Deborah Smith Douglas profiles a distinguished woman.
She is a grandmother, a faithful communicant, and a pillar of the church. She knows the liturgy and most of the hymns by heart and she never misses a service. She taught Sunday school and vacation bible school for years. She served for years as the head of the altar guild and she still keeps an eagle eye on the young acolytes each Sunday and, woe betide the crucifer who puts a foot wrong during communion.
In many ways, she is the institutional memory of the church, as well as the guardian of its traditions and identity.
You might assume that she is a cliché, a hat-wearing convention, a rock-ribbed conservative, pious and prim—the sort of “Church Lady” that Saturday Night Live made fun of, once upon a time. You would be wrong.
Christine Johnson is now nearly eighty years old, and has been passionate about justice since, as a teenager, she watched crosses burn on the lawn of her family’s house in North Carolina.
Her father was a Black Baptist minister, and his involvement in civil rights in the late 1950s, and throughout the turbulent 1960s, made him a target for the Ku Klux Klan. This did nothing to stop him—or his fiery daughter (“I never did have the sense to be nice and quiet,” she admits)—from standing firm in their convictions, rooted and grounded in their faith in God.
When Johnson asked her father if he was afraid of those who hated and opposed him, he answered calmly that his life was in God’s hands; that God had put him there and given him work to do, and that God would call him home whenever He liked. And until then, there was nothing anyone on earth could do to harm him—or, to stop him from doing what he knew was right.
The apple, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the tree. Johnson’s life has been marked by the same sort of fearless commitment to what is right. She has boundless compassion for those who suffer, and bedrock awareness that in life and in death she belongs to God.
FOUND HER WAY TO THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
As the daughter of a cradle-Methodist mother and a Baptist-preacher father, Johnson’s early religious formation was deep and strong. In her 20s, disenchanted with some aspects of the Baptist tradition, she found her way to the Episcopal Church. The riches of the Book of Common Prayer, with its Biblical resonance, prayers for all occasions, and Eucharistic liturgy, attracted her at once. She loved the round of liturgical seasons, and the fact that whatever Episcopal church she attended, worship would follow the same pattern—and she would be welcome. She was confirmed at Holy Trinity Episcopal, in Baltimore, where the Reverend Robert Powell, a prominent Black minister and community activist, was the rector.
Her involvement with civil rights began in her student days in New York City, when she joined Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in protests, marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations of all kinds, both in Harlem and in distant cities to which they traveled by bus. She recalls proudly that she was arrested once…but, she wistfully remembers, she wasn’t sent to jail because the Richmond jails were already full.
When she graduated from nursing school in 1961, she went on to earn a Master’s degree in medical-surgical nursing, specializing in clinical practice and hospital administration. In those days, her career options as a Black woman were limited: she could either work at a segregated Black hospital in the South, or an “integrated” hospital in the North—but only on night shifts “so people wouldn’t know what color I was,” she dryly explains. She could also join one of the U.S. uniformed services.
So she joined the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and began a career as a nurse, administrator, and educator in government hospitals across the United States—from New York’s Staten Island to Baltimore and Detroit and Santa Fe—a career that would last until she retired (as a Colonel) from active duty in 2001. The armed services weren’t ready for women in authority in the 60s, Johnson recalls, much less Black women: the prejudice was more subtle in the North, but just as real. She wore her dress blues, rather than street clothes, when she went out to restaurants, “to make it a little harder for them to refuse to serve me.”
She met David Johnson at Friendship Baptist Church in New York City, while she was in nursing school. They married in 1970 and had two daughters, Deborah and Christel, “named for our Lord, not a chandelier,” says Johnson. David worked as a motorman for the New York transit authority, operating subway trains until the day he died. The couple separated, out of necessity in 1982, when Johnson was sent to the Indian Hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico to be the deputy director of Nursing. There were no motorman jobs in Santa Fe, so despite the initial hope that he would be able to join her and the girls, David remained in New York until his death in 1992.
Deborah and Christel are now grown women with graduate degrees of their own. They are both married with flourishing careers in health care administration in Washington DC and physical therapy in Dallas, respectively. After they came to Santa Fe as children, they spent every summer with their father, so they could stay close to him and be with their cousins, so that they might be part of a larger Black community growing up connected with that part of their heritage (which was never going to happen in Santa Fe, where Blacks even now comprise only about 1% of the population).
This pattern of the girls spending summers in New York was beneficial for the extended family and for their father. The summer pattern also allowed her to take different tours of duty away from the Indian Hospital while the girls were away.
As sensible for everyone as this plan seemed to be, at the end of the day Christine Johnson was still a hard-working single mother in Santa Fe, far from her own family roots. She plunged into church and community life with her whole heart and mind, however, putting down strong new roots that have held fast for decades.
Johnson has done just about every job, and held every office at St. Bede’s, that it is possible to do and hold, (except for church suppers) “I don’t do kitchens” she declares with a grin. She has long been active in the local chapter of the NAACP, she tutors in local schools, and has taught nursing at the community college. She raises money every year for the American Cancer Society. She is a cancer survivor and she has volunteered with at-risk youth at the Santa Fe Mountain Center and served on the board of the local battered women’s shelter. Currently, she helps young people from Santa Fe’s large immigrant population move toward citizenship.
There is a common thread that runs through and unites all that compassionate service. Christine Johnson has a large heart for women, children, young people, for the disenfranchised, and the oppressed. “Whatever I do,” she says, “it’s because it’s important for struggling people to know that other people care about them, and that God loves them.”
Johnson is not a cliché, nor (Heaven knows) a caricature of a gloved-and-hatted-pursed-lipped “church lady.” She is an eagle-eyed and lion-hearted woman who has given her life to God and to the work God has given her to do.
The whole Body of Christ, the communion of saints, and the Episcopal Church are strengthened and enriched by her presence among us. †
— Author Deborah Smith Douglas has known Christine Johnson for more than 30 years, since they met as new members at St. Bede’s Episcopal Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Author of The Praying Life: Seeking God in All Things, Douglas is a writer, retreat leader, spiritual director, and Benedictine oblate.