The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World

Beni Johnson

1955–2022Charismatic

Taught that intercession can be joyful instead of grim, and prayed that way until cancer took her.

Pictured: the era he stood in — Dietrich Bonhoeffer with his students, 1932 — Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Summary

Beni Johnson lived 1955–2022. This wing places Beni Johnson in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World, 1930–today.

Lived 1955–2022.
Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
Hangs on The Revivalists.
Read first: The Happy Intercessor (2009).
Tradition: Charismatic / Bethel-stream / Happy-intercessor / Prayer-and-presence.

The life

Brenda ("Beni") Johnson (May 27, 1955 – July 13, 2022) was an American Charismatic minister, author, intercessor, and senior co-pastor of Bethel Church (Redding, California) alongside her husband Bill Johnson (Tier 1) from 1996 until her death from cancer in July 2022. She oversaw Bethel's intercessors, the Bethel Prayer House, and women's ministry.

Her book catalog includes The Happy Intercessor (2009), The Joy of Intercession, Healthy and Free, 40 Days of Wholeness, Embracing Transition, Experiencing Jesus Through Communion, and The Power of Communion. The Happy Intercessor (2009) is her signature articulation of intercession-with-joy framework distinct from warfare-and-burden-emphasis intercession-stream voices.

What was happening while he lived4 moments · 1930–today

1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
Autumn 1989Candles in Leipzig, and the wall comes downMonday peace prayers had gathered for years at the Nikolaikirche under pastor Christian Führer. On October 9 about seventy thousand people, the figure the city's own contemporary reports give, walked out of that neighborhood carrying candles past armed police, and not a shot was fired. The Berlin Wall opened a month later, on November 9.

The Church Under Fire & Into All the World: the whole era→

Go further

Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.

The Happy Intercessor2009
Beni Johnson's signature articulation of intercession-with-joy framework. Standard text in the Bethel-stream prayer-emphasis literature.
Find this book — Open Library
Healthy and Free: A Journey to Wellness for Your Body, Soul, and Spirit2015
Find this book — Open Library
Experiencing Jesus Through Communion / The Power of Communion
Find this book — Open Library

Search Beni Johnson at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites

Why this one hangs here

Hangs on The Revivalists: The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed.

On the wall

Era: The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today)

Hangs in: The Revivalists

The years he lived in

The Church Under Fire & Into All the World 1930–today

Two counts of the twentieth century's Christian dead are in circulation and they are built differently, so the page gives both. David Barrett and Todd Johnson put the figure near forty-five million in the World Christian Encyclopedia, first edition 1982 and second edition 2001. They counted every believer whose life was cut short by human hostility. That takes in whole populations killed in wars and famines where faith was one cause among several. Thomas Schirrmacher, working for the International Institute for Religious Freedom, puts the yearly figure near seven to eight thousand, counting only deaths documented case by case as killings for confessing Christ. Barrett and Johnson's own Center for the Study of Global Christianity revised the annual rate down in the third edition of 2019. The wide number and the narrow number measure two different things, and even the narrow one is large. The same century saw the church grow faster than it ever had. Both are true of the same hundred years.

The whole era →

This voice also teaches on MannaFest: their author page and quotes.

Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall

Corrie ten Boom1892–1983

Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.

Maximilian Kolbe1894–1941

Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.

C.S. Lewis1898–1963

The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.

Wang Mingdao1900–1991

Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.

Eric Liddell1902–1945

Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.

Watchman Nee1903–1972

Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.