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Called to the Fire: A Witness for God in Mississippi; The Story of Dr. Charles Johnson
The last place on earth young Charles Johnson wanted to go was Mississippi during the heat of the civil rights movement.
As the key African American witness to take the stand in the trial famously dubbed the "Mississippi Burning" case by the FBI, Dr. Charles Johnson, a young preacher fresh out of Bible College, became a voice for justice and equality in the segregated south.
Unwittingly thrust into the heart of a national tragedy - the murder of three civil rights activists - Dr. Johnson overcame fear and adversity to become a leader in the civil rights movement. He played a vital role for the Federal Justice Department, offering clarity to the event that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And, in a shocking turn of events, Johnson offered a path of reconciliation for one of the convicted killers. A story of love, conviction, adversity, and redemption, Called to the Fire is a riveting account of a life in pursuit of the call of God and the fight for justice and equality.
As the key African American witness to take the stand in the trial famously dubbed the "Mississippi Burning" case by the FBI, Dr. Charles Johnson, a young preacher fresh out of Bible College, became a voice for justice and equality in the segregated south.
Unwittingly thrust into the heart of a national tragedy - the murder of three civil rights activists - Dr. Johnson overcame fear and adversity to become a leader in the civil rights movement. He played a vital role for the Federal Justice Department, offering clarity to the event that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And, in a shocking turn of events, Johnson offered a path of reconciliation for one of the convicted killers. A story of love, conviction, adversity, and redemption, Called to the Fire is a riveting account of a life in pursuit of the call of God and the fight for justice and equality.
225 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
October 28, 2018
I agree with mary who wrote
"I really like books where the hero talks to God . In this book God talks back and actually guides and protects this guy in a very vivid and clear way . He says "just as clear as any voice of this world " and usually at times when his heart was et o doing just teh opposite of what the voice said.
I think that sets this book apart form other merely historical accounts of how bad it was for blacks in the 60s . It is truly a book where you have the paranormal relationship with god standing out in vivid relief --as such it is very valuable book of someone interested in his own personal relationship with God . I highly recommend and will be rereading in 5 years "
I couldn't have said it better 🙂👍!!!!
"I really like books where the hero talks to God . In this book God talks back and actually guides and protects this guy in a very vivid and clear way . He says "just as clear as any voice of this world " and usually at times when his heart was et o doing just teh opposite of what the voice said.
I think that sets this book apart form other merely historical accounts of how bad it was for blacks in the 60s . It is truly a book where you have the paranormal relationship with god standing out in vivid relief --as such it is very valuable book of someone interested in his own personal relationship with God . I highly recommend and will be rereading in 5 years "
I couldn't have said it better 🙂👍!!!!
June 2, 2016
After graduating with my bachelors at Olivet Nazarene University, I wound up in a graduate program at the University of Mississippi. There, in Oxford, Mississippi, my wife and I started attending the single small Nazarene church in town. We hadn’t been members there long when a young pastor and his family arrived. Chet Bush quickly became a great friend and mentor as well as my all-time favorite pastor, for a lot of reasons.
One of those reasons was that he didn’t want to preach.
That’s not to say he wasn’t a good preacher. He was. He was a great preacher, but he was a great preacher because it was clear he wasn’t doing it because he loved speaking or loved being in front of people. He was doing it because he felt like he needed to. More than that, it was clear he was doing it because he wanted to teach
And perhaps most important of all, it was clear he was doing it because he wanted to learn.
Fast forward a few years. I’m back in the Midwest, teaching at my alma mater, and Chet, after a brief peregrination to Tennessee, has returned to Mississippi as a graduate student in the history department at Ole Miss. Along the way, he’s written a book that I think captures a lot of what Chet himself is about. More than that though, in a weird way I found this book on the life of a Nazarene minister active in the Mississippi Civil Rights movement a call to the entire denomination regarding what learning, scholarship, and ministry can really mean.
If you grew up in the Nazarene church, like Chet and I did, you probably remember missionary books. They were an attempt to pass on the denomination’s history and heritage. They were usually stories of the heroes of the denomination (often but not always foreign missionaries), how they came to faith, and what they ended up doing with their lives. I don’t remember the specifics of any of them, but I remember how they felt.
