People I Remember:
Bob Johanson

February 14, 2007

In the seventh grade my family moved to Redlands, California.. and my Sunday School teacher became Bob Johanson. Early in my tenure in the junior high class he walked us chapter by chapter through the Gospel of John. He would draw pictures in erasable ink on top of the white-topped table, the sweet smell of ink filling the room.

From the start I found humorous his attempts to create a mnemonic device that would cause the contents of each chapter stick in our heads. He began with the bare number of the chapter, written on the table, and from it he would improvise some new visual cue.. numbers turning into people or things.. and then he attached a phrase that he believed would prompt us to remember that new visual cue. Mnemonic devices are supposed to be simple, but I needed a mnemonic device just to recall what his mnemonic device was for. I wish that I could recall an example.. it would not be the least interesting of my memories.

What I remember much better than his mnemonic devices were the photos he occasionally brought in from his time in Papua New Guinea. Bob Johanson had served as a pilot for Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF).. and the bulk of his time had been spent flying in that complex landscape of jungles and mountains. His main job was to fly missionaries and their supplies into different villages. I recall photos of insanely short landing strips and tiny villages where the people came out to greet the new arrivals. The people in the photos wore little clothing.. and are perhaps best known for their penis gourds. But we did not laugh at anyone in the photos. These were the leaders of villages and heads of churches.. and were all people that our Sunday School teacher had actually met!

I think now about how lucky I was to have had this little primer on anthropology in the seventh grade. The habits and lifeway of a very distant people were talked about fondly. It was not just in Sunday School that this message came through.. but from as early as I can recall there were annual missionary conferences that lasted a couple of weeks. Yes, cultural information came to me with a terrible slant: these were peoples who needed to believe in Jesus and all that. But I was exposed to far more slide shows about far-flung places than is usual for a young person growing up in the US..

But back to Bob Johanson.. who may be the person I heard most often speak about his missionary experiences. He was at least six feet.. and maintained dark bushy sidebrows. He was Scandinavian by lineage, but his interests and habits were those of a young man from a small American town. I can imagine him as a character in American Graffiti.. that is, if a Hollywood movie were able to understand a character motivated by faith. There is his greaser-like slicked back hair and sidebrows.. but also the odd fact that he always wore a large silver belt buckle. One Sunday he explained to us how he always wore the buckle just to the side.. because that was the fashion when he was growing up. He also walked with a bit of a limp, and I seem to recall that this had something to do with a motorcycle accident. You can imagine a character from American Graffiti walking out of the film, spending his life in Papua New Guinea, and always maintaining a few symbolic ties to that car-crazy American past.

Bob Johanson was in Redlands because he had retired from active missionary work. He now trained pilots for MAF.. which was then using the small Redlands Airport as their training center. I never saw him fly. I knew him always as a man in our church.. sometimes leading our small congregation in a hymn, sometimes standing with his wife in the pews, but always letting his nasally voice sing out. I also remember him as a committed Arminian.. that is to say, he believed that every person in the world had a free will with which he or she could accept the Gospel message. He refused to believe in a God who decided these things for his own pleasure. During my brief dalliance with a form of Calvinism, I once expressed in a cold way my view of God's hatred for sinners.. and I recall his shock, his hurt. And I am sorry for that, for he is someone who taught me the opposite: tolerance and love for all people.