Fired Northview Church Pastor CJ Johnson launches new church

Four months after he was fired from the multi-campus Northview Church in Indiana due to concerns over his leadership style, Pastor CJ Johnson is now back in the pulpit with a new congregation at Patmos Church.

Johnson announced the new church in an Instagram post on Oct. 19, citing Revelation 1:9, where the Apostle John references the small Greek island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea. It was a place of exile and isolation where the apostle received and recorded his apocalyptic visions.

“A broken world needs a brave church,” one of the slides in the Oct. 19 post states.

Elders at Northview Church in Indiana announced Johnson’s firing in June, approximately three years after defending his 2021 hiring as senior pastor despite warnings from former members of the now-defunct Southland City Church in Minnesota, which Johnson previously led. In 2023, former Southland members accused him of “speaking dishonestly from the pulpit, lacking transparency about church finances, and threatening or manipulating those who questioned his ideas or leadership,” according to The Roys Report. 

Jason Pongratz, executive pastor at Northview Church, told The Christian Post in July 2023 that elders had conducted a “full due diligence” process and worked hard to ensure that Johnson was the person God wanted them to hire.

“Everyone involved worked hard to ensure that the selection of the senior pastor was someone they could confidently stand behind as the person God has for the church for the next chapter in Northview’s history. The leadership of Northview Church did not take this task lightly. Northview’s elders conducted a full due diligence process regarding Pastor CJ,” Pongratz said in a statement at the time.

He further said that the allegations against Johnson were a “distortion of truth” by some former staff members at Southland City Church.

“Recently, members of Pastor CJ’s former staff have reached out to own their parts of the distortion of truth and have begun reconciling with Pastor CJ. However, we believe that it is in the best interest of all involved for our church to respect the former staff members' privacy and give them the space to heal with Pastor CJ,” Pongratz said.

Michelle Creasman, who served as an elder at Southland from 2018 to December 2020, claimed in an interview with Current in 2023 that Johnson ran Southland into the ground. She said she wanted to hold him accountable and sound the alarm for Northview’s congregation.

“My motivation is not to aid in a hit piece on CJ but rather to hold him accountable at his new church and also educate the congregation so they can make an informed decision on where they call home,” Creasman said. “His actions impacted many people who are still recouping from what happened, whether it be emotional, spiritual, or financial, so I wanted to make sure this was brought to light.”

As of Monday afternoon, Patmos Church had more than 750 followers on Instagram.