September 2007
a monthly e-news publication

Here’s our summer newsletter!

This year we’ve posted our full summer newsletter, complete with lots of photos, online for everyone to check out, rather than mailing it by post. This saves trees, money that could be used for our ministries, and is convenient! Instead of a regular Koinonia Briefly this month, we’d like to share this newsletter—just read on.

Our ministries

J. Reilly, coordinator of Koinonia's
Heart to Heart home repair team

Heart to Heart home repair ministry team leaders J. and Brendan, and sundry helpers, have made 372 repairs on 20 houses in the past year! We made improvements on 19 neighbors’ houses, as well as working on visitor lodging at Koinonia. Our biggest accomplishment was a total rehabilitation of the home of our neighbor LaTonya Anderson. At the rededication ceremony in July, LaTonya shared that she had lived in the house since the age of one, and knew that her grandmother would be so glad and proud if she could see the house now. We are grateful for all who donate to make this work possible, but we especially want to thank The Fuller Center for Housing, a wonderful partner and the largest single donor to this important ministry.

The Circle of Friends ministry serves not only the elder neighbors who make up its fellowship, but others in the wider community, as the Friends pass along their abundant blessings. The group has, this year, brought Easter baskets to a local nursing home, cooked repasts for those in need, and as always, kept each other joyful and laughing. As for the kids, the annual Summer Youth Camp was a splashing success. Thanks go to the six talented Junior Counselors—local teens who gave so much back to their younger neighbors—as well as visiting friends from out of town who brought Vacation Bible School, music and nature art classes, conflict resolution workshops, and water games to the 30 eager, energetic kids who attended.

The year has been rich for our hospitality ministry: exceptional interns, college “alternative spring break” groups, friends in RVs, eager youth groups, tours for senior citizens’ groups, as well as families, retreatants, and single travelers. In April, our busiest month, we had 119 overnight visitors, plus many more for just lunch and a tour. We have especially enjoyed the many dedicated Habitat for Humanity volunteers who come here to learn about Habitat’s birthplace… and end up becoming a part of Koinonia’s extended family too. If you would like to visit, bring a group, retreat, or intern with us, contact hospitality.

“Thank you for your warm hospitality, for your generous gifts, for your allowing us to work alongside you all week; this community’s integrity and faithfulness to the gospel inspire me and challenge me to be more faithful.” —Jane Harris, Hendrix College

Our new Peace Action Team (slogan: “Reaching Others Through Counter-recruitment”) is a grassroots group of Koinonians, concerned parents and friends in Sumter County, and allies in the public schools. We provide information and perspectives to counter-balance the presence of military recruiters by giving public forums, we visit school administrators to ensure that parents and students know their rights to opt-out, and we are starting a Peace Scholarship program to help students access higher education without resorting to the military. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Finally, as always, we are dreaming, praying, listening and keeping our eyes ears and hearts open to what kind of work we may be called to next as a community. We are moved by many issues and stories in Sumter County—the death penalty, the situation for undocumented immigrants, the aftereffects of the March 1 tornado in Americus, the effect of the U.S. military on our schoolchildren—and many of us take consistent action to serve.  But more than anything, we have been deeply moved by the power of prayer this past year, and trust that our next collective steps will be lit as the time comes to take them.

Our products

The Koinonia Bakery & Store is enjoying a faster internet connection to better serve customers, planning the 2007-2008 Catalog (watch your mailboxes in October!) and we’re debuting several new products in our next Catalog, including delicious 100% Natural Pecan Butter made with Koinonia pecans (already available online here), and several Fair Trade chocolate items. Let us know how you like them!

"I was in France for the last two weeks—your chocolate is even better than what I had there!" —Emily Schaming, Ottawa Mennonite Church

Our community

Certainly one of our most joyful events this year was the blessing of the newly renovated Koinonia chapel, which brought us together with the broader community spiritually. Renovation of common spaces like the Coffee House and Jubilee House lobby and porch also made them more welcoming to visitors and neighbors.

