HaMoreh Ministries and Dr. Jamie Johns

Jamie Johns is a bundle of contradictions. He is a language professor who was kicked out of school. He is an American who prefers Africa. He is a missionary who has no love for religious dogma or doctrine. He is a man who, while very clearly living in the moment, spends a great deal of his time cementing a legacy.

The boy who was to grow into Dr. James L. Johns was born in Georgia to a liberal atheist mother and an alcoholic, mostly disinterested father. Eventually his father wandered away altogether and young Jamie's family centered on himself, his two younger sisters, and his mother. A self-described "momma's boy," his tumultuous childhood was filled with the usual small boy misbehaviors that soon escalated to the point of his being kicked out of elementary school in the second grade. Though he was able to complete his primary education at another school, this incident set the stage for things to come.

As an adolescent, Jamie found his way into newer and bigger troubles. He was again thrown out of school in the eighth grade. He became friendly with a fast and wild crowd, discovering drugs and alcohol and the power they held. He learned quickly of the destruction associated with his chosen lifestyle when a close friend was killed on the way home from a party. However, this incident didn't seem to faze Jamie. He continued much as he had before.

What is interesting about this time in Jamie's life is that he was a successful student even though he was becoming increasingly involved with drugs. In his words, “I figured out that I wanted to get rich so that I could have more stuff. To get rich I needed to go to college.” Even now, decades later, it is completely believable that Jamie was simply able to decide not to allow his drug use to become a problem. He radiates an aura of self-control, especially evidenced when he speaks. He speaks slowly, obviously choosing each word carefully rather than allowing his thoughts to simply burst forth. He sometimes searches several seconds for the precise term he needs. A conversation with Jamie Johns does not flow the way a normal one does. It is something more stilted, yet completely organic.

The next chapter of Jamie’s life could have been an episode of any popular teen drama. He excelled in college, was hired on by one of the most high-profile accounting firms in the world, and began to make huge sums of money almost immediately. Along the way, a whirlwind romance with an equally impressive young lady led to marriage and the quintessential yuppie lifestyle, complete with a luxury condo, a maid - and all the cocaine you could ingest. Jamie describes how he met his wife, Mimi: “I was asked by a friend if I was man enough, and for ten dollars, would I ask her out? She was a sassy, loud aggressive chick. On a Friday night we went out, three weeks later we were engaged.“

This “sassy, loud, aggressive chick” is a far cry from the pixyish woman who greeted me at the door this morning, wearing flannel pajamas and apologizing for being behind schedule. The woman who kept me company while we waited for Jamie to begin this story is a quiet, kind-looking woman whose smile betrays a hint of mischief. She is lovely, she is patient, and she is genuinely sweet, but sassy she is not. She is, however, a huge part of the rest of Jamie’s story. It was Mimi who inadvertently changed Jamie’s life. She did it by almost dying.

Early into Jamie and Mimi’s marriage, things were rocky. Jamie’s drug use had escalated and both he and Mimi wandered away from each other, focused on their careers and attracting the attention of other young professionals on the fast track. They considered divorce, and had gone so far as to initiate a separation when Mimi was involved in a horrible car accident that put her into a coma for three and a half months.

At the time, Jamie’s father, long estranged, had recently died from liver failure. In fact, Jamie was leaving his father’s deathbed when Mimi was hurt. To add to the pain, Jamie’s mother died from cancer while Mimi remained in the hospital. For Jamie, there were no longer any feelings. He was numb. He describes this time in his life as though everything was on hold. He managed to get a job transfer to be closer to Mimi and her family. He sold his luxury condo and moved into a back bedroom with his in-laws, who knew all about the state of his marriage to their daughter at the time of her accident. All of a sudden, nothing really mattered anymore. He was “just existing.”

Then Mimi woke up. Jamie describes it this way: “On a Thursday night, Mimi started to speak. She cried for a while, her left side came awake before her right side. She started to articulate, to cry … but her first full phrase any of us remember, she asked her mom, ‘Mama, Jesus still loves me doesn’t he?’ and I was just undone.” Jamie had never heard Mimi mention Jesus before. Sure, they had married in a church to make her parents happy, (he grins, remembers faking his way through the pastor’s questions) but that was as nominally Christian as Mimi had ever claimed to be. He thought she had walked away from the church long ago. Yet here she was, asking about Jesus. Just when he thought life had become strange enough.

Mimi continued to talk about Jesus. As she struggled, as she worked to relearn how to eat, how to control her body, how to read, her primary focus remained on her relationship with Jesus. When she was well enough, she went to church. She spoke to her pastor. She asked her mother to read to her from her Bible. That winter, she asked her mother to go to the store and buy another Bible – so that she could give it to Jamie as a Christmas gift. As Mimi became more able, Jamie began to drive the family to church. At first he waited in the car. Eventually he began to sit in the back of the church, listening to the words of the same pastor who had performed his wedding to Mimi. It was at this point that, as Jamie puts it, “the old man began loving on me.” The pastor began to make up excuses to visit Jamie at work, claiming to need assistance with some insignificant church business, but "It was obvious to me that he just wanted to talk. And he looked so religious, with his little New Testament in his pocket. So earnest. But the conversation would always end this way: ‘Do you know that Jesus loves you?’ And I just said ‘I appreciate your care for me, I don’t doubt that you believe that, but … no.’”

