Cotton Patch Gospel

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.

The Cotton Patch Gospel recasts the stories of Jesus and the letters of Paul and Peter into the language of the mid-20th century South. Born out of the Civil Rights struggle, these now classic translations of much of the New Testament bring the far-away places of Scipture closer to home: Gainesville, Selma, Birmingham, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. As Jordan once wrote, "While there have been many excellent translations of the Scriptures into modern English, they still have left us stranded in the long-distant past. We need to have the good news come to us not only in our own tongue but in our own time. We want to be participants in the faith, not merely spectators."

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.