and the dream virtually ignored two decades before was now the center of their interest!

On that same visit in 1964, I had in my home, as a guest from South Africa, the heroic white Afrikaner Christian, Beyers Naude (whose biography, Prophet to South Africa, I would later write). Clarence and Naude hit it off, and from that encounter he and Florence, with my help, were able to have a lifelong dream fulfilled in their visit to South Africa.

So the little Koinonia of the red, bleeding, worn-out land of 1942 has become fifty years later the tree from the mustard seed, housing birds from all over the world.

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