Christian History Home > Issue 79 > Holy Johnson and the Ethiopian Church
Holy Johnson and the Ethiopian Church
Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God, said the Psalm. Yet racism in the mission churches clouded that vision. James Johnson (1836-1917) offered a solution.
Ted Olsen | posted 7/01/2003 12:00AM
This is terrible," James Johnson wrote as European missionaries undercut Bishop Crowther's authority on the Niger Mission. "This insult to him … has incensed the whole native community elsewhere irrespective of denominational distinctions. … There is a limit to patience."
Like Crowther, Johnson was a Yoruba graduate of the Fourah Bay Institution, but it was his parents, not himself as in Crowther's case, who had been rescued from slavery. Johnson himself was born and raised free, in Sierra Leone, and became a catechist at the colony's southernmost village, Kent.
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After two years, Johnson was transferred to the Freetown Grammar School, where he had first been educated. There, he quickly gained a reputation for an intense moral code—which he often imposed on others. He even withheld the dinners of students who hadn't finished their math homework. (For this rigor he became known as "Holy" Johnson.)
Reclaiming a lost legacy
Johnson became a deacon at the influential Pademba Road Church and ...
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