In August of 2021 I posted an update which I entitled, “Signing Off.” If you haven’t heard it and are interested you can listen HERE. As I explained in that podcast discussion, my slow walk of obedience from public to more localized service of God and His Church had begun years earlier and had come to a climax in January of 2021 when I stepped down from full-time pastoral ministry and resigned both my credentials and my membership as a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene, a Wesleyan-American Holiness Denomination. But even after that departure, I had not given up on building an online preaching and teaching platform.
I interpreted the conviction I was feeling which led to the “Signing Off” discussion in August of that year as a call to give up that pursuit. And so, from that point forward I stepped away from my attempts to build a preaching and teaching platform online by ceasing to follow the best practices recommended by those who provide advice for building, maintaining, and extending an online presence.
During that same month, the Lord led me to begin attending a small local church near my home with the instruction that I had to be prepared to lead that congregation. In obedience I began attending, and in early December one of the denominational leaders asked me to serve as an interim minister, despite my then having no credentials. I accepted and spent 16 months as the interim minister there.
I am now a month out of that ministry, and the Lord’s call to sign off has deepened. My next steps are to vacate most of social media. For the foreseeable future, I will continue to maintain a YouTube channel, this website, and a podcast. But as of August 1, 2023 I will be departing from all other social media. My hope for what remains of my web presence is that it might serve as a resource for those who are reading through the Bible personally or studying the Bible in small groups. I am currently teaching through the Gospel of Luke, and I will continue to post those lessons on YouTube and on the podcast.
Though my future, especially in terms of paid employment, is unsettled, I am grateful for the Lord’s conviction and call to follow Him into a different way of serving the Church than I had formerly imagined. I and my family are in the process of joining a local church, and we will continue to serve Jesus as members of that local body. I am also editing my previously posted sermons to remove contextual details, exhortations that were specific to a particular congregation at a particular time, and dated illustrations which were meant originally to make the main point more accessible. What remains is the core message of each sermon along with, what I consider to be, less time-constricted applications. Again, I hope that these efforts along with the ongoing teaching episodes will serve the people of God in the days ahead.
It has been nearly seven years since the Lord first began convicting me that the vocation of full-time paid pastoral ministry had been leading me away from the worship of God—that somehow both that vocation and my loyalty to a particular religious tradition within the larger Christian Church which supported it had become idols which were supplanting God in my life. I have found that the Lord is patient with His calling and conviction. If He had asked me to do all He has asked me to do at one time, I wonder if I couldn’t have managed the courage to obey. But by His grace, He has convicted me incrementally and led me one step at a time. This is the next step in that process, and I trust it will not be the last.
Thank you to those who have encouraged me in the teaching and preaching of the Word of God over these nearly twenty-three years of paid pastoral service to the church. As I said, I will continue to provide lessons from the Scriptures, and I will continue to write both on this blog and in books as encouragements to discipleship in our historic and apostolic faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
I remain convinced that we are in a season of God’s call to the Church to repent. I believe that what we are experiencing both nationally and globally are the Lord’s locusts, allowing us to sample the true nature of the world if God were to remove His providential work of creation and governance. During the last 23 years of vocational ministry, I have added my voice to the hundreds of Christian voices over the last five centuries calling the people of God to return to our first love and to the testimonies of those God has chosen to reveal His Word to His people. May those who have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. Godspeed.
J. Thomas Johnson
For those who might be helped by them, below are links to the books I have currently published through Amazon.com. At present, I am working on a treatise on God’s election, God’s Sovereignty, and human free will, which I hope to complete in the next year.