Fifteen-minute read. A shorter version of this interview is also available.
As an 11-year-old in Barbados, Deon K. Johnson — now the Rt. Rev. Deon K. Johnson — felt drawn to a sacramental life.
“Our parish church was always open, and it was just down the street from my school, so I was that kid after school who would find myself in the church standing behind the altar and acting what I saw on Sunday morning, so it kind of began there,” Johnson said.
A sense of call solidified during the process of confirmation, but Johnson still resisted for years, only to be encouraged forward by a village of advisers.
Since becoming the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri during COVID, Johnson’s ministry has come to include a practice of writing daily prayers that he shares through social media. And, as the diocese’s first bishop who is Black, openly gay and an immigrant, he has recently spoken publicly, including with NPR, about a traumatic year for his family. In 2024, his husband, who was born in Mexico but came to the U.S. as a young child, was separated from Johnson and their son and daughter as part of the federal immigration crackdown.
Johnson spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Aleta Payne about his ministry, life and family, as well as the crucial role the church can play as America’s 250th birthday is observed. The following is an edited transcript.
Faith & Leadership: Would you tell us about your call story?
Deon K. Johnson: Confirmation in Barbados takes about a year, because what they really want you to do is to make sure that this is what you’re committing yourself to but [also] to find out what your place in ministry looks like.
The priest at the time insisted that we had to go and be engaged in every single ministry of the church, because he really wanted us to figure out, Where’s your place in this faith community? I was an impetuous child that looked at them and said, “I want your job.” But in many ways, I also resisted answering this call.
It’s biblical in some ways. God calls, we say, “Yeah, yeah, not me,” and God wins.
That’s what’s happened in my life. I immigrated to the United States when I was about 14 and continued to just say, “Hey, church is important to me, but I’ll go get a job out in the world, and at some point I will think about this whole ordination thing.”
I went off to college, and it was there that I finally began to come out to myself. At that time in the late ’90s, early 2000s, we had controversy going on around banning gay marriage and everything, and the church was also continuing to wrestle with all of that.
I said to myself, “Surely this church does not want me.” Yet my priest at the time kept saying to me, “You need to consider going to seminary. I think that God’s calling you to something.” And I kept saying to her, “Thank you, but if God wants me to do this, God will figure it out.”
Her way of letting God figure it out is that she talked to the bishop, and she set up an appointment for me and told me, “Oh, by the way, you’re meeting with the bishop next Wednesday.”
In the back of my mind, I thought, “He’s going to say no, and I’ll just continue with how things are going.”
Strangely enough, I get to that meeting, and he said, “I see a calling.”
I’m like, “What are you talking about?”
F&L: Still trying to talk yourself out of this.
DKJ: I kept trying to talk myself out of it, every step, and at every step someone showed up and said to me, “No, this is what you need to be doing.”
I developed this practice that if people say the same thing to me independently three times, I need to pay closer attention to it. That has served me well throughout my ministry and throughout my life.
When it came time for ordination, I kept going, “OK, God, what do you want? You tell me.” And at every step people have stepped in and said to me, “We really see this in you.” Even when I fight it, they’re able to see it sometimes.
The same thing is true when I became a bishop. There’s a really funny story about allowing my name to go forward to be bishop. I had been in a previous search, and I had said to myself, “Yeah, no, I don’t want to go through that process ever again.”
[Then] one of my friends called me up and said, “Have you seen the profile for the diocese in Missouri?” Another calls me up and says, “Have you looked at Missouri?” I said, “I looked at it. The deadline is too soon. I do not have time to write the essays and fill out the application, because it’s a tedious process. Maybe if they extend the deadline.”
The next week she calls me up and says, “I’m holding you to what you said. Look online. They just extended the deadline until the end of the month.”
I filled out the application, sent all the things in, and this is how it ended. The gift is I’ve had people who at every step have said to me, “You need to respond to this.” It was ironic, coming from a village [in Barbados]; in the village, you think of what’s best for the community rather than what’s just best for me. It really is a community who discerns. It takes a community — it takes a village — to help us actually discern our call, especially when we’re trying, like Jonah, to run away from our call.
F&L: Your family has a history of immigration. You are from Barbados; your husband is from Mexico. You all have gone through a time of trial in this moment of a crackdown on people who have come here as immigrants. Can you talk about your family’s experience?
DKJ: This is a very difficult season no matter where you come from. It is focused on folks coming from the Latin American, Spanish-speaking countries, but it’s affecting everybody.
I am an immigrant, my parents are immigrants, I’m married to an immigrant, and this is our lived reality. With my husband, I have to repeat this often: We were doing everything right. He was brought here as a child, he was approved for DACA, was working, doing all the things, aspiring to that American dream.
We got married, and we filled out all the paperwork. I have advanced degrees, and I can barely get through figuring out the paperwork in English. We’ve done all the paperwork, and everything was filed, and we got a letter saying that we needed to go to Juárez in Mexico for our interview at the U.S. Consulate.
We went to the interview, and the interviewer said to my husband, “You’ve not lived in Mexico for a very long time. I think you need to spend some time there. You may not be going to the United States for a year.”
[Previously] everything had been approved. All of his background checks and everything said, “Here is a model person with children, family, trying to do all the right things.”
The response was, “You’re going to have to stay here for a year.”
We had to quickly figure out going from two incomes to one, [from] having one household to two, taking care of kids, distance. We had to try to figure out how to navigate all of that.
I recognized the privilege that I had in being able to afford to do two households, to be able to get on a plane and all that. A lot of our immigrant siblings don’t have that privilege. There was a lady behind us [at the consulate] from Oklahoma who had driven through a snowstorm to go for her interview, had just had a baby months earlier, and who was told, “You have to stay in Mexico for three years.” Can you imagine having a newborn that you’re not going to see until that baby is three years old? This is how our system is working.
It was a very difficult year for both of us, him being in a place where he had never lived for a significant portion of his life and us on the other side trying to navigate.
At the end of the year, he had to do all of the things [at the consulate] over again. The person who interviewed him said, “Why did you take a year to come for your interview?” He said, “Your colleague told me that I had to stay in the country for a year.” She looked at all of this paperwork and said, “That makes no sense.”
I have to keep emphasizing, I recognize the privilege that I have in being able to do what we did. I think often of folks who don’t have that privilege, whose spouse or son, daughter, brother, sister is in a country where a lot of them have no connection. What’s worse is the family that’s left behind isn’t able to actually go and spend time with those people who have been detained or deported. It was and continues to be something that I’ve been passionate and feel strongly about, just because this isn’t who we should be as a nation.