Determined, Mimi’s pastor kept visiting, and Jamie started responding. First with anger, then with questions. “I didn’t make sense of any of it – much – but the sincerity of the effort and the integrity of his person really got into me. And he kept after me, and I remember the first Saturday morning of October 1987 we were on his back porch and he was doing what he did, loving me, and he asked me again and I said ‘No. I now believe in the basic story, and that you have faith in this God-man Jesus person, and that these other ones, Mimi, her family, you’re all there. But I don’t believe that this God-person would forgive me, take care of me, you still don’t get it.’ And this pastor, he just broke down and said ‘No, you don’t get it. I love you. It has nothing to do with you, just like how God loves you. He just loves you.’”

Somehow, that was enough for Jamie: “So that day, I asked … prayed … I said ‘Hey, Jesus-God thing. I will trust that you love me. I do believe. Just like you love this pastor. I believe your love for me is real, true. I’ll just try it and see what happens.’ Just like that. I went to church the next morning.” Jamie believed.

As conversion stories go, Jamie’s is not particularly dramatic. It was what began to unfold after his conversion that makes Jamie remarkable. Jamie believed enough to go to seminary. In fact, Jamie believed enough to go to seminary and earn his doctorate, along with a slew of master’s degrees in divinity, theology, and biblical studies. Jamie learned Greek and Hebrew, the better to understand the Bible. Jamie’s exceptional mind, once focused on dollar signs and “stuff,” was now focused on absorbing every aspect of the Divine, and sharing it with others. He became a pastor himself, pastoring churches in Tennessee and Louisiana, then finally a professor of language at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where he was perfectly content to remain, so he thought. But it was not to be. Through the University, he met two students from Nairobi, Kenya and their Canadian mentor who was headed back there to teach the New Testament at an African college during the summer. “She challenged me,” relates Jamie with a smile, “She said to me, ‘So you think you’re a teacher? Come to Africa. See what you can do with students who are actually excited about learning.’” So Jamie agreed to travel to Daystar University in Nairobi for a summer. It was there that he fell in love for the second time in his life.

"It was just absolutely amazing, the people that we met, the students that I was with, to watch the people do so much with so little … to get a sense of the worldview of an African was just amazing, stunning. I was overwhelmed.” At this little college, students were bussed in from rural villages, from slums like Kibera (where half a millions squatters live in squalor in an area the size of Central Park) risking their lives, in some cases, to get to this university and to learn about the message of the Bible.

When Jamie and Mimi returned from Africa, he immediately gave notice that he would soon be returning as a missionary. He began the arduous process to become appointed by the International Mission Board and returned with Mimi to Nairobi to await his official appointment. Upon his return, though, he had a realization: “It became clear to me that if we moved here and lived here, they (the African students) would get the rest of our lives, but … that’s all they would get.” Not content with giving only the rest of their lives to needy Africans, Jamie and Mimi began to formulate a plan, one that would allow Jamie to teach as much as possible, but also to travel frequently back and forth between the continents, trying to (in his words) “infect” as many other people as possible with the love and joy found in bringing Christianity to Africa. Why Africa? Perhaps because, in an age when Christians must ask themselves what Jesus would do, it could be argued he’d be doing just this. “In the West, we have become a post-Christian, postmodern society. If one would look around the world, the emerging Christian communities would be in areas of persistent suffering. The poor, the needy were always the preferred audience of those who brought this faith. From the founders to the early authors, it seems to be long forgotten in this culture that there is actually a preference, a priority in caring and being with and loving the poor and the needy. “

So now Jamie and Mimi have a plan. They have organized a ministry which they have named HaMoreh, which translated means “the teacher.” For now, Jamie plans to “go back and forth and ‘infect’ people around here to respond with resources, time, books, other equipment, computers, volunteers, teachers, money ….” He is also trying to spend more time building relationships in Kenya, working on finances and resources. He wants to build a library there, and in fact his living room is currently dominated by stacks of volumes which will soon be dedicated to his students, who must currently sign out tattered textbooks for two hour blocks of time when they wish to study. HaMoreh has already begun making a difference in the lives of Africans for the last few summers, and in doing so has touched the lives of its American volunteers as well.

In the end, though, Jamie wants to serve what he believes to be his higher purpose. “This really is about the fact that I think there is no better or higher way to make God happy than by doing what we are doing. The best I can ever do is to be happy. I think that as a spiritual child of God, he is happy when he sees that I am happy. I am happy when I am enjoying the opportunity to just freely give to someone who might be happy as a result of whatever it is I can contribute to them. I think in anything that increases another’s joy is where we want to be. My medium happens to be education. I hope to empower people with joy. At the end, we’re not going to be in our bodies anymore. We won’t have any stuff; all of our stuff is just a tool. I want to leave tools. We are pouring ourselves into other people. We are loving people through time, resources, and care. I am one guy, but if I can find something I love to do, I’m thinking that it is meaningful enough that there are younger people who will love it, too. Long term, I’m training younger ones to do what I’m doing. I am having fun trying to give some tools to people. That’s why I do what I do.”

Jamie Johns may be “just one guy," but he is one special guy. In an age where too many churches are spreading the wealth, he is doing his best to spread the truth about the love of Jesus Christ for all of mankind. Jamie Johns loves you. Consider yourself infected.

written by Kathy Wormhoudt