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First Person is produced in cooperation with the Far East Broadcasting Company, who rejoice in the stories of changed lives through the power of Jesus Christ. Learn more at febc.org. Twenty years as a helicopter pilot, I thought, what am I going to do with this in the real world, so to speak? And, you know, the structure of the Marine Corps is all about mentoring and investing in the next generation, and that plays perfectly into what we do in the church. ♪
Welcome to First Person, where you're going to meet a former Marine helicopter pilot who is now committed to a spiritual discipleship ministry. K.J. Johnson is our guest, and we'll meet him in just a moment.
Thanks for joining us this week. First Person, made possible by the Far East Broadcasting Company, is a look into the lives of people who have given their lives to Jesus Christ and His purposes for them. We've told hundreds of stories, and they are all available for listening as a podcast by using just about any podcast app. You can also listen anytime at our website, firstpersoninterview.com. We're also found online on social media at facebook.com slash firstpersoninterview.
The man we'll meet today, K.J. Johnson, is the director of the C.S. Lewis Institute in Chicago. We'll learn more about this organization and its purpose, but we'll also hear K.J.'s personal story of faith.
He joined me in the studio recently, and we began by talking about his calling. Well, what he's calling me to do today is the call that's been on my life for about the past 10 or 12 years now. As I was phasing out of my previous career, I really felt a call into ministry, but I felt a clear non-call associated with that. I really felt...
that the Lord was saying, pastoral ministry is not for you, at least not right now. I feel a tug on that now and then. But my heart has always been towards discipleship. And it comes from my own journey of wondering why at phases in my life I struggled
And I realized that I had never really had anyone fully disciple me. And so I went on a journey on that in my late 30s. And when I did experience that, that's when I felt God calling me into full-time ministry to help other people be discipled as well.
Okay, and you do that now by working with the C.S. Lewis Institute. That's right. The C.S. Lewis Institute was founded by two men, one of whom knew Lewis, and their vision was not to make more fans of Lewis, but to make more people like Lewis. So our tagline, if you will, is Discipleship of Heart and Mind. And so what we try to do is build people up in Christ. Of course, we help them cultivate the mind of Christ, and we read great stuff. And it's not just C.S. Lewis, but we also—
It's a very relational ministry where we pair people with mentors and place them in discipleship groups. And I'm actually a product of that program myself. That's what transformed my life. And when I had that experience, it was sort of, I'm dating myself here, but like an old V8 moment where you hit yourself in the head and go, oh, I could have a V8. I kind of hit myself in the head and had an aha moment, like,
This isn't that hard. We shouldn't have to struggle with discipleship, but I think for a variety of reasons, the church has wrestled with this, and my heart is to help the church to do it better and help individuals who are languishing in their spiritual lives. We'll circle back on that. I really do want to talk more about that, but I want to hear your story.
Because did you grow up in a Christian home? I grew up in a pseudo-Christian home. And by and large, I would say it was Christian. My mother was Christian. My grandmother was Christian. My grandmother was a big part of my life. My father would say he was, but he was really more of a practicing Buddhist. Really? Yes. This is in Chicago. This is in Chicago. I grew up in the north side of Chicago, the Edgewater community, right on the lake. My father was a big...
big part of the Chicago Buddhist temple. Later on in life, he traveled to Thailand to study, but he would have also considered himself Christian. And he made sure that my brother and I went to church. He just didn't go with us. And my, and so I grew up at Moody church. Yeah. My claim to fame was I was there during the Wiersbe years. Wiersbe baptized me when I was seven there. It's been all good years at Moody church, but those were great years. Those were. Yeah. And my, but my grandmother had this long lasting legacy of,
And a few years ago, when Moody celebrated their 150th and did a table coffee book, she had a page there because she, they, before they remodeled, the nursery was actually named after my grandmother. So I feel in some ways like Timothy, who has this legacy of these women. My mother followed in that and made sure we went to church. So I would say generally, yes, I grew up in a Christian home, even though my father wasn't necessarily reinforcing those things. Did you become a Christian then as a child? I don't know a time where I didn't believe. Okay.
