Substance of Faith and Other Cotton Patch Sermons

This collection gathers sermons preached by Clarence Jordan at Koinonia Farm, the interracial Christian community he founded in rural Georgia in 1942. The sermons emerged from the crucible of the civil rights era, when Jordan and his community faced bombing, economic boycotts, and sustained hostility for their commitment to racial integration and economic justice. Jordan delivered these messages to a congregation that lived out radical discipleship in the face of violent opposition, speaking not as an abstract theologian but as a pastor whose community paid a concrete price for following Jesus.

Jordan's preaching weaves together his distinctive Cotton Patch translation work with practical theology born from communal experience. He renders familiar biblical passages in the vernacular of the American South, making Moses a sharecropper and transforming Jerusalem into Atlanta, not for shock value but to strip away the cultural distance that allows comfortable Christianity to evade the gospel's demands. His sermons on substance and faith, racial reconciliation, and economic sharing emerge directly from his community's attempts to live as the early church described in Acts. Jordan argues that authentic Christianity requires concrete embodiment rather than spiritual abstraction, that faith must take material form in how believers organize their common life, handle money, and cross racial boundaries.

These sermons have endured because Jordan successfully demonstrates how to preach prophetically without losing pastoral care, and how to translate biblical truth into contemporary idiom without domesticating its challenge. His homiletical approach influenced later preachers seeking to address social justice from the pulpit while maintaining evangelical commitment to biblical authority.

Pastors struggling to address social issues biblically should read this, along with anyone interested in seeing how radical discipleship shapes preaching. This collection is not for those seeking conventional sermon techniques or comfortable spiritual encouragement, but for readers willing to consider what gospel proclamation sounds like when the preacher's life matches his message.