THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP--BRUCE & EUGENIA JOHNSON [M, 11-22-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

“You look lost,” the tall, handsome young man said to me. “I am,” I replied. I’m new here.” “Follow me,” he said. “I’ll get you where you need to be.” That was when I began to learn the difference between good advice and a savior. [1]

Bruce Johnson was the first person I met at Garrett Theological Seminary, at Northwestern U, as I wandered in the hallway looking for the registrar. [2] We graduated together in 1964, and he was appointed to Armitage Ave. Methodist Church, on the near north side of Chicago. On Sept. 29, 1969, Bruce and Eugenia [nee Ransier], his wife, were murdered in their home, stabbed many times, Bruce sitting in his rocking chair and Genie in bed. Their three little children asleep in their beds. The murders of their parents were discovered the next morning, when the letter carrier found the two-year old sitting on the porch steps with blood on his bare feet.

Their murders are still not solved, in part because Chicago officials have shown little interest in doing so.

 

Bruce was a controversial preacher. His congregation was mostly conservative Cuban refugees from Castro. But the neighborhood had a lot of Puerto Rican folks. They did not mix well. Bruce became a friend of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican street gang that had become an agency for equal justice and opportunity in Chicago. Bruce said, “I’m trying to make them Christians, and they’re trying to make me a communist. We’ll see.”

 

Together, the Young Lords and Bruce protested Mayor Daley’s forcing seventy thousand poor and non-white people from the Lincoln Park area, so that developers could make big bucks by “gentrifying” the area, and so that institutions like DePaul University could expand at little cost.

As part of their attempt to stabilize the neighborhood, the Young Lords wanted to set up a day care center at Armitage Ave. Church. Bruce agreed. The congregation balked, though, and asked the city to evaluate the building as inadequate. The city agreed, citing $10,000 in costs to bring it up to code for day care. Against all odds, the Young Lords raised the money, but… two of the leaders of the Young Lords were shot by the police, even though unarmed…and, well, especially now, in the wake of the Rittenhouse and McMichael trials, you know the story.

This was in the turmoil of the 1960s—the turmoil of school desegregation, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Selma, the assassination of MLK, Viet Nam... Bruce and Genie were murdered when they were only 31 years old, shortly after the Chicago police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Chicago police had earned their reputation as a white supremacist force that enforced “the law” any way they wanted, on any one they didn’t like. They didn’t like the Young Lords.

 

At the 50 year anniversary of their murder, it was not their seminary or their church that organized a memorial celebration for Bruce and Genie, but the Young Lords.

 

Bruce Johnson had every advantage in American society. He came from a wealthy family. He was tall and handsome and straight and white. But he took Christianity with utmost seriousness. Jesus was his model as he tried to live out what it meant to be a Christian pastor in a difficult neighborhood in difficult times. Just like Jesus, he was on the side of the dispossessed…even if it meant crucifixion.

When Thanksgiving comes around, I give thanks for Bruce and Genie and their witness. I try to find some thing I can do for someone who struggles, as a living memorial to my friends. The cost of my discipleship is rather small compared to theirs, but it keeps their memory alive, at least for me.

John Robert McFarland

1] There is a story of a minister who had been appointed to a community just like Cedar Lake, IN, where I lived and pastored during my years at Garrett. All the streets had funny water-themed names, and dead-ended into the lake, so it was hard to find your way to where you needed to go. One lost day he asked a man in a pickup truck for directions. “Follow me, and I’ll take you there,” the man said. The preacher said it was on that day that he learned the difference between good advice and a savior.

2] I had been thrown out of Dallas, TX, for integrating the Methodist community center Helen and I directed, and so left Perkins School of Theology, at SMU. In 1961, I started preaching at Cedar Lake and Creston, in the Calumet District of the Northwest Indiana Conference of The Methodist Church, getting ready to do the 65 mile [each way] daily commute to Garrett.