During church controversy, elder learned to take a stand
John H. Adams, Posted Tuesday, Dec 28, 2004
Matthew A. “Matt” Johnson, a banker in Richmond, Va., is an elder at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, a congregation that has had a history of fiery ordeals.
Grace Covenant’s predecessor congregations date back to the 18th century, but its roots were all that were left after the Union army burned the building to the ground in the Battle of Richmond.
Still, it recovered well, with membership peaking at 1,800 in 1953, when Grace Covenant was the largest Presbyterian congregation in Virginia. It’s been mostly downhill, but the congregation appears to be turning around.
Johnson, who recently became a director of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, is one of those who has gone through a latter-day fiery ordeal at Grace Covenant – this time ignited by a church faction that opposed the preaching of the current pastor, the Rev. James C. “Jim” Goodloe IV, who arrived at Grace Covenant in 1997.
He began to preach Christ-centered, Biblically grounded sermons, and some in the congregation objected strongly and sought Goodloe’s ouster. He was sharply criticized for opposing efforts to repeal the denomination’s “fidelity/chastity” ordination requirement.
Johnson, the clerk of the session at the time, was one of a handful of elders (“We were always outvoted 14-4”) who supported Goodloe, but mostly quietly. Then he started getting phone calls at home from disgruntled members. He recalls one in particular from an elderly woman.
She was angry and part of the faction that wanted to oust Goodloe. Johnson said he angrily repeated some of the Sunday school lessons he had heard from the late John Leith, who taught the class. Leith, who died in 2002, was one of the most influential Reformed scholars in the denomination.
Matthew A. ‘Matt’ Johnson
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“John Leith had said there were times when you had to tell people that the church is not a social club,” Johnson said. “There are times when you have to say no. John Leith said the easiest thing for anyone to say on a session is yes.”
Thus, Johnson faced his own test of having to take a stand. He said he told the woman she was wrong, that the faction she was listening to was wrong. And, as the conversation became heated, he hung up on her, immediately feeling guilty about being so brusque.
Remarkably, he added, “The next time I saw her, she told me, ‘You changed my life.’” He had won her over. “She became very supportive after that.”
Taking a stand was not exactly where Johnson thought he was headed. He was raised in a Christian home and his parents were charter members of First Presbyterian Church in Pearland, Texas. His father, who died in 1976, was an elder and clerk of session.
His mother remarried in 1979, Johnson’s senior year in high school, and moved with her husband to Florida. Johnson remained in Pearland with the family of First Presbyterian’s minister. “That time gave me a good insight into the life of ministers,” he says.
But it would be years before that deeper understanding of the ministry began to take hold. At Georgia Tech, which he attended under a work-study program that enabled him to pay for his education, Johnson said he rarely went to church.
After graduating from Georgia Tech in 1986, he moved to Richmond in 1987.
A bachelor then, he found a place to live near Grace Covenant. He was soon back in the fold – joining Grace Covenant in 1987, ordained as an elder in 1989 and serving as clerk of session from 1998 to 2002.
His faith grew as he heard Leith and, more recently, Ben Lacy Rose. Both of these men served on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in Richmond and taught Sunday school classes at Grace Covenant. Johnson is now Rose’s substitute teacher.
Goodloe “enjoyed a brief honeymoon period with our congregation that ended when a minority of the members began to oppose and attack his ministry publicly and privately,” Johnson said. “Confrontation was forced on me, and it was the first time I had to take a stand in the church to uphold the Confessions, our Book of Order and Biblical authority.”
The flare-ups at Grace Covenant appear to have ended. After a half-century of annual membership losses – from 1,800 to the current 463 – the congregation has begun to rebound. “This year, for the first time in many years, we will have more baptisms than funerals,” Goodloe says.
Goodloe counts Johnson as a close friend and a strong ally in the ministry of the congregation, which is one of 1,306 Confessing Churches in the Presbyterian Church (USA). “He is bright, clear-thinking … and he takes a stand,” Goodloe said.
Johnson no longer lives in the Grace Covenant neighborhood. He, his wife, Mary Beth Johnson, a public school teacher, and their two daughters live in Chester, Va., a 25- to 30-minute ride from the historic Monument Avenue section of Richmond.
But it’s not too far to drive to take a stand.