I feel like in that sense, yes, I always believed in the triune God and the divinity of Christ. It was just a matter of having that sink more deeply in my heart. I have a clear memory of being at the old Moody Church summer camp, Camp Mayoka, one summer and wrestling with it and a friend of mine just helping me navigate what it truly means to be saved and to follow Christ. And that's when I feel like I really, okay, I get it now.
Yeah. Okay. So when it came time then to launch into life, what path did you take? I went to the University of Illinois for college. And my original desire was to be an astronaut, believe it or not. But I'm not smart enough to be an astronaut. And we didn't have the internet, so I didn't know that you really should go after an engineering degree. But I did know being a pilot would help.
And so I had gotten a contract with the U.S. Marine Corps, an air contract, so that when I would graduate from college, I would get a commission and go in as an officer and go to flight school. So that was my attempt in that direction. So you enlisted in the Marines. Right. And they...
Eventually, that's going to lead to flight school. It did for you? So I... Well, technically, I didn't enlist. What I did was I accepted a commission outside of college. So once I graduated, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant and...
went to my Marine training and then went down to Pensacola, Florida, where all Navy, Coast Guard, Marine Corps do flight training. It's where Top Gun starts and that kind of stuff. And so I did that for several years and I ended up as a helicopter pilot. And so I spent 20 years in the Marine Corps. I didn't make it as far as I would like, but I had a blast. I saw the world. I flew in
the outback of Australia. I've flown in Thailand. I've flown in Yemen and, you know, in places all over the world that are beautiful. In that service, did you encounter hostility of any kind? I have served in combat. My final deployment was in Afghanistan. But actually, what I like to think mostly about is the thing I did the most is I did three humanitarian missions.
And so I know we focus on a lot of the combat years, but there were a lot of humanitarian crises in my time. The biggest one being that 2004 tsunami. And so I spent three and a half months out there bringing in relief to Bandache, which is on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Incredible experience. It was incredible. And to see how that tsunami just rewrote the coastline, it didn't match, the terrain didn't match the maps anymore. Right.
and just being able to help people. And then a couple in the Philippines. So I like to think that, I like to think of those good times rather than the others. And was your faith active and strong during those years in the service and flying these missions? The latter half, so I was in for 20 years. The last 10 years, more so than the first 10. Because what I did when I went to college is I did what the typical Christian kid did. I went through what I called my seven years of hedonism, where I didn't reject my faith. I just conveniently set it aside and,
and tried to sow wild oats. And when I was three years in the Marine Corps, my longtime girlfriend, who I'd started dating at Moody Church, we finally got married, had a kid, and that will sober you up in a lot of ways. And I realized I was responsible for the spiritual formation of this family. And I got serious quickly, but I struggled because I'd never really been discipled.
Yeah, that's incredible. Joe, as you know, is the producer of this program and is listening to you right now.
And we all love Joe, and he's doing that now at Cook County Jail. Yeah. One of the toughest spots in the city. So we thank God for him. But I did want to ask you about those people who discipled you, but Joe was one. Was there anybody else? I mean, your pastor, of course, you were under his ministry. Yeah, but Moody Church was really large. And Pastor Lutzer came in when I was 10 years old. So my exposure to Pastor Lutzer was limited. There were
what I like to say during those years, because I was very active both in the youth group, I worked at the church as a janitor, so I was there a lot in the off hours. That's how I really got to know Joe. And then I spent all my summers at the camp. I was always in good Christian community. And so I liken it to sort of secondhand smoke. When I was in that community, I was always in the straight and narrow. Exactly what you mean, yeah. Yeah. But when I was in
When I was in college, I didn't have that anymore. And I realized, one, I'd never heard of InterVarsity or Crew or any of these campus ministries. I just didn't know they existed. I went to one church and it was a...
