This "Greatest Story Ever Retold" is based on the book "The Cotton Patch Version of Matthew and John" in which the Gospel is presented in a setting of rural Georgia with country music songs, the final and perhaps best work of Harry Chapin.

When Jesus delivered his parables, he lit a stick of dynamite, covered it with a story about everyday life, and then left it with his audience. By the time his hearers fully unwrapped the parable, Jesus and his disciples were long gone. Clarence Jordan essentially retells these powerful parables in the language of the South in order to place modern readers in that same first-century situation. Properly understood, these Cotton Patch stories can liberate us into the kingdom of God from the cultural prisons of religion, wealth, and prejudice. After Jordan's death in 1969, Bill Lane Doulos took up the task to combine these Cotton Patch Version parables with appropriate excerpts from Jordan's sermons and with his own commentary which does well to pull everything together. In the end, Doulos and Jordan call readers into true discipleship, challenging them to explore the demands of kingdom life on a whole new level.

Clarence Jordan seemed to be born with an ability to see things just a little bit differently than other people did--and sometimes that got him into trouble. Like his views on racial equality: they just weren't popular with many other White people in the Deep South of his day. Like his views on war and how to deal with violence and hatred. For Clarence, the Gospel was very clear about these issues. Moreover, he believed that Jesus's teachings were not just abstract principles but were meant to be applied directly to everyday life. That got him into trouble too, especially among certain church-going people. Along the way, Clarence became a progressive farmer, a sought-after preacher, a Greek scholar, an author, a precursor of the Civil Rights movement, and a family man. An irrepressible sense of humor enlivened all these aspects of his life. Today, Clarence Jordan is best known as the author of the Cotton Patch Gospels and as the inspiration for Habitat for Humanity. The story of the making of this extraordinary man is not so widely known. Cotton Patch Rebel tells that story.

A true American prophet Clarence Jordan (1912-1969) was reared in the heart of the Southern Baptist Church. He passed up the options of scholarship or traditional ministry to found an interracial Christian community in Americus, Georgia at a time when preaching racial justice and equality could spark violence. His cooperative farm was repeatedly attacked by the KKK and subject to a total economic boycott. Through his sermons and his so-called Cotton Patch version of the Gospels--a "dynamic" translation of his own setting Jesus' life in a Southern context Jordan laid out a revolutionary vision of Christian community

The story of Koinonia Farm and Clarence Jordan is as important today as it was in 1971 when Dallas Lee first recorded the history, shortly after Jordan's death. This is a story of the enduring witness of Christian communal living that continues to influence the faithful around the world. Ê In 1942, Clarence and others set out to live as the early apostles, following Christ's teaching and sharing all things in common. Everyone was welcome. When word spread that a Negro farmhand shared their communal table, the consequences exploded fast and hard as the Ku Klux Klan came calling with bombs, gunfire, and boycott. Ê This edition concludes with a new afterword by director of Koinonia Farm Bren Dubay that highlights the continuity of Koinonia's originalÊmission today, despite all the challenges and changes since 1942.