With Called to the Fire, Chet has written something more than a Nazarene missionary book. In some ways though, it has that familiar feel. The book is the story of Charles Johnson, the African American pastor of a Nazarene church in Meridian, Mississippi, and the role he played as a leader in the community during the height of the Civil Rights movement, during which time Johnson briefly took the national spotlight as a witness for the prosecution during the famous Mississippi Burning trial.
Johnson’s personal journey took him from growing up in rural Orlando and coming to faith in a Nazarene revival there (which is where the book feels most like those missionary books I remember from my childhood), to school at the Nazarene Bible College in Institute, West Virginia (more on this in a moment), to his first ministerial posting at ground zero of the Civil Rights struggle. A major portion of the narrative is the young pastor’s wrestling with God to accept what he felt was God’s calling to overcome a young black man’s fear and take his family and his life into the heart of the country’s most segregated state during one of the most violent periods in its history.
The book is brief but covers the pastor’s career up to the present day, retold by Chet and built on interviews with Johnson, whose direct quotes pepper the account. Because of its brevity, the work is of necessity cursory, not delving much into the politics of a segregated denomination or the broader context of Johnson’s personal experience. Much of Johnson’s years in Meridian are passed over quickly, with the narrative coming into focus on events like Johnson’s first day in Mississippi, his days at the trial on the brutal murders of three Civil Rights workers outside of Meridian, his experiences with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Johnson’s final reconciliation with one of the defendants in the trial.
It’s a good book (though, as Chet admits, looking back on it with the historical training he’s already received at the University of Mississippi, there are things he’d do differently), but most importantly it captures the story of someone whose life and actions might have gone largely ignored or been forgotten in his own church. This is where the book for me was a doorway into understanding something bigger regarding my own denominational heritage. (And yes, I’m going to consider myself culturally and contextually a Nazarene for the following discussion, even though I’m no longer a member of the denomination.)
Here’s the thing: Charles Johnson’s story opens onto a history that’s either been ignored, forgotten, or was simply never told. My first clue was the mention of the Nazarene Bible College in Institute, West Virginia, where Charles Johnson studied. I know a bit about the history of Nazarene higher education, and I had never heard of this school. It was clear from Chet’s account that this was a historically black college, which Johnson attended because Trevecca Nazarene College was closed to black students at that time. (I hadn’t realized Nazarene schools in the south were segregated.)
In the book, Chet talks about how Johnson was assigned to the church in Meridian, Mississippi, by Warren Rogers, who was superintendent of the Gulf Central District of the Nazarene church, which encompassed sixteen states. Now, I admit that I didn’t read this portion of Chet’s narrative carefully enough, because I only realized the importance of this in a later conversation with him by phone. I was asking him about there being a single superintendent over such a large district and said that I hadn’t realized the entire southern half of the United States was basically one district at this point in time.
It only slowly dawned on me in speaking with Chet that I had misunderstood, and I actually stopped the conversation to make sure I was hearing correctly: this wasn’t the only Nazarene district in the South. This was a segregated, separate black district, geographically overlapping several white districts.
I had to let that sink in for a minute. Up until (I think) 1968, there was a separate district in the south for black Nazarene churches. Their ministers went to a separate Nazarene college (which no longer exists), and they had a separate superintendent.
What floored me most about this was not the implications for race and reconciliation in our own denomination. What floored me most was that I simply didn’t know. I didn’t know the history of the church I’d grown up in. And in asking around since then, I get the idea that no one else knows this either.
Here’s where it comes home for me, and in this context it’s not about race. It’s about learning, scholarship, and ministry. Because Chet, I’m sure, is going to go on in his academic career at the University of Mississippi and do good work. I hope he does scholarly work on the history of the Nazarene church in the South, especially the history of the Nazarene Bible College of Institute, West Virginia, which apparently has no archive and knowledge of which exists now only in the memories of aging African American ministers across the country. That’s a story that has broad implications apart from its importance to the denomination and deserves to be explored.
My fear though is that as a denomination we don’t have a scholarly forum on which work like this can be disseminated and discussed. Sure, we have individuals at individual institutions who are doing good work, and Chet’s book has found a welcome audience at, for instance, Trevecca Nazarene University (where Charles Johnson was eventually awarded an honorary doctorate).
