Speaking at a news conference, John Dysinger said he was part of a group that attended a clemency meeting with Gov. Bill Lee's staff on behalf of Don Johnson. He said the meeting was scheduled to last an hour but stretched to 3.
"I felt like the governor's staff heard us out very well. They were engaged. They asked deep and probing questions. And I think they're taking it very seriously," Dysinger said. "I have every hope they're praying about it, and they're going to make the decision that Jesus would make."
Lee had never held elected office before winning the governorship with a campaign last year that centered on his religious faith.
Johnson, who was convicted of murdering his wife Connie Johnson in 1984, has centered his plea for clemency on his religious conversion in prison.
The 68-year-old's story of redemption includes the forgiveness of his stepdaughter, Cynthia Vaughn, the daughter of Connie Johnson, who has joined the clemency request.
Dysinger said he first met Johnson years ago when he made the unusual decision to include his wife and young children in his prison ministry. His youngest was 1 year old at the time and now is 16.
"He's definitely part of the family," Dysinger said of Johnson. "He's Uncle Don to the kids. They are very invested in his life, and he's had a very positive impact on their lives."
At the Thursday news conference with Dysinger were 5 other men who know Johnson through their work as religious volunteers in the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. All spoke of Johnson's strong religious faith and ministry, calling him a light in a dark place.
The news conference was held at Riverside Seventh Day Adventist Church, where Johnson is an elder assigned to minister to his fellow inmates. Two banners in the lobby outside the sanctuary refer to the upcoming execution of "our Donnie Johnson" and ask churchgoers to "Join the Journey: Forgiveness for Don."
Pastor Furman Fordham explained that he ordained Johnson after church volunteers had worked with him for years in their prison ministry.
Fordham said that unlike the others at the Thursday news conference, he was not a regular prison visitor. But he was able to see that Johnson's ministry was bearing fruit when a former prisoner walked into Riverside saying he had learned about the church while studying the Bible with Johnson.
"Don Johnson's ministry is living," Fordham said. "He is doing behind those walls what I aspire to do outside the walls."
Tennessee executed 3 inmates in 2018 after a 9-year hiatus, during which legal challenges to the state's lethal injection protocols put all executions on hold. Johnson's execution, scheduled for May 16, is the 1st of 4 planned in 2019.
Source: The Associated Press, Staff, May 13, 2019
Why a Seventh-day Adventist church in Nashville made Donnie Johnson, a death row inmate, an elder
Members of Riverside Chapel Seventh-day Adventist Church do not want the state of Tennessee to execute Donnie Johnson.
Several who sit in the pews and preach in the pulpit are urging Gov. Bill Lee to grant Johnson clemency before his May 16 execution date and allow him to spend the rest of his life in prison.
The church has hosted a news conference, the pastor has met with Lee's legal team, members have joined a letter-writing campaign and on Saturday they are organizing a prayer march all in the hopes of swaying the governor to spare Johnson's life.
Johnson, who has spent the last 33 years on Tennessee's death row for the 1984 murder of his wife, is one of their own.
Not only is he a Seventh-day Adventist, but about a decade ago the congregation decided to ordain Johnson as an elder of their church because of the ministry work he was doing behind bars.
"He has been leading and serving in such a way that what he's doing in there is the exact kind of ministry that we would definitely ordain someone for out here," said Pastor Furman F. Fordham II, who leads Riverside Chapel in Nashville.
Johnson, 68, guides Bible studies inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, started a radio program called "What the Bible Says" and supports his fellow inmates living on Unit 2, which is where men on Tennessee's death row are housed.
"I was accustomed to being at different churches where you’d have a prison ministry, but I had never seen one of the prisoners leading it," said Fordham, who met Johnson about a dozen years ago after he became senior pastor of the church.
"We were his assistants."
In 2008, Johnson became an ordained elder of Riverside Chapel — a church he has never stepped foot inside of — because the congregation believed he was using the special abilities that God had gifted him with to further the gospel.
The history of Riverside Chapel
Riverbend Maximum Security Institution is an 18-minute drive from Riverside Chapel, which is located just north of a bend in the Cumberland River that runs through the city.
The church started in 1945 to give the doctors, nurses and other hospital staff who worked at Riverside Sanitarium next door a nearby place to worship. The now defunct hospital was the 1st black Seventh-day Adventist medical facility.
Today, the multi-generational church with a mostly black congregation draws about 400 people to its Saturday worship service. It has two church plants, including New Hope Seventh-day Adventist Church in Chapmansboro.
Like Adventist-run hospitals and schools, prison ministry is often associated with the denomination, and for decades it has been a part of Riverside Chapel's outreach, Fordham said.