Owen and Betty Miller in front of the newly remodeled chapel

Button and Kurt share Koinonia
noontime devotions

In our third year of return to the intentional community model, we feel our koinonia to be an ever-stronger and more unified group, with much growth still to come, we pray. Many visitors, including former members like Coffee Worth, have told us what a joyful feel the community has these days. This feedback means a lot to us! Among several new members, we have especially welcomed Kellan, the second daughter of the Prendergast family, now seven months old (and crawling).

Israel and Matt--one from Koinonia, one from
Church of the Servant King--meditate by a waterfall

We continue to be blessed by connections with other Christian communities, such as Rose Creek Village, Church of the Servant King, Jubilee Partners, and Reba Place Fellowship. These friends in service and faith inspire us to come just a little closer to each other, to extend ourselves just a little bit more, to trust in God just a little bit more with each conversation. Former Koinonia community members and interns also connect us to other communities, working across the country for good: Habitat for Humanity affiliates, the Open Door Community, New Hope House (prison ministry), The Fuller Center for Housing and more. Finally, we were privileged to host our first School for Conversion in April, in partnership with the New Monasticism movement. The conversion implied by this conference is a continual rebirth into a new way of life, one marked by the “creation of new community and ministry opportunities in the abandoned spaces of our world.” (See www.newmonasticism.org for more.) We felt blessed to host the tremendous positive and prayerful energy of over 30 participants, and hope to do it again soon.

Bren Dubay, our director, continues to travel and speak to interested groups and individuals. New relationships have been born and older ones strengthened as Bren has traveled to California, Maine, Texas, Michigan, Arizona and more. She has spoken at church services, Sunday school classes, universities, and even delivered a commencement address. She’ll be in Columbus, Indiana on September 14, 2007 to be keynote speaker to help kick off a weekend of events celebrating National Neighborhood Day at East Side Community Center.. If your group would like to invite her to share the Koinonia story in your hometown, please email her.

Our farm and land

The Adopt a Tree program has made great progress since last year. 54 people have adopted trees, and 134 people have made other gifts to the program.Thanks to supporters like you, we had the funds needed to make many needed repairs to our pecan plant and bakery. We were also able to move encroaching brush away from the edges of the pecan orchards, and to remove crowded trees. This has resulted in a crop of nuts so thick this year that some branches are drooping nearly to the ground under the weight! Thank you all so much! Click here to get involved with Adopt a Tree.

One ongoing area of focus is our financial situation. We gradually plumb the depths of financial challenges stemming from at least a decade ago. Though this is challenging, we are grateful as the facts come to light and we are able to deal with them at last. Many of our buildings will soon need major repairs, and we are short of extra funds for this endeavor, but we are brainstorming creative solutions to this challenge. (If you are interested in supporting Koinonia financially, please take a look at our Ways to Give page.) Our budget for the upcoming year is balanced on paper—and we aim to make it so in “real” life, too!

Some of the steps we take to simplify and save money are also steps forward environmentally. For instance, we have turned up our office thermostat just a few degrees—there’s no noticeable difference, except on our energy bills. And, though it doesn’t save money (the cost is roughly the same), we have gone bio-diesel—all our tractors and farm equipment now run on a mix that emits far fewer harmful fumes into the ozone layer. We look forward to making many more such changes as we seek to be stewards of the land. Will you join with us in taking a few of these steps in your own home or community?

Koinonia's Greenhouse

Koinonia's Greenhouse

As for our organic crops, we were catalyzed by a visit from organics' expert Malcolm Beck this year, and hope to build on what we have learned in future seasons. Meanwhile, our organic garden produces and several community members take pride in their own plots, growing flowers, vegetables, herbs—and even chickens in a mobile, fertilizer-producing, and loudly crowing “chicken tractor.” Our organic peanut field again did not produce usable nuts, but is on its way, we hope, to real production. We would love to offer peanut products made with our own organic peanuts someday!

