“I moved from Memphis to Wisconsin to establish a church within the organization of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World,” Johnson said. “We were invited by the diocesan to help establish the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World faith in Wisconsin and throughout his region, which is Minnesota and North and South Dakota. I certainly did not want to come to Wisconsin at first because of the cold weather. However, the Lord convinced me to come by pulling the rug from under me in so many ways, economically and emotionally in the sense that I was no longer satisfied with being in Memphis.”

Johnson was ordained a Pentecostal minister in August 1983 in Milwaukee and then Carolyn and he checked out Madison to see if it was the place where they should start a church.

“Many people felt Madison, including some of the locals and the religious editor of the Wisconsin State Journal, Bill Wineke, felt that establishing a Pentecostal church in a liberal city like Madison would be a challenge. But we had strong faith and so we were, like I said, initially invited here to take over the interim directorship of the Madison Urban League. I moved here with nothing, only $200 in my pocket, and with a dream of establishing a Pentecostal church while my family remained in Memphis to work until I got things set up and established.”

The Madison Urban League was in a financial crisis, having lost a lot of funding with the ending of CETA in the early 1980s. With a few staff, Bill Beckett felt that it could hold onto only one of the administrative staff, Johnson or another employee. Johnson elected to leave and received a job offer from Beckett to work as an LTE position with the WI Department of Development where Beckett worked in the minority business enterprise program.

“That helped me to sustain myself while at the same time, trying to build the church,” Johnson said. “I was basically homeless then. Dr. Richard Harris was gracious to let me stay with him for a couple of weeks. And then I stayed with a University of Wisconsin student for a month. By that time, I brought my family up and we got my own place to live.”

And Johnson set about building his church.

“I went door-to-door on the east side in Worthington-Darbo,” Johnson said. “I knocked on doors asking people to come to church. Everywhere I went — on basketball courts or what have you — I asked people to join the church. Bill Wineke from the Wisconsin State Journal, opened up the Wisconsin Rescue Mission to allow us to have services there. We were there for several months to a year. From there, because our services were pretty dynamic and active and there was a residential place as well as a recovery place for some who were having issues with alcoholism, we moved to various places. We moved to Security Bank’s community room for a minute and then we moved to the South Madison Neighborhood Center, which became very costly for us. To save money, we decided to move into one of the student’s home who was going for his doctorate. We held church in his basement and that gave us a platform to really reach out. After three years, we decided that we wanted to build or have our own facility.”

This was 1980s Madison that served up many barriers to the building of Black institutions. By now, Johnson was working in WisDOT’s DBE Program and he met Jerry Hancock who introduced him to a lawyer by the name of James Doyle, who would later go on to become the governor of Wisconsin.

“We were seeking to purchase some land on Nygard Street,” Johnson said. “To my surprise, we began to be opposed by the neighborhood because they didn’t want us to build a church on the acre of land that we had acquired with financing from Park Bank. Jim Doyle took us through the process of dealing with the Town of Madison who voted against it. We appealed it to the Dane County Board of Supervisors. Bill Lunney was a county board supervisor. I told him what we were trying to do. His suggestion was for me to contact each supervisor and explain my dilemma. I called all 42 supervisors, explaining to them what we wanted to do. We received virtually unanimous approval. We got support from the chairman. We got support from Julie of Mazomanie. She was on the land use commission. We got great support and negotiated and settled with the neighbors on how to build the church.”

Now that they got permission to build on the site, it now became an ordeal to obtain financing.

“Joe Daniels was a very faithful person,” Johnson said of the contractor who would eventually build the church. “We were turned down from a loan from Park Bank even though we had the total amount to build. But Park Bank wanted us to provide an unconditional letter of credit to back a loan that they would provide for us. I thought that was very unfair. They turned on us even though we had at the time $85,000 ready to build a church valued at $125,000. We went to Joe Daniels Construction. It was really interesting how people don’t go to Wisconsin because there are no Black people there. But it was really the support that I got from white business men and Jim Doyle that got us through. Joe Daniels introduced me to his banker and told him I was a good man. They loaned us the money at Anchor Bank to build our church, which we did build. There were people like Bill Lunney who really supported us.”