After 35 years, Bob and Rhonda Johnson continue to lead church they planted

Southwesterners Bob and Rhonda Johnson have some good advice for people who are called to plant a church.

“First step: Get on your knees. Second step: Stay on your knees,” Rhonda said with a laugh.

Bob agreed, but noted he was helped by being on a team and planting a church right out of college and was part of a church in Fort Worth that had a church planting emphasis.

“So I had the advantage of, in my 20s, knowing that God had a call on my life to plant a church, so I literally spent my 20s learning as much as I could, and then staying on my knees for sure,” he said.

Bob serves as pastor of Grace Point Church in San Diego, while Rhonda leads the women’s and discipleship programs and oversees the children’s ministry. The couple started the church shortly after graduating in 1991 from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

“And it’s one thing that I asked the Lord … is to not just be a church planter, but a founding pastor,” Bob said. “I felt like that was a calling that God gave me to go ahead and plant my life and develop a ministry that would be a ministry call for many years. And a lot of people have different callings, but it wasn’t my calling to go ahead and plant and leave, but basically plant and stay, and grow a church. And by God’s grace, 35 years later, God’s still allowing us to do that.”

He felt the call as a student at Texas Christian University and, after graduating in 1980, went to Huntington Beach, California, to help start a church there.

“[I] saw God just change hearts and reach the lost, and I felt like that was a confirming time for me,” he said.

Though the church wanted him to stay as an associate pastor, he declined.

“One thing that I understood out there is I was more teaching out of other people’s studies than my own,” he said. “I was teaching more out of commentary than out of a clear understanding of what God’s Word said.” He decided to attend Southwestern Seminary “to develop my own convictions and learn how to study the Scripture and learn how to develop ministry skills,” he said.

Rhonda had attended the University of Oklahoma, which she said had a great discipleship program under Max Barnett, a Southwestern alumnus who directed what then was called the Baptist Student Union at the school. She decided to attend seminary after graduating to get more biblical training.

“What God put on my heart is, if there’s anyone that’s genuinely seeking God, it would be my eternal pleasure to accompany them and walk beside them in their seeking,” she said. Rhonda chose to study at Southwestern not only for the “rich potential of studying the Bible with men who have studied it for a long time,” but also because of Hope Baptist (now known as Hope Church) in Fort Worth and its strong missional emphasis. “I wanted to be active,” she said.

Bob attended the same church and couldn’t help running into Rhonda as they also lived in the same apartment complex.

“And I want to go on record: I was at the apartment complex first,” he said with a grin.

“I was not stalking him!” Rhonda insisted as they both laughed.

Bob added that he and Rhonda not only went to the same church and lived in the same apartment complex, they both worked at different companies in downtown Fort Worth. As “poor seminary students,” he said, they avoided paying for downtown parking by parking 14 blocks away.

“So we started walking together from where we parked our car to where we worked,” he recalled. “So that’s how we got to know each other as friends and as people who just loved Jesus. And then the relationship took off from there.”

After dating about two years, the couple married June 17, 1989. They have four grown sons and one grandson.

As students at Southwestern, both Bob and Rhonda had professors that left a lasting impact. Rhonda said her systematic theology class under Bert Dominy, professor of theology, “gave me just a deeper foundation and awareness of what I would say is the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, His life and His ways.” She added that Dominy sometimes met with students in the cafeteria where the learning continued over coffee.

“He was so relaxed about us processing and learning and asking questions that I think that really helped me be authentic in helping other people process their questions and come to a genuine faith, like he helped with us,” she said.

Bob also mentioned Dominy as an influence on him and added Roy Fish, professor of evangelism; Doyle Young, professor of church history; and Tommy Lea, professor of New Testament and later dean of the School of Theology. He noted that one of the best things he did in seminary was to “ask for a little bit more quality time with these professors that I highly respected. So I remember the talks in their offices and the walks around the campus, and I still treasure those.”

Both Bob and Rhonda earned their Master of Divinity degrees from Southwestern Seminary in 1991, then worked at Centrifuge, a Baptist summer camp in Glorieta, New Mexico. “Then, right after that summer,” Bob said, “we got in a U-Haul …”

“Packed up everything we had,” Rhonda inserted.

“Which really wasn’t much,” Bob added as the couple laughed.

“We had a one-way ticket west,” he said, adding that they were in the Southern Baptist Convention’s Church Planter Apprentice Program in which aspiring planters train under an approved church to gain hands-on experience before starting a new church. When their training was complete, Bob and Rhonda started Grace Point.

From the beginning, he said, “We decided to start a church for the unchurched, and so [what] that basically meant for me was instead of going to the churches five nights a week, I would go out and do surveys.” Bob said he introduced himself as a new pastor in the area asked people what needs the area had that a local church could address, why they thought people in the area didn’t regularly attend church, what they would look for in a church, etc.

“Not one time over those many months of going out five nights a week did I not find at least one person that was prayerfully looking for answers that they could not find yet,” Bob said. “And so I think God led me to the right homes, the right people, and from those relationships, we started a Bible study in our house that grew a little bit, and then it grew a little bit more, and then we rented [space in] a junior high school, and that grew a little bit, and it just kind of continued to go from there.”

He still looks at Grace Point as a church for the unchurched, but said it has broadened a bit.

“There’s always been a passion for evangelism and outreach, but at the same time, we feel like our church also needs equipping and developing,” he said. “Discipleship and evangelism are both priorities in the Scriptures. And so it’s not an ‘either or’ for us, it’s definitely a ‘both and.’ So I enjoy seeing our church as a place where people can get saved, where we can be salt and light, but also to develop people and to develop their leadership gifts and develop their understanding of Scripture and their ministry skills.”

In addition to her responsibilities at Grace Point, Rhonda also serves people outside the church as a licensed spiritual director, which she explains as “sitting with people” in the same way Dominy sat and talked with students in the Southwestern cafeteria. Following his model, Rhonda said she sits with people and listens as they process their relationship with God and put it into words.

“[They] actually find the words to articulate, because often it’s either just between our ears, or we don’t quite have words for it,” she explained.

Bob also works outside the church. He said the passion of the professors and the respect for the authority of Scriptures he saw at Southwestern inspired him to earn a doctorate at Gateway Seminary in California, where he now teaches as an affiliate professor.

“It’s a privilege to carry that torch now as a professor to others with that same passion of the authority of Scripture and the availability to come alongside people as they learn,” he said.