a theologically out in left field you know kind of church and i realized uh i don't need to go there and but so i never went to church and i drifted and but what i did know is i knew other christians and i never got together with them and so that's part of if i'd been discipled to look for other christians and i could have been you know um
Elise Strobel or someone like that, but it doesn't matter how smart you are when it comes to theology and apologetics. Peer pressure is tremendous. And so finding other believers would have been really vital for me. So you get married and you start a family and you're very intentional then about discipleship. What did you do? Who did you seek out? Well, apologetics at that time was experiencing a resurgence. And so I started getting into that and that was helpful, um,
It's what I call my Romans 12-2 moment. I started to engage my mind in a way that I had never had. Up until that point, I was a very lazy student. Never had bad grades, but I just never applied myself. So that was a beginning, but that was still my effort. And I went on a journey looking for it, and I was praying for someone to disciple me. And I had a few what I call near misses, and I think...
You know, Oz Guinness says contrast is the mother of clarity. I think God showed me some instances of what it wasn't supposed to be like so that when I found it, I would be more confident. And actually, it kind of...
feeds right into what I'm doing now. I found the C.S. Lewis Institute and the man then who was the president, Tom Terrence, just like Joe, took an interest in me and they happened to have this program and I jumped in and he was my mentor and he's been my mentor for nearly 20 years now. I mean, when my father died, he's the first guy, after my brother, the first guy I called. We'll continue meeting K.J. Johnson and learn about the C.S. Lewis Institute in Chicago coming up on First Person.
Hi, I'm Ed Cannon. And as you know, situations around the world are changing quickly. Stay current with FEBC's ministry and get a deeper understanding of people who need to find hope. Hear how you can feel the pulse of God's Spirit moving through the hearts of believers dedicated to reaching the lost. Be sure you join me for the podcast until all have heard. Discover how the gospel is making a difference around the world.
Search for Until All Have Heard on your favorite podcast platform or hear it online at febc.org. My guest is Carl Johnson. You go by KJ, though, right? Everybody calls me KJ. Okay. If your mom's listening, we want everyone to know that it is Carl. Yes. Thank you.
But let's pick up your story then. You begin to get discipled, get serious about God's Word. Did a hunger develop for God's Word then? Oh, a hunger in general. So the funny thing is, in college I was an English major. The irony is I hated reading. I loved to write, but I'm a typical Gen X slacker generation. I just was always looking for the easy way out, but I always thought reading was...
not fun. And when I had that Romans 12, two moment, I could not stop reading. I was reading the word. I was reading Christian apologetics, everything I could get my hand on. And you wouldn't find me without a book in my hand. And I remember after about two and a half years, one day, my wife said, why do you always carry a book around? And I realized I told her, I go, well,
I think this is a phase, and I want to get in as much as I can before I go back to, before it wears off. But after about two and a half, three years, I realized this is not a phase. This is new normal. So I was devouring everything I could, and I felt like I was making up for lost time. So a hunger for the Word, a discipler came along, and Tom, that helped. Take me through the rest of the story then. What happened?
So I discovered the C.S. Lewis Institute first because they were hosting apologetics event. And so I went there and a friend of mine who was an old Vietnam vet said, find Tom, tell him you're a Marine. He loves Marines. And so I was still active duty at the time. And I did just that. I know how to follow orders. And I went to every single one of their events over the course of almost a year. And he just took an interest in me the same way Joe did. And
and just kept talking to me in the margins and finding out about my story, giving me little bits of advice when I asked for it. And then one day he just invited me into their discipleship program, the C.S. Lewis Fellows Program. And at that time I'd heard about it, I just didn't know how to get into it. And he just simply said, you should consider our fellows program. And I just said,
How high? You tell me to jump. And I did that, and he was my mentor in the program. It's a year-long program that's biblically based. Sure, we read C.S. Lewis, but we read a lot of people, Tozer and things like that. And he invested in me over the course of a year.
and I was in some discipleship groups with other men. And I was not only reading, but now I was in focused reading where every month, I like to say we marinate in it. Every month was around a theme. So everything we read, scripture and non-biblical were all reinforcing whatever the theme was. And by the end of the year, I had a much firmer grasp of what the Christian life should look like. And that's where my aha moment came. And I just thought, this isn't that hard. Why have I struggled my whole life?