But I don’t see us as a denomination having a place to dialogue with relevant, important, ongoing work by Nazarene scholars like Chet (or, for instance, Tom Oord) in a pan-Nazarene academic context. That seems a shame, especially for a denomination with a rich history, a tapestry of vibrant institutions, and a host of issues from our heritage—from racial segregation to science and faith topics to gender and sexuality to our stance on alcohol to our understanding of holiness—that are begging for dedicated, sophisticated academic thought and dialogue at a denominational level.
A modest proposal: what about a society for Nazarene scholars and those pursuing scholarship in Nazarene contexts? It would be open to anyone, with a small annual membership fee that could sponsor the publication of a (for now) annual peer-reviewed journal. The pages of the journal would be a place for Nazarene scholars to pursue and explore these topics. I want to read informed scholarship about the history of the Nazarene church in the South (and throughout the world). I want to know more about the relationship between holiness theology and higher education. I want a place where scholarly voices in the Nazarene denomination can interact.
Heck, maybe we could even get together once every four years or so.
The thing is, our denomination has the resources and it has the need. As Chet’s account shows, there’s lots of good work being done and still to be done, but I don’t feel right now that we have a place to share this at a denominational level. Speaking from my own experience, I feel fairly disconnected from the scholarship happening at other Nazarene schools outside my own particular discipline.
Does anyone else feel the same way?
One of those reasons was that he didn’t want to preach.
That’s not to say he wasn’t a good preacher. He was. He was a great preacher, but he was a great preacher because it was clear he wasn’t doing it because he loved speaking or loved being in front of people. He was doing it because he felt like he needed to. More than that, it was clear he was doing it because he wanted to teach
And perhaps most important of all, it was clear he was doing it because he wanted to learn.
Fast forward a few years. I’m back in the Midwest, teaching at my alma mater, and Chet, after a brief peregrination to Tennessee, has returned to Mississippi as a graduate student in the history department at Ole Miss. Along the way, he’s written a book that I think captures a lot of what Chet himself is about. More than that though, in a weird way I found this book on the life of a Nazarene minister active in the Mississippi Civil Rights movement a call to the entire denomination regarding what learning, scholarship, and ministry can really mean.
If you grew up in the Nazarene church, like Chet and I did, you probably remember missionary books. They were an attempt to pass on the denomination’s history and heritage. They were usually stories of the heroes of the denomination (often but not always foreign missionaries), how they came to faith, and what they ended up doing with their lives. I don’t remember the specifics of any of them, but I remember how they felt.
With Called to the Fire, Chet has written something more than a Nazarene missionary book. In some ways though, it has that familiar feel. The book is the story of Charles Johnson, the African American pastor of a Nazarene church in Meridian, Mississippi, and the role he played as a leader in the community during the height of the Civil Rights movement, during which time Johnson briefly took the national spotlight as a witness for the prosecution during the famous Mississippi Burning trial.
Johnson’s personal journey took him from growing up in rural Orlando and coming to faith in a Nazarene revival there (which is where the book feels most like those missionary books I remember from my childhood), to school at the Nazarene Bible College in Institute, West Virginia (more on this in a moment), to his first ministerial posting at ground zero of the Civil Rights struggle. A major portion of the narrative is the young pastor’s wrestling with God to accept what he felt was God’s calling to overcome a young black man’s fear and take his family and his life into the heart of the country’s most segregated state during one of the most violent periods in its history.
The book is brief but covers the pastor’s career up to the present day, retold by Chet and built on interviews with Johnson, whose direct quotes pepper the account. Because of its brevity, the work is of necessity cursory, not delving much into the politics of a segregated denomination or the broader context of Johnson’s personal experience. Much of Johnson’s years in Meridian are passed over quickly, with the narrative coming into focus on events like Johnson’s first day in Mississippi, his days at the trial on the brutal murders of three Civil Rights workers outside of Meridian, his experiences with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Johnson’s final reconciliation with one of the defendants in the trial.
It’s a good book (though, as Chet admits, looking back on it with the historical training he’s already received at the University of Mississippi, there are things he’d do differently), but most importantly it captures the story of someone whose life and actions might have gone largely ignored or been forgotten in his own church. This is where the book for me was a doorway into understanding something bigger regarding my own denominational heritage. (And yes, I’m going to consider myself culturally and contextually a Nazarene for the following discussion, even though I’m no longer a member of the denomination.)