"It's just coming from Jesus' words in Mathew chapter 25; he tells a parable where he says, 'I was in prison and you visited me,'" Fordham said. "We take it very seriously to minister to the incarcerated."
About a dozen people make up the church’s prison ministry team, Fordham said. They organize worship services at Riverbend, correspond regularly with inmates and mail Bible studies to those willing to receive them.
Prison ministry forges relationship between church and death row inmate
Members of Riverside Chapel met Johnson through their work. The late Jimmy Pitt, who led the ministry for years, helped forge the relationship.
"Don is one of those people that is not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he will share that with any and everybody that gives him an opportunity," said Rosalyn Pitt, who was married to Jimmy Pitt for 43 years before he died in 2017.
"It was very easy for my husband and Don to make that connection."
Rosalyn Pitt, who helped start New Hope with her husband, is a mentor to Johnson. She visits him in prison and he calls her about every week. Pitt said Johnson does not want to die, but he is ready if his execution is carried out because of his deep faith in God and the afterlife.
But Pitt, who has changed her position on the death penalty after getting to know Johnson, does not think his work at Riverbend is finished.
"I used to be fairly set on if you did the crime, you pay the price," Pitt said. "I really would love for him to get clemency of some sort because there's always forgiveness."
Johnson's religious transformation behind bars
Johnson found religion in February 1985 in the Shelby County Jail, he said in written answers responding to questions from the USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee. He was raised Christian, but Johnson said he had no interest in it until he heard an inmate preach.
5 years later, 2 incarcerated Seventh-day Adventists introduced him to their Christian tradition.
"They introduced me to the scriptures in a way I could understand," Johnson said. "They opened up the Bible to me in ways I had never thought possible."
Johnson's transformation behind bars is central to his clemency petition as is his stepdaughter's forgiveness for killing her mother.
He killed his wife, Connie Johnson, in the office of the camping equipment center where he worked. He stuffed a large plastic bag in her mouth and suffocated her, according to court documents. With help from an inmate on work release, Donnie Johnson moved his wife's body and belongings into her van and left it at the Mall of Memphis.
Johnson no longer contests his guilt.
Fordham said he does not want to minimize what Johnson did. He thinks it was barbaric, but Fordham also thinks the methods of execution in Tennessee, lethal injection and the electric chair, are barbaric, too.
The Seventh-day Adventist denomination does not have an official position on the death penalty, but Fordham thinks Jesus' teachings are moving believers away from support for the death penalty.
Fordham believes there still needs to be consequences, which is why the church is not advocating that the governor release Johnson. But Fordham questions what would be gained by executing him.
"Transformation is real," Fordham said. "This is a new gentlemen. He just is. And I think that there should be room for that caveat to be considered and I think that is why in our state constitution the governor can press pause."
Thomas Lawrence, who met Johnson 15 years ago while volunteering at Riverbend, said the Johnson he knows today is not the same man that killed his wife more than 30 years ago, and his heart broke when he found out that Johnson's execution date had been set for May 16.
"It is like putting a candle out in a cave where there's no light," Johnson said. "Without that light, you go back to this dark, horrible place with no hope."
Jimmy Pitt introduced Lawrence to Johnson. Lawrence was attending Riverside at the time and did so for years, but now is a part of small, Seventh-day Adventist group called The Way that meets in a house.
During their first meeting, Johnson did something that amazed Lawrence. Johnson prayed for him.
"That just blew my mind," Lawrence said. "He was someone who was incarcerated, recognized that I needed God in my life to be able to be whatever God needed me to be for the men who were incarcerated."
Source: The Tennessean, Staff, May 13, 2019
Will grace prevail as Tennessee execution looms?
It's the 1st time I’ve counted down the days to a friend’s execution. Unless there is a miracle from God or compassion from the state’s governor, Tennessee will kill Don Johnson by lethal injection on May 16.
I have a model of a lighthouse in my office that Don made for me, a sign of the friendship we’ve built in my visits over the past five years to Unit 2 at Riverbend Correctional Facility, Tennessee’s death row.
Over the years we’ve laughed together. We’ve prayed together. Told each other jokes. We’ve sung songs like “Amazing Grace” and he’s taught me the true meaning of the words, “How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.”
Don had one of the most horrific childhoods of anyone I’ve ever met. He was abused, bullied, abandoned, institutionalized. The abuse he endured, he transmitted, culminating in the death of his wife. Unlike many on death row who I believe are innocent of the crimes for which they face execution, Don’s guilt was never in question for me. But neither was his redemption.
What’s most remarkable about Don is not what he did that landed him on death row; it’s what God has done with him since. His story is a grace story, a redemption story. It’s a Jesus story.