And so my journey and my calling is to share this with everybody now. Mm-hmm.
The word that keeps popping in my head is intentional. You were very intentional about it. You took action. And that is a word I underscore when I teach on discipleship, because there's, you know, what Joe Carlson did with me is a very informal. I didn't ask him to disciple me. He didn't ask me if I wanted to. He just poured into me. It was natural. It was natural, but he was intentional. And as you know Joe, he's intentional in all of his relationships. And so I'll say you can be formal, you can be informal.
It can take so many forms, but you've got to be intentional about helping people go deeper into Jesus Christ. Okay. So now you're the director of the C.S. Lewis Institute in Chicago. That's right. How many people participate and what do you do?
Yeah, so I was involved. So I had orders and I left D.C. where the Institute was and I was on their board for a few years. And then when I came back to Chicago to go to seminary, they asked me to start the Chicago office. And so here in Chicago, we probably have about 20, 25 people a year go through our discipleship program. How do you identify them?
They apply. I mean, I pray and ask the Lord to raise up the right men and women, and he always does. And we stress the call of God. You know, people say, what's it take to get in the program? Say, we have an application process. But I tell them, this is really just a mutual discernment processing. Is this what God's calling you to do this year? You have a way of measuring their intentionality. There's that word again. Sure. Yeah. If...
So the great scholar Mike Wilkins said that there are two prerequisites to discipleship, cost and commitment. And you see all throughout the Gospels, Christ is calling people to count the cost and then make a commitment. And some people step up, some people walk away. And that's basically what's built into our program is we invite people to come in, we tell them what the commitment is, and then we just ask them to commit to it. Yeah. Why C.S. Lewis? So, yeah, that's a great question.
So one of the founders who started the institute had been friends with Lewis. He'd been friends with him for about eight years in Oxford. He's a Brit. And his vision was that C.S. Lewis, Walter Hooper says it best, he never saw a more thoroughly converted man. And Lewis was so sold out for Jesus Christ that it impacted every area of his life. A lot of people don't know this, but he started something called an Agape Fund. And predominantly all of, if not all,
of his proceeds from his books went into the Agape Fund and he gave most of it away. I didn't know that. He could have, it's sort of like J.K. Rowling today with Harry Potter giving away most of the proceeds from that.
Using C.S. Lewis, it puts a human face on this, but obviously that's not the point of the whole thing. The whole thing is about Christ. That's right. Becoming a disciple of Christ. I joke that he's our patron saint, but really like a launch pad. But if he becomes an obstacle to seeing Christ more clearly, we put him aside. So we're not all things Lewis. We're all things Jesus Christ. Paul said, imitate me as I imitate Christ. I sometimes jokingly say, we just updated the image a little bit because Paul,
Paul was a first century Jew. Lewis is a little bit more accessible in what it might look like. Yeah, understood. Do you read a lot of C.S. Lewis then in the discipleship program? We read a fair amount, but it's probably not even 25% of what we read. We read a smattering of Christian classics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer on discipleship, A.W. Tozer, Andrew Murray, Paul.
We try to read it from a variety of disciplines, too. It's a very non-denominational, we kind of call it interdenominational setting, so we're not pushing a particular Presbyterian or Baptist point of view. It covers the basis, so to speak, then. Yeah. Yeah, okay.
So tell me some stories of people who have gone through the program, people who are in the program. What kind of difference does it make in a person's life to have this kind of in-depth study about becoming a disciple of Christ? Oh, well, I'll tell you a story about somebody who was in my class, and this is, again, about 15 years ago.