Here’s the thing: Charles Johnson’s story opens onto a history that’s either been ignored, forgotten, or was simply never told. My first clue was the mention of the Nazarene Bible College in Institute, West Virginia, where Charles Johnson studied. I know a bit about the history of Nazarene higher education, and I had never heard of this school. It was clear from Chet’s account that this was a historically black college, which Johnson attended because Trevecca Nazarene College was closed to black students at that time. (I hadn’t realized Nazarene schools in the south were segregated.)
In the book, Chet talks about how Johnson was assigned to the church in Meridian, Mississippi, by Warren Rogers, who was superintendent of the Gulf Central District of the Nazarene church, which encompassed sixteen states. Now, I admit that I didn’t read this portion of Chet’s narrative carefully enough, because I only realized the importance of this in a later conversation with him by phone. I was asking him about there being a single superintendent over such a large district and said that I hadn’t realized the entire southern half of the United States was basically one district at this point in time.
It only slowly dawned on me in speaking with Chet that I had misunderstood, and I actually stopped the conversation to make sure I was hearing correctly: this wasn’t the only Nazarene district in the South. This was a segregated, separate black district, geographically overlapping several white districts.
I had to let that sink in for a minute. Up until (I think) 1968, there was a separate district in the south for black Nazarene churches. Their ministers went to a separate Nazarene college (which no longer exists), and they had a separate superintendent.
What floored me most about this was not the implications for race and reconciliation in our own denomination. What floored me most was that I simply didn’t know. I didn’t know the history of the church I’d grown up in. And in asking around since then, I get the idea that no one else knows this either.
Here’s where it comes home for me, and in this context it’s not about race. It’s about learning, scholarship, and ministry. Because Chet, I’m sure, is going to go on in his academic career at the University of Mississippi and do good work. I hope he does scholarly work on the history of the Nazarene church in the South, especially the history of the Nazarene Bible College of Institute, West Virginia, which apparently has no archive and knowledge of which exists now only in the memories of aging African American ministers across the country. That’s a story that has broad implications apart from its importance to the denomination and deserves to be explored.
My fear though is that as a denomination we don’t have a scholarly forum on which work like this can be disseminated and discussed. Sure, we have individuals at individual institutions who are doing good work, and Chet’s book has found a welcome audience at, for instance, Trevecca Nazarene University (where Charles Johnson was eventually awarded an honorary doctorate).
But I don’t see us as a denomination having a place to dialogue with relevant, important, ongoing work by Nazarene scholars like Chet (or, for instance, Tom Oord) in a pan-Nazarene academic context. That seems a shame, especially for a denomination with a rich history, a tapestry of vibrant institutions, and a host of issues from our heritage—from racial segregation to science and faith topics to gender and sexuality to our stance on alcohol to our understanding of holiness—that are begging for dedicated, sophisticated academic thought and dialogue at a denominational level.
A modest proposal: what about a society for Nazarene scholars and those pursuing scholarship in Nazarene contexts? It would be open to anyone, with a small annual membership fee that could sponsor the publication of a (for now) annual peer-reviewed journal. The pages of the journal would be a place for Nazarene scholars to pursue and explore these topics. I want to read informed scholarship about the history of the Nazarene church in the South (and throughout the world). I want to know more about the relationship between holiness theology and higher education. I want a place where scholarly voices in the Nazarene denomination can interact.
Heck, maybe we could even get together once every four years or so.
The thing is, our denomination has the resources and it has the need. As Chet’s account shows, there’s lots of good work being done and still to be done, but I don’t feel right now that we have a place to share this at a denominational level. Speaking from my own experience, I feel fairly disconnected from the scholarship happening at other Nazarene schools outside my own particular discipline.
Does anyone else feel the same way?
February 3, 2017
An incredible story of an incredible man and his faith journey through the civil rights era of the 60's. Dr. Charles Johnson was certainly a special man with a special faith.
February 4, 2021
There are only a handful of books that can say they caught my attention enough to be read in one sitting. Called to the Fire, the story of Dr. Charles Johnson, by Chet Bush is one of them. From the mesmerizing first chapter to the heartbreaking, yet hopeful, ending, I simply could not turn the pages fast enough. Even before I dive into the rest of my thoughts on this book, this is certainly a must read.
Dr. Charles Johnson is a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene who found himself embroiled in a civil rights murder trial as a witness for the prosecution in 1967. The Mississippi Burning Trial has been the subject of film, documentaries, and other books, but this is the book that takes on the biography of Dr. Johnson, one of the pivotal figures in the small towns of Mississippi where racism and the Ku Klux Klan reigned supreme in the 1960s. From Dr. Johnson's work in educating African Americans to his dynamite preaching, God called Dr. Johnson to the fire so he could be a beacon of hope in the storm.
