“Wait a minute…!” Clarence Jordan’s “Inconvenient Gospel”
Review by Bradley Jersak

Clarence Jordan, The Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race, and Religion (Plough Spiritual Guides: Backpack Classics, 2022).

CLICK HERE TO READ A SAMPLE

“Wait a minute!” One day I may not be so surprised and delighted by the books Plough Publishing sends me, but they’ve done it again! Before I dive into the substance of Clarence Jordan’s Inconvenient Gospel, I must first commend Plough from a publisher’s perspective. The design and layout of the physical copy make for a beautiful product, bound on good-quality stock and a heavier-than-paper cover. More important, though, is that this particular book is a welcome addition to their “Spiritual Guides” series, which is a treasury of authors including:

• Dorothy Day
• Simone Weil
• Eberhard Arnold and Richard Foster
• Eberhard Arnold and Thomas Merton
• Oscar Romero
• Amy Carmichael
• Abraham Joshua Heschel

Seriously, contact Plough and ask for the whole set—it’s an incredible collection of great hearts and minds, and each work includes a distilled biography and introduction along with a treasury of primary source material from each author.

Now to Clarence Jordan's Inconvenient Gospel. The book opens with Frederick L. Downing’s fine biography of Jordan (1912-1969), his wife Florence, and their Koinonia community. Jordan is described as a white Baptist minister from Old South Georgia who broke every mold associated with that stereotype. The “Wait a minute!” moments on those first pages stack up quickly. Here we have a Southern Baptist-trained preacher (with a Ph.D. in NT Greek) who embraced nonviolence, racial integration, and communal living decades before the Civil Rights movement picked up steam! Utterly countercultural, monitored by the government, harassed by the Klansmen… his story is so gripping that when Martin Luther King Jr. heard Jordan was practicing what King was preaching, he said, “I went to Koinonia [Jordan's community] to see it for myself and couldn’t wait to leave because I was sure the Klan would show up and kill us both.” The Koinonia project, a gospel-centered, interracial, alternative economic project, struck me exactly as the title suggests—an “inconvenient Gospel.” 

After Downing’s biography, readers are treated to an Introduction by Starlette Thomas, titled “Reading Clarence Jordan Today.” Wait a minute! THAT Starlette Thomas? For those unfamiliar with her, Thomas is the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative; she's a practical theologian and blogger, and a serious womanist preacher in ministry. When someone of her stature shares her perspective on Clarence Jordan and his “raceless gospel” (not to be confused with “color-blindness”!), I am arrested in the most important way. I.e., she had my attention.

But then we’re exposed to Clarence Jordan firsthand in a series of thirteen of his articles and sermons. It's worth sharing the chapter titles to catch a glimpse of key themes from this “wait a minute!” provocateur. I'm especially bearing in mind the religious and social cultures of his Baptist audiences (churches, journals, and conventions from 1941-1955) and later, his Mennonite listeners (Goshen College) in the 1960s. 

1. Impractical Christianity
2. The Meaning of Christian Fellowship
3. What is the Word of God?
4. White Southern Christians and Race
5. No Promised Land without the Wilderness
6. The Ten Commandments
7. Jesus, Leader of the Poor
8. Love Your Enemies
9. Jesus and Possessions
10. Metamorphosis
11. The Man from Gadara
12. Things Needed for Our Peace
13. The Humanity of God

Through his penetrating messages, Jordan presses some truly inconvenient "wait a minute!" facts. For example, the radical polarization around economic and racial issues that are right now tearing apart our frayed society are nothing new. He was there and underwent that reality directly, overtly, frequently suffering intimidation from the church, the FBI, and the KKK alike.

Further, his active opposition against white supremacy before the Civil Rights reached a critical mass was prophetic and intensely risky. Hatred from what we now call the “far right” was still the norm then,… and couple that problem with preaching a gospel of nonviolence that refused to hate domestic oppressors or wage war against foreign enemies. Well, call him crazy, call him communist, call him the devil… and many did. But we cannot call his nonviolence "complicity with injustice." His nonviolent witness was an active living martyrdom… as dangerously naïve as Jesus' foundation sermon, perhaps? I hope so, because so far, “the ways that make for peace have been hidden from our eyes.” Jordan has a word for us all, right now. He IS a prophet to speaking to the 21st century. 

But even if I can follow his call to radical forgiveness, enemy love, and anti-racism, that only gets me through the Matthew 5 section of his Sermon on the Mount example. Jordan ventures into the implications of a Matthew 6 life—I’m referring to how seriously he took renouncing personal wealthy and possessions and heeding Jesus’ command [?] not to lay up earthly treasures for ourselves. Jordan preached and practiced a communal gospel reminiscent of the church in those first chapters of Acts, where everyone shared, and no one was left impoverished. "Wait a minute!" That’s a “hard word” for those of us (I mean me) with mortgages and homes, deeply attached to our pensions and investments. Maybe now that middle-class wealth is being gobbled up by inflation and greed, and a home is no longer even an option for my children, Jordan has my attention—and after him, who knows? Might I listen to Jesus, too—but this time with fresh ears in Clarence Jordan’s Southern-seasoned voice. 

It's worth saying how closely aligned Jordan was with Tolstoy, Gandhi, Thurman, and King Jr., in that same Sermon on the Mount tradition, living its practicability in his own way. Even without the same global name recognition, he is surely due the same honor as these, his peers. 

Finally, one last bonus “Wait a minute!” Have you ever heard of the southern retelling of the Jesus story, The Cotton Patch Gospel? I had not realized Clarence Jordan wrote was the author! In fact, he was composing it when he departed this life for the next. One might have wished he had more time for that endeavor, but then again, what a beautiful way to complete one’s journey.