Author DONNA M. JOHNSON
Publisher GOTHAM BOOKS
ISBN 978-1-592-40745-4
I found this book a thoroughly thought-provoking, well-written memoir. Donna Johnson was, from infanthood, deeply involved with probably the last of the sawdust trail, tent ministry, Holy Roller evangelists. David Terrell is, at the point of writing (October 2013), still holding ‘revival meetings’ in the Southern States of the USA and has dedicated adherents following his ministry from place to place and there yet remain a number of churches that open to him and his ministry. This book is disturbing, sensitively written and not at all the bitter critique of the tent revival circus that was so popular in the nineteen thirties through the fifties. The author lived through some horrendous experiences. Her mother became organist for David Terrell, in time became his unacknowledged second wife. The story is told with a certain grace and much skill and although Donna Johnson clearly uses some embellishment this does not in any way detract from the strange mystery of her life inextricably bound up with the career of a man apparently dedicated to God, a man with a gift of healing who was able to gather crowds of many thousands and grip them with his message and yet who slid down a moral precipice that led him to a life that denied the very gospel of Jesus Christ he preached. He did prison time because of abuse of funds, he fathered a number of children by several women, fasted often, claimed revelations of Jesus, regarded himself increasingly as an infallible ‘end-time’ prophet and Donna Johnson lived through the enigmas of these events until well into her twenties. Her book carries the reader into a realm where God, sin, spiritual power, deceit all intermingle into a confusing muddle and for Christian leaders it should cause them to fall on their knees and ask God to keep them. The absence of accountability in the life of this man and the continued lack of it when warned and checked by others, the abuse of the ‘faithful’ who gave so freely to his ministry and to him personally so that he had ranches, houses, planes and cars and yet the apparently genuine healings that accompanied his ministry from time to time all conspires together to act as a profound warning to every one of us in the churches. This book is grieving in the way it records events that bring the Name of Jesus into such disrepute, it teaches and warns those who will pay attention, it amazes in the way the author managed, with incredible resilience to pass through her childhood and teenage years without ending up as an embittered middle aged woman. Donna Johnson has written a vivid book that takes us into a Christian subculture on the edge of which many churches today, and their leaders, especially of the Pentecostal and Charismatic stripe perilously perch.