Multiple times while reading I teared up, and the events of one of the final chapters broke me. I won't spoil it here, but it was perhaps one of the most powerful moments I have read in any biography ever. The ability of this man of God to stand up even when threatened to continue to do what God had called him to do is inspiring.
The book is not a long read, and there are photographs of key events and places from the narrative. There are also copious notes in the endnotes that point to more sources and information not only about the Mississippi Burning Trial, but also about Dr. Johnson's life.
We need more stories like this one. We need to remember the heroes of the past and today, and to remember that sometimes we are called into the fire. The purposes and reasons of the calling may not always be apparent, but looking back we will see what God has done in the wake. Pick up a copy of Called to the Fire. This one is a must read.
Dr. Charles Johnson is a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene who found himself embroiled in a civil rights murder trial as a witness for the prosecution in 1967. The Mississippi Burning Trial has been the subject of film, documentaries, and other books, but this is the book that takes on the biography of Dr. Johnson, one of the pivotal figures in the small towns of Mississippi where racism and the Ku Klux Klan reigned supreme in the 1960s. From Dr. Johnson's work in educating African Americans to his dynamite preaching, God called Dr. Johnson to the fire so he could be a beacon of hope in the storm.
Multiple times while reading I teared up, and the events of one of the final chapters broke me. I won't spoil it here, but it was perhaps one of the most powerful moments I have read in any biography ever. The ability of this man of God to stand up even when threatened to continue to do what God had called him to do is inspiring.
The book is not a long read, and there are photographs of key events and places from the narrative. There are also copious notes in the endnotes that point to more sources and information not only about the Mississippi Burning Trial, but also about Dr. Johnson's life.
We need more stories like this one. We need to remember the heroes of the past and today, and to remember that sometimes we are called into the fire. The purposes and reasons of the calling may not always be apparent, but looking back we will see what God has done in the wake. Pick up a copy of Called to the Fire. This one is a must read.
August 8, 2019
What do you think? Is the question what I think is I was in Jr. High and High School when this book takes place. I knew of separation but not of such deep hatred. I thank God I was not living in Mississippi. My exposure was watching the news in the evening. I remember thinking WOW is that really true? Now for the book and author. Well written and informative. I find it hard to imagine the life described same with the tragedy during WWII. Problems in life are not solved but concerning hate at least some of us are better for what we know now. We need to be informed about the hate in the world even today 2019.
April 18, 2014
What can I possibly say? It's stories like this that makes me ashamed to be from MS. As sad and horrific as it is, the story ends on a positive note. Bless Dr. Johnson for taking a chance on a place that was so determined to hate him simply for existing.
Read
September 3, 2013Excellent and eye opening
July 30, 2014
Very good read.
June 24, 2015
I needed a book to read in the wake of the Charleston murders of 2015...this reminded me of good people standing up for God and God's children. All of them.
February 13, 2017
An amazing story of a black minister who found himself in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement in Meridian, Mississippi.
August 19, 2023
Summary: A brief biography of Charles Johnson, a pastor in Meridian, Mississippi, and one of the witnesses in the Mississippi Burning Trial.
I picked this up because it was free in the Audible Plus catalog. I am satisfied with the time I spent on the book because I was not aware of the story of Charles Johnson previously. But once I was about an hour into the book, I looked around for reviews to decide if I wanted to finish the book. This review discussed how this biography was framed as an old-fashioned missionary biography, giving me the language to accept the style. (I encourage you to read that link if you haven't.)
The book opens with Charles Johnson as a young child. A white salesman worked in his Black community of Orlando. In his spare time, that salesman encouraged youth, occasionally hired them, and eventually opened a community center. Through his work, Charles Johnson became a Christian. When Johnson felt the call to ministry, that salesman helped him attend a Nazarene seminary in West Virginia. As the review notes, the Nazarenes were segregated, including their seminaries. So the only seminary Johnson could have gone to within the Nazarene movement was the one in West Virginia. Bush notes denominational racism several times in the book. Still, the book's framing, even as it attempts to show how Johnson moved beyond the holiness pietism of the Nazarenes more generally, has that pietism in the background. He shows that Johnson kept to Nazarene pietism through the emphasis on evangelism toward the end of his life and in his rejection of acceptance of the invitation to the Carter inaugural ball because it served alcohol.
