Early in the 1960s, after we had moved to Voluntown in 1960, Clarence Jordon invited me to visit Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia. I first met Clarence at one of the early organizational meetings of the Committee for Nonviolent Action. He was a Baptist minister as well as a successful farmer on 2000 acres of land, as much at home on the seat of a tractor as he was in the pulpit. In addition to his credentials as a minister and farmer (a doctoral degree in theology and a graduate degree in agriculture), Clarence had a great gift for storytelling, not only Bible stories that he translated into modern language but also stories from his own life.

Koinonia, an intentional community of sorts, had a constant flow of volunteers from all over the country—people who came in spite of the danger of violence to share in the witness. In its early days the farm was comprised of three or four families, one of them black. The day before I arrived one of the buildings had been strafed with machine-gun fire on the side facing the road. The bullets had passed just above some sleeping farm workers. This wasn't the first time Koinonia had been fired upon, although it may have been the closest escape from death.

Clarence Jordan, his family, and other co-workers on the farm had already suffered dozens of attacks because of their insistence on living as true Christians in a community that included both blacks and whites. Their suffering seemed endless. Shortly before I arrived, an interracial camp had been closed by court injunction. Local people stopped buying their produce and refused to sell them supplies or provide services. Explosives destroyed the farm's roadside market and its walk-in refrigerator. Their insurance was canceled. And a store in Americus that continued to serve the farm was bombed.

The community persevered through their strong faith in God and the belief that people of different colors could live together. One of Koinonia's major sources of income was a mail-order business of pecan nuts and candies. People all over the country not only bought them for their own consumption but also acted as voluntary "middle men" to increase the volume of sales. The business was successful, and the violence against them probably made it more so. In lieu of their canceled insurance policy, friends from all over the world assisted by pledging money to be used specifically for fire or other damage. Over 2000 pledges came in. Thus, Koinonia survived and even thrived to some degree.

The stress on the black members of the community took a heavy psychological toll. One of them became paranoid. Clarence asked us if we (at the Voluntown farm) could take in the family on a temporary basis. We agreed, and I went to Koinonia to accompany them on their trip north. We had arranged stopping-off places on the way back with several of our friends. We traveled in an old bus someone lent us. The family eventually located a permanent place in New Jersey where they were able to recover.

The pecan business became increasingly successful. As new members joined the farm, in the mid-1960s Clarence created a strategy he called the Partnership to find ways Koinonia could live up to its potential. He asked key people who had been close to Koinonia for many years for advice and invited them to participate in developing a new direction for Koinonia. I was one of those people, and I attended a couple of meetings with the Partners, but as I became involved in the New Communities project in Albany, Georgia, I had to drop out of the Partnership.

Out of the Partnership discussions grew a proposal to take a dozen acres of the farm's property and build twenty-four dwellings on half-acre plots for low-income families. To make the houses affordable they would be built by the eventual owners together with volunteers. This low-income housing project later came to be called Habitat for Humanity. With the help of private grants at least 2000 houses are built worldwide each year. The original idea goes back to Clarence Jordan and Millard Fuller. It was Clarence who inspired Millard, but it was Millard who was the genius behind the success of Habitat.