The Rt. Rev. Robert Hodges Johnson, who championed Latino and youth ministry as well as the acceptance of gay and lesbian people in a long ministry leading the Diocese of Western North Carolina, died October 7 at Deerfield Episcopal Retirement Community in Asheville, at 91.
“Passionate about Jesus and the church, Bishop Bob’s smile could light up a room. He was known for being a compassionate leader who cared deeply for the clergy and laity of the diocese,” Western North Carolina’s current bishop, José McLoughlin, wrote in a message announcing Johnson’s death.
A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson graduated from the University of Florida and served in the U.S. Army before studies at Virginia Theological Seminary. He began his ministry at several churches in Jacksonville, and then was rector of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Atlanta for 17 years.
He was elected as coadjutor to Western North Carolina’s fourth bishop, William G. Weinhauer, in November 1988, and became diocesan in 1990.
Later that year, Johnson stepped into the spotlight on an issue that came to matter deeply to him. Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning arranged a study day on homosexuality for a House of Bishops meeting in Washington, D.C., in September 1990, and asked Johnson to serve as the opening speaker.
Browning chose the theme in response to a resolution filed by the Rt. Rev. William Wantland of Eau Claire that asked the bishops to disassociate themselves from Bishop Walter Righter’s December 1989 ordination of Barry Stopfel, an openly gay man. It was one of the first open and extended discussions by the Episcopal Church’s leaders of a matter that would come to dominate the church’s life for decades.
TLC quoted Johnson as saying to his fellow bishops, “I believe in Jesus Christ that the truth sets us all free. … Yet how can we as a church encourage people to be truthful about their sexuality on the one hand and penalize them on the other when their truth-telling sometimes offends our scriptural and spiritual sensibilities?”
The house issued a light rebuke of Righter by a very narrow margin (78-74, with four abstentions). A series of churchwide conversations on human sexuality followed the next year, in which Johnson also played a significant role.
These led directly to General Convention’s 1994 decision to bar discrimination against candidates for ministry on the basis of sexual orientation. Shortly afterward, with Johnson’s guidance and support, several churches in his diocese began offering same-sex blessings.
McLoughlin also praised Johnson as an advocate for Latino ministry—he established the diocese’s first Spanish-language congregation at La Capilla de Santa Maria in Hendersonville, as well as founding the diocese’s Commission to Dismantle Racism, the first in a series of efforts to address racial injustice and division in the church and broader community.
Johnson hired the diocese’s first full-time youth worker and oversaw a transition of the diocese’s Camp Henry and its conference ministry to a new site on Lake Logan in Canton, North Carolina.
In 1992, to celebrate the diocese’s centennial, he launched a $3.25 million campaign devoted entirely to outreach. “We are a diaconal church, servant people called to bear one another’s burdens and to be aware of and to do something about the needs of others in the name of Jesus Christ,” he told diocesan convention when the campaign was announced.
For six of his 15 years in episcopal ministry, Bishop Robert H. Johnson of Western North Carolina’s neighbor to the east was Bishop Robert C. Johnson of North Carolina. Only God knows how often they received one another’s misdirected letters.
Johnson retired in 2004, and would later serve as interim Bishop of Southern Virginia in 2006, and as an assisting bishop in the Diocese of Pittsburgh in 2008, during the contentious days after Bishop Robert Duncan was deposed and a majority of the diocese’s parishes announced their intention to leave the Episcopal Church.
Johnson is survived by Julie, his wife of 63 years, and by their children, Rob and Katherine.
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.