I have read many missionary biographies, and many of the genre's tropes are here. They tend to be short; this was less than four hours in audiobook. They emphasize supernatural calling and intervention. They focus on the action, not the interior life or mundane everyday work. And they always talk about what was given up to serve God, including losing family or spouse. And the story of one of the KKK members who was convicted for the killings became Christian in jail and personally came to ask for forgiveness from Charles Johnson after leaving jail fits the genre's tropes as well. I think of these types of books as hagiography. I can see how Chet Bush is attempting to subvert some of the genre by making Johnson the subject (he is Black in a predominately white denomination, and the story's location is the US, not the international mission field).
The problem with the genre is that it makes the Christian life into a hero story. This is a distortion of what it means to be a Christian. There is the additional problem of the limited view of the gospel, even though there was an attempt to subvert that in this book by emphasizing the work of addressing racism and poverty and the refrain of Charles Johnson about the gospel being for the "whole person." But that refrain is not enough to counter the individualism and pietism that runs throughout the book.
Again, I do not think this is a bad book, and the review I linked above talks about how this was written when Chet Bush was a pastor in Mississippi and how he later went back to get his Ph.D. in history. I would pick up newly written books, even if Called to the Fire has weaknesses. I have not previously read anything written mainly about the Mississippi Burning case, so I wonder whether this book adds to other books about that story by emphasizing Charles Johnson. I categorize this as a book I am glad I have read, but I am hesitant to recommend it if you read it for biography or civil rights history. Many other books are better, especially if you are not well-read in either area.
Originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/called-to-the-fire/
I picked this up because it was free in the Audible Plus catalog. I am satisfied with the time I spent on the book because I was not aware of the story of Charles Johnson previously. But once I was about an hour into the book, I looked around for reviews to decide if I wanted to finish the book. This review discussed how this biography was framed as an old-fashioned missionary biography, giving me the language to accept the style. (I encourage you to read that link if you haven't.)
The book opens with Charles Johnson as a young child. A white salesman worked in his Black community of Orlando. In his spare time, that salesman encouraged youth, occasionally hired them, and eventually opened a community center. Through his work, Charles Johnson became a Christian. When Johnson felt the call to ministry, that salesman helped him attend a Nazarene seminary in West Virginia. As the review notes, the Nazarenes were segregated, including their seminaries. So the only seminary Johnson could have gone to within the Nazarene movement was the one in West Virginia. Bush notes denominational racism several times in the book. Still, the book's framing, even as it attempts to show how Johnson moved beyond the holiness pietism of the Nazarenes more generally, has that pietism in the background. He shows that Johnson kept to Nazarene pietism through the emphasis on evangelism toward the end of his life and in his rejection of acceptance of the invitation to the Carter inaugural ball because it served alcohol.
I have read many missionary biographies, and many of the genre's tropes are here. They tend to be short; this was less than four hours in audiobook. They emphasize supernatural calling and intervention. They focus on the action, not the interior life or mundane everyday work. And they always talk about what was given up to serve God, including losing family or spouse. And the story of one of the KKK members who was convicted for the killings became Christian in jail and personally came to ask for forgiveness from Charles Johnson after leaving jail fits the genre's tropes as well. I think of these types of books as hagiography. I can see how Chet Bush is attempting to subvert some of the genre by making Johnson the subject (he is Black in a predominately white denomination, and the story's location is the US, not the international mission field).
The problem with the genre is that it makes the Christian life into a hero story. This is a distortion of what it means to be a Christian. There is the additional problem of the limited view of the gospel, even though there was an attempt to subvert that in this book by emphasizing the work of addressing racism and poverty and the refrain of Charles Johnson about the gospel being for the "whole person." But that refrain is not enough to counter the individualism and pietism that runs throughout the book.
Again, I do not think this is a bad book, and the review I linked above talks about how this was written when Chet Bush was a pastor in Mississippi and how he later went back to get his Ph.D. in history. I would pick up newly written books, even if Called to the Fire has weaknesses. I have not previously read anything written mainly about the Mississippi Burning case, so I wonder whether this book adds to other books about that story by emphasizing Charles Johnson. I categorize this as a book I am glad I have read, but I am hesitant to recommend it if you read it for biography or civil rights history. Many other books are better, especially if you are not well-read in either area.
Originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/called-to-the-fire/
May 5, 2017
This is a powerful story of the Mississippi Burning event and trial, and the life of a pastor who was a witness during the trial.
The author used a long quotation from Dr Johnson in most chapters -- I thought this worked well. It made it feel like a biography that was the outcome of an interview.
There's a big religious component as well, as Dr. Johnson resisted his call to Mississippi and felt like he was told by God to Go.
The author used a long quotation from Dr Johnson in most chapters -- I thought this worked well. It made it feel like a biography that was the outcome of an interview.
There's a big religious component as well, as Dr. Johnson resisted his call to Mississippi and felt like he was told by God to Go.
February 9, 2020
Excellent Biography of A Great Man
I glad the opportunity to meet and hear Dr. Johnson several times as he preached revivals at Spring Branch Church of the Nazarene, Houston, TX. Before reading this I had no idea of his instrumental involvement in the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s. I’ve always respected this man of God but even more now knowing his commitment to a purpose and his fervent stand on such a movement such as this.
I glad the opportunity to meet and hear Dr. Johnson several times as he preached revivals at Spring Branch Church of the Nazarene, Houston, TX. Before reading this I had no idea of his instrumental involvement in the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s. I’ve always respected this man of God but even more now knowing his commitment to a purpose and his fervent stand on such a movement such as this.
April 2, 2022
An incredible story of a black minister who was led by God to Meridian, MS. He truly fought for changes during a time of racism in the south and fought for voting rights and changes. Charles Johnson and his leadership during this time is a story worth reading and telling. Johnson was refused entry to Trevecca in Nashville to attend Bible college due to race yet in 1986 he was asked to return and get his Doctorate from there.
August 16, 2020
One man's obedience to God can bring incredible change! Dr. Charles Johson's life is a testament to this truth. I highly recommend this book about an incredible man and an important time in our nation's history.
January 26, 2021
"powerful" is used on the book jacket a number of times and adequately describes this book. It's a 2012 book I read as part of the UMW reading program. I am very glad I took the time to read this account of a key witness' story and account of the Mississippi Burning Case.
May 29, 2021
Excellent book and incredible man of God
Chet Bush presents a phenomenal and necessary work in recording the inspirational story of a modern-day hero. Dr. Johnson’s selfless work in the civil rights movement is a humbling story of obedience. This is a must read!
Chet Bush presents a phenomenal and necessary work in recording the inspirational story of a modern-day hero. Dr. Johnson’s selfless work in the civil rights movement is a humbling story of obedience. This is a must read!
January 10, 2020
Just finished an awesome story about a great minister during the height if the civil rights movement in Mississippi.
January 8, 2021
an inspiring account of faith and courage!
September 19, 2021
Such a great story of a man of God and his obedience. Highly recommend for Nazarenes.
December 11, 2021
Eye opening and informative. Such a terrible time in our history-the murder of three Civil Rights workers and a young minister called to do God’s will
August 5, 2024
I love stories of faith and big acts of obedience to God. As a Mississippian, this one was really special to me.
October 27, 2025
I stumbled upon this audiobook and enjoyed it!
January 24, 2023
An evcellent book
January 2, 2019
Fantastic, must be heard story of the faithful work of a Nazarene minister in the deep south as the civil rights movement comes to a head.
April 5, 2017
During the 1970s, my father pastored a church in Mississippi and we saw Charles Johnson at our district assembly every year. I was 12 the first time I saw him and just becoming aware of many social issues. Having recently moved from a small town in East Tennessee, I had not seen the kind of racism common in Mississippi.
Charles Johnson was well loved and respected by church leadership and other pastors. I'm not sure if my parents even realized at the time, Dr. Johnson's significance in the civil rights movement.
Reading this book was enlightening. How I wish, during my teen years, I had known what a brave man Dr. Johnson was. As a student in Memphis City Schools, I would certainly have understood his role and the honor he deserved.
Charles Johnson was well loved and respected by church leadership and other pastors. I'm not sure if my parents even realized at the time, Dr. Johnson's significance in the civil rights movement.
Reading this book was enlightening. How I wish, during my teen years, I had known what a brave man Dr. Johnson was. As a student in Memphis City Schools, I would certainly have understood his role and the honor he deserved.
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