That story began in the Shelby County, Tenn., jail, while Don was awaiting trial. He heard another inmate talking about the healing power of Jesus. As Don was convicted and taken to death row, he heard more redemption stories. Soon he dedicated his life to Jesus. He was baptized on death row.
Years later, he is an ordained elder of his church. Of his 25 million-member denomination, he’s the only elder on death row. Riverbend’s Unit 2 is his parish, and many inside the prison and out can testify of how his faith has shaped them, including correctional officers and staff.
But the most stunning, and credible, witness of all is his daughter, Cynthia Vaughn.
After losing her mom at the age of 7, she became a champion for the death penalty, especially when it came to the execution of her dad. She wanted him dead. She hated him. The death penalty seemed like justice, at first.
Cynthia eventually found that her hatred was not hurting him, but it was killing her. She found herself in a prison of her own anger and resentment, confined, in her words, “to my own internal house of hell.” The justice she sought turned out to be revenge.
I first met Cynthia when we both spoke at an event in Nashville. It was the first time she would talk about her change of heart, how she found a way out of her internal hell. I had recently released a book titled “Executing Grace,” on the death penalty, restorative justice and the power of forgiveness. Cynthia had come to embody everything I wrote about – the power of grace to heal the wounds of both the offended and the offenders.
I got into Nashville early that day so I could visit Don. I hesitated to tell him about the event because I wasn’t sure about the dynamics of their new relationship. All I knew was that after 30 years of not speaking, they were working hard to heal the wounds of their shared past. I didn’t want to further complicate any of that.
I simply told Don I was in town for an event that night. I could see in his eyes and his proud, ear-to-ear smile that he already knew. He said, “You’ll be with my daughter,” and went on to tell me all about what a bright light in the world she is, what a gift it is to have her in his life again.
That evening, I heard Cynthia tell of being set free from the prison of her own hatred, about the power of forgiveness to heal both the victims and the victimizers. She talked about being able to giggle again, and being able to hear birds sing after so many years in a solitary confinement of its own sort.
She forgave her dad, not so he could sleep at night but so that she could sleep at night. Now she is fighting to save his life.
Cynthia is fighting for alternatives to the death penalty – for her dad, and for everyone else. Despite its promises of closure and justice, the death penalty extends trauma, exacerbates wounds and creates a whole new set of victims, something Cynthia knows all too well.
The electric chair used in 2 of Tennessee’s 3 executions last year is a mirror of the evil it promises to heal. The “cure” is as bad as the disease.
Violence is the problem, not the solution.
Despite the voices of folks like Mother Teresa, Pope Francis and so many others, the death penalty has survived in America largely because of the support of Christians. Nearly 90% of all executions in the past 40 years have occurred in the Bible Belt. As one death row chaplain says, “The Bible Belt is the death belt in America.”
Grace is at the heart of the Christian faith – this belief that God gave us grace when we didn’t deserve it. The United Methodist Church’s 50-year-old statement puts it well: “We believe the death penalty denies the power of Christ to redeem, restore and transform all human beings.”
We undermine the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross and rob our fellow sinners of the possibilities of redemption every time we take the life of a child of God by state execution.
When we kill those who kill to show that killing is wrong, we legitimize the very evil we hope to rid the world of, the evil that sent Jesus to the cross.
The Bible is filled with murderers who were given a second chance, including Moses, David and Saul of Tarsus. The Bible would be much shorter without grace.
Martin Luther King Jr. called execution “society’s final assertion that we will not forgive.” In 2017, Pope Francis declared that the death penalty is “contrary to the gospel.”
Many Americans, including many young evangelical Christians, see the disconnect between following Jesus and our capital punishment. In a nationwide survey, only 5% of Americans said that Jesus would support the death penalty.
After all, Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” In the Gospels, Jesus interrupted an execution of a woman guilty of a capital crime, saying, “Let the one who is without sin, cast the first stone.”
No one is above reproach. And no one is beyond redemption.
This week grace has a chance to be amazing in Tennessee. We just need Christians, and Christian lawmakers in particular, to ask the question: What would Jesus do? And then do it.
With just a few months in office, Gov. Bill Lee is facing his first death penalty decision. He needs all of our prayers.
It is my prayer that the leaders of my home state will declare that execution is not the best version of justice we can come up with.
I pray Lee will celebrate the power of God to redeem a broken sinner like Don – like Moses, like David, like Saul, like me. I also pray he will be moved by the power of mercy and forgiveness embodied so beautifully by Cynthia. And I pray that he will honor the wounds they are actively working to heal … by not creating more wounds.
Source: Religion News Service, Opinion; Shane Claiborne, May 13, 2019. Shane Claiborne is the author of “Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us.”
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
