Before Don Miller witnessed a jazz musician playing his instrument with his eyes closed, totally oblivious to any audience, he never liked jazz music. He felt like jazz music “never resolved.” He learned something that day as he watched the musician transported by his music to another place, and he concludes: “Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It’s as if they are showing you the way.” He had the same feelings about God “because God didn’t resolve” (Blue Like Jazz, Don Miller).
For me, Bill Johnson is the quintessential model of this unknown musician of Miller’s observation. Unlike many of our day who insist on “resolving” God and all of the difficulties He has created for theologians and who insist on needing “pat answers,” Bill Johnson plows full speed ahead into the mounds of unresolved issues with questions—sometimes unanswered—and insights that are stunning in their simplicity. Bill’s ministry embraces paradox as though it is the most normal thing in the world. He refuses to allow us to embrace a way of thinking that may on the one hand give us an out with a construct that justifies unscriptural conclusions, while on the other hand he shows us with classic simplicity how those paradigms undermine the goodness of God and the practical examples of Jesus Christ in the New Testament.
Often in his teaching ministry Bill will make a statement without “resolving” it and then watch in his classic amusing stance as we all wrestle with the “I’ve-never-seen-that-before” statement. He will then enlarge upon the previous “unresolved” statement several times and literally talk to himself about how powerful the thought he just shared with us was. His teaching entices you to pursue a way of thinking that is often foreign to traditional teachers, and it whets your appetite for something you always knew was there.
“Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It’s as if they are showing you the way.” Face to Face With God is both testimonial and biographical; it is historical and utterly theological. It is the needed narrative that will enable the church to enter into a wholly plausible realm that has always existed for us. Watching Bill Johnson love the presence of God awakens in many of us the slumbering desire to do the same thing. His heroes are those men and women who pursued and are pursuing passionately the presence of God. His message of the power of God is absolutely essential for this season we face. May it be said of us in the twenty-first century as it was of them in the first-century church: “They were amazed and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus.”
—Bishop Joseph L. Garlington Sr.
Senior Pastor, Covenant Church of Pittsburgh
Presiding Bishop, Reconciliation Ministries International