A late frost had us scrambling to cover the strawberries in the garden—but there’s no cheesecloth big enough for 90 acres of pecans or 13 rows of organic blueberries. The resulting loss of 90% of our blueberry crop and some of our pecans too was a hard hit, but we are grateful for what we still have—including a full vineyard of ripe organic grapes! Despite losing 50% of the pecans from the orchard between Clarence’s Shack and the Muckaloochee River due to the frost, our other trees are loaded and we hope to make up the difference in the other orchards.Farming keeps us aware of how dependent our lives are on the abundance of nature’s rain, sun and soil. While it can be precarious, we are also joyful to be so deeply engaged with God’s earth.

We thank you for reading our newsletter, and we close with a special letter from our director, Bren Dubay.

Peace and Faith,
The Koinonia Community

A letter from Bren Dubay

Dear Friends and Family,

We still have that first brochure—the one Clarence Jordan and Martin England wrote in the 1940s when Koinonia was yet a gleam in their eyes. They, along with their wives Florence and Mabel, described their dream of starting a community

“…to relate … to train … in religion and agriculture. To provide an opportunity for Christian students to serve a period of apprenticeship in developing community life on the teachings and principles of Jesus. To seek to conserve the soil, which we believe to be God’s holy earth … to uplift and enrich the lives of the people … to make a contribution to the lives of all those who suffer and are oppressed.”

We love the life they describe, the life we share here. Every day, we look forward to serving others in these ways—hospitality, youth, elders, internships, land work, home repair, and more. What is more difficult is asking for the funding needed to continue this daily work. But it has been a part of our life from the beginning. From that first brochure:

Koinonia’s work shall be financed by gifts and (non-interest bearing) loans made by friends and others… Cash gifts may be made in monthly, quarterly, or annual installments. Gifts of merchandise, materials, stock, implements, and the like will be gladly received… a list of such items available upon request.

And so it is today. Koinonia’s work is financed by your generosity. There are several ways to give:

• Through the fall and spring appeals. Donations to these appeals fund our general operations to help maintain the community and the different works of service we do.
• The Adopt-a-Tree Project. By adopting a tree, you partner with us in the care and upkeep of our pecan orchards, pecan processing plants and the bakery. These businesses are our basic income-producing streams and since the 1950s, they have sustained our existence.
• Heart to Heart Project. When you give to this project you support our ministry of home repair for those in need, and you help us maintain our community buildings and grounds.
• By remembering Koinonia in your will. We have been deeply humbled by the number of donors who remember us in this way.
• Special appeals. From time to time, we seek support for projects ranging from help with storm relief to major capital improvements.
• In response to this summer letter. We have included a reply form and envelope. If the reply is great enough, we are able to save on the time and expense of mailing a fall appeal.
• By buying Koinonia books, CDs, and bakery items. If each person on our mailing list spent $10 a month on items in our catalog or online store, it would not be necessary to do a fall or spring appeal!
• Other ways to give. Visit our website (www.koinoniapartners.org/support) or call us at 229-924-0391 to learn about gift annuities, life income plans, and other options.

Koinonia’s founders were thankful for the kindness of so many through the years. So are we. Sometimes we long to do it all ourselves, to be in a position where asking for support isn’t necessary. But perhaps there is a design in this. God calls us to be partners with Him and with each other. We continue to “seek a new spirit… a spirit of partnership with God and people everywhere.”

Enjoy our summer letter—both in print and online—and thank you for your continuing support of time, talent and treasure. We are grateful.

The youngest Koinonian - Kellan in her daddy's arms

Blessings,

Bren Dubay
Director of Koinonia

P.S. Our director, Bren Dubay, will speak at East Side Community Center in Columbus, Indiana on September 14, kicking off a weekend of events celebrating National Neighbor Day. She’ll also visit some Koinonia friends in the area. Call 229 924 0391 if you’d like to attend the event, or to make a personal appointment with Bren in Indiana.

Here are some more pictures from this summer.