Ian Johnson

"Ian Johnson is a Christian author who earns his living as a research paralegal." This is roughly how the career experts say my biographical sketch should begin.  My story, they say,  should begin with me, and draw the attention of people (and robots) to my name.  But, in truth, nothing about my story begins with me.  My story ultimately both begins, and ends, in God, who created me for His own purpose.  It also passes, at every point, through my Savior, Jesus Christ, who has been with me, sustaining me even when I did not know Him, forgiving my many sins, and offering me entrance into His Kingdom, even when I was foolishly trying to build my own.  Make no mistake, I have spent plenty of time trying to build my own kingdoms—castles in the air—and have had some notable human achievements while I was doing so.  Though I was diagnosed as mentally retarded in Kindergarten, I graduated from Wichita State University a mere fourteen years later, with two degrees, Magna Cum Laude.  A few years after that, I graduated “with high distinction” (i.e., in the top 15% of my class) from the University of Iowa College of Law.  If I were a gambler, I’d wager I’m the only retarded person you know who graduated in the top 15% of his class at a top-20 law school. (Please, no jokes about dumb lawyers!)   But God’s real direction for my life, my passion now, is the building of His Kingdom in my life and that of others. I was ordained to the ministry of the Gospel in 1995 by Randel Ministries, Inc, and spent a time as a part-time volunteer pastor of a church in that organization.  I have also exercised various lay roles in churches.  But, more specifically, I am interested in the unity of the Church, the one Body of Christ. To that end, I have co-authored a book:  Ian Johnson and Lauston Stephens, “Our Oneness in Christ” (ISBN 1424160359), and am a major contributor to the Christian-oneness.org website. I am presently in the process of re-writing my contribution to that book, in a manner that is more rigorous and, hopefully, easier to read.  I am also the author of the Place of Repentance blog.  My principal calling appears to be teaching—through scholarship and writing, though I am also open to speaking—in the service of God’s Kingdom, though He presently supports me through secular employment as a paralegal. Beyond this, there is another gift I am just now beginning to have the boldness to confess having been given, much less to now belately start to lr]earn to use. At the end of my academic career, at the University of Kansas, a time when my studies were running out of money and sanity, I met one of the most important people in my life here on earth, our friend Regina Oliveira, who helped us--my wife and I--in our time of greatest crisis and set me, slowly and timidly, on the right course in my life.  I haven't heard from Regina since 1991, and now suspect she may have been an angel. Hebrews 13:2. Her last instructions to me were that I was not to try to repay her, but I was to pass on to others what she had done for us.  Years later, at the ceremony for my licensure to the ministry by Randel Ministries in 1994, I was given, by prophecy and laying on of hands, a gift of healing for the mentally, emotionally and spiritually ill, a gift I didn't understand at the time, but which was confirmed at my ordination a year later. This is a gift which I have only now, 20 years later, been beginning to understand how to prepare to use, and to fan into flame and start using. More on this later!  

Memberships: Triple Nine Society, Mensa USA Interests & Activities: Family, history, philosophy, Bible, Christian theology, Christian unity, healing, interfaith issues, recovery, cosmology, abstract physics, square dancing, legal reform.