He worked for the Department of Justice. This is when I was in DC area. And he was very – he's the person who introduced me to the International Justice Mission, IJM. Took us to the annual banquet. First time I'd heard Gary Haugen speak. Incredible. I was like, where's this guy? Ben, he went on to found the Human Trafficking Institute. Right.
And they produce an annual report that – I think I have this correct. It's the first and only government-recognized report on human trafficking globally. So they complement the work of IJM, and they raise up people in this industry. Another guy in that same class has gone on to work with another organization and found one that helps combat human trafficking. In the name of Christ. In the name of Christ, exactly. And then, you know, we have –
Stay at home moms in the program people who are in finance we have all walks of life I had a class here in Chicago where the youngest was 22 and the oldest was 82 so you know intergenerational interdominant denominational interracially but in our very first class we had a very high-powered smart guy and he came to me at the end of the year and he goes you know what I'm a better father and
I said, well, why does that surprise you? He goes, there's nothing about parenting in this program. I said, well, it's discipleship. You spent a year becoming more like Christ. Why wouldn't you be a better parent? He said, you're right. I go, you're going to be a better husband too.
So there are a lot of stories like that. I think one more would be we do a service project as part of it. It's the month we focus on what we call living a life of love and obedience. And rather than just teach on it, we want to go exercise it, go to a place like Pacific Garden Mission or even to the Lower Wacker and serve there.
And a gal in Washington, D.C. is the one who set the tone for me. She was running the project when I was going through the program. And she told a story where I think it was Washington Circle where a lot of homeless in D.C. hang out. And on the weekends, a lot of charities come and give out sandwiches and things. And she was sitting on a bench talking to a homeless man for about 20, 25 minutes. And at the end, she said, I feel really bad. I said, well, why, honey? He goes, I'm out of sandwiches. I have nothing to give you.
And I said, dear, don't worry about that. There's someone here giving us that all the time. You gave me something way more valuable. You've given me your time and talked to me like I'm a human. And that ended up encouraging her to leave the affluent white suburbs and move to the inner city to teach in schools. So it's those kinds of heart changes, and then we can live out Christ. Yeah.
If someone wants to get involved, we'll put information, of course, in our program notes about getting involved. But what kind of commitment are we making to get involved in an intentional disciple-making program like this? It's simply committing to come to the meetings, read what we're reading. We live in an age where people don't like to read anymore, so that seems very intimidating. Phil Yancey wrote a great article years ago called The Death of Reading. People get scared of reading, but it's not an academic program.
So they commit to doing the assignments and meeting with us for a year. They get a mentor and they get a very vibrant community.
And they commit to being a part. It's a participatory program. So they commit to participating and not just sort of being a spectator or observer. How large are the classes? It varies depending on who God brings. But usually we're around 20, 25. Okay. So it's a working size group. It is. It is. It allows you to be personal with each other. Men and women. So usually it's about 12 men. We usually have a little bit more women, like 15 women. And so they do break down by gender into small groups and things like that.
Well, KJ, it's great to hear your story and how God has called you to this. Did you ever see yourself do anything like this when you were flying those missions? No. I mean, 20 years as a helicopter pilot and weapons and tactics guy, I thought, what am I going to do with this in the real world, so to speak? And, you know, the structure of the Marine Corps is all about mentoring and investing in the next generation. And that plays perfectly into what we do in the church.
It certainly does. Once again, we've learned from K.J. Johnson that God doesn't waste our experiences, but uses them to prepare us for service in His kingdom. Our first-person guest has been K.J. Johnson, who is director of Chicago's C.S. Lewis Institute, dedicated to equipping disciples of Jesus Christ. There's more about this ministry through links you'll find at FirstPersonInterview.com.
Making Disciples is also the calling of the Far East Broadcasting Company, who is committed to reaching the world for Christ via radio and new media. In addition to introducing the Saving Gospel message, FEBC also trains and equips listeners with God's Word, helping come alongside the church in reaching deep into local culture. For more, please visit febc.org. Now, with thanks to my friend and producer, Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Join us next time for First Person.