Charles Foster Johnson, one of our best allies in the fight against vouchers and for adequate funding for public schools, was named “Baptist of the Year.”
Congratulations,Charlie!
Charles organized Pastors for Texas Kids to advocate for children in public schools and for separation of church and state. He has helped to organize similar groups in other states because he has a deep commitment to the common good.
EthicsDaily.com’s board of directors is pleased to announce that Charles Foster Johnson is the 2018 Baptist of the Year.
Johnson, a pastor who has become a tireless advocate for public education, is the executive director of Pastors for Texas Children.
The organization, founded by Johnson in 2013, is a statewide ecumenical group mobilizing the faith community for public education support and advocacy.
In Texas, Kentucky, Arizona, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma and other states, adequately funding public education has become a significant political – and campaigning – issue.
Johnson and his supporters deserve much credit for mobilizing Christians to support and advocate for public education.
Their efforts paid off with both Democratic and Republican officeholders recommitting themselves to making public education funding a top priority in upcoming legislative sessions.
“With his deep, infectious voice and his black cowboy boots, he never meets a stranger and never backs down from a challenge,” said Sharon Felton, minister to youth and students at Faith Baptist Church in Georgetown, Kentucky, and the head of Pastors for Kentucky Children. “But what makes Charlie one of my favorite Baptists is his gentle and kind heart.”
Felton says Johnson’s personality is “larger than life,” and anyone who knows him will agree.
In an interview with EthicsDaily early this year, Johnson reminded Baptists about the importance of educating all children for the common good.
“People of faith embrace public education as a provision of God’s common good,” he said, “as a basic, core, fundamental, social justice expression in society.”
“When Oklahoma pastors noticed their local public schools falling apart due to a severe lack of funding, we turned to our neighbors to the south in Texas for guidance and help,” said Pastors for Oklahoma Kids Executive Director Clark Frailey. “Charles Johnson answered the call and spoke at what would ultimately become our first organizing meeting.”
Johnson worked with the leaders of Pastors for Oklahoma Kids when thousands of Oklahoma teachers walked out of the classroom to protest a decade-long trend of defunding public education.
Their efforts gave great support to teachers and helped frame the conversation for people of faith.
Johnson, also the founder and co-pastor of Bread, a faith community in Fort Worth, Texas, knows a thing or two about organizing.
He brought a stellar career of pastoring churches in Texas, Mississippi and Kentucky with him to his current advocacy work.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Public schools need more advocates like Charles Foster. He understands the value of the collective good, and he is willing to share his experience and wisdom with others.
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Thank you, Diane, for your unceasing affirmation, endorsement, and counsel for our cause. We appreciate you so very much and pray all the best for you, your family, and your critical work in 2019!
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Thank you for having the voice needed and to Diane for amplifying it. Let us hope for a better New Year than last year.
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Agree that Charles Foster is an exemplar especially in these times when a voice like his is desperately needed..
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There are at least two “faith” communities.
The one that supports Trump and probably never read the Bible,
and the one that Charles Foster belongs to that doesn’t support Trump and reads/studies the Bible.
The one that supports Trump has no idea what Jesus Christ taught.
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The one that supports Trump thinks the Ten Commandments exist for “other people,” not them and not Trump. He has broken almost all of them, and they love him for it.
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I was thinking that Trump and his deplorable followers are all troglodytes.
The informal definition is correct but the word is wrong when applied to Trump and his loyalists.
informal a stupid person who has old-fashioned views or habits, or behaves in a way that is not considered socially acceptable:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/troglodyte
How about a new word?
Trumplodytes = bigots, brutes, clods, hooligans, ignoramus, lout, vandals
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Richard Cohen in the Washington Post today:
OPINION
Trump turned the White House into a madhouse
I drove past the White House the other day. It had been a while, and the place seemed smaller, somewhat tawdry, almost haunted. I imagined bats winging in and out , spider webs in the corners, and the president upstairs in the family quarters, talking back to the TV, railing against Nancy Pelosi, the Federal Reserve, Robert S. Mueller III, Emmanuel Macron, Theresa May, Jim Mattis, Jeff Sessions, Stormy Daniels and . . . who am I forgetting? Oh, yes, Barack Obama for, well, everything.
The car slowed. I thought I heard a wail from the upper floor: President Trump going mad.
Or maybe I am. I would not be surprised. Trump has that effect on people. It’s hard to believe we’re into another year, and he’s still the president of the United States.
The shock of it has not worn off. He has never achieved normalcy. Often, when I see him on TV, I react with a kind of nausea: Him! How? I know, the electoral college. I know, a slice of three states. Yes, yes, but how did we elect such a dummy, such a liar, such a baby, such a fool, such a dirty man? He walks the same halls Abraham Lincoln did. He sleeps where the Roosevelts did. He bathes where the visiting Winston Churchill did. Would Churchill have ever visited this president?
Trump has soiled America. He has not made it greater but, in a word whose need is now apparent, worser. The America that previous presidents boasted about — Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” — is now a slum among nations. The goodness of the American people, another refrain of presidents past, is now a mere memory. But American goodness was always like the banner that tour guides held up: Follow me. Follow the United States because we saved Europe from the Nazis and Asia from Imperial Japan — and then Europe again, this time from the Stalinist thugs of Soviet communism. We saved Berlin with an airlift and eradicated polio with a vaccine. We thought we were good people. We thought we were great people.
Trump wants to make America great again. It is an old presidential refrain. John F. Kennedy used it over and over again in his 1960 campaign against Richard M. Nixon. “This is a great country,” he’d say. “But I think it could be a greater country . . . I think it’s time America started moving again.”
The amazing thing is that the previous administration had been Dwight D. Eisenhower’s. Looking back now, that era is known for a kind of kitschy middle-class affluence: the huge cars, the creep of suburbia, the martinis of “Mad Men” and, in general, a sense that things were pretty good — for white men in particular. But, overall, with no war and a thriving economy, things may never have been better.
But the reason the brief Kennedy presidency still shines — despite the steady involvement in Vietnam and the messiness of his private life — is not just his image of high glamour but the urgency of his rhetoric. His call to follow his own example, his call to do good, his call to government service was compelling. Contrast it with Trump’s disparagement of federal workers. Kennedy asked; Kennedy asked not. Presidents have measured themselves against him ever since.
Not Trump, though. He is a rhetorical pratfall. His soul is dark. His vision is to shrink the traditional American spirit. He offers the world no moral leadership and slaps the back of authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin. He lies with every breath — not because he must, as Eisenhower did about the downing of Francis Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane — because it’s the easier course. There’s not a parent out there who wants his or her child to be like Trump.
Trump’s one certain achievement will be to leave his successor an America that will become greater just by his leaving office. A president who does not lie, who does not try to buy the silence of a porn star, who makes his taxes public, who leaves moneymaking behind, who does not turn his political party into a beer-hall collection of ideological goons, who rages at the murder of a journalist by a foreign country, who respects the importance of a free press . . . such a president will make America greater just by showing up.
Now, though, as I pass the White House, it looks sad, the home of a hoarder — lies and scandals and crimes spilling out of the closets and Trump tweeting some inanity. It’s a madhouse that I’ve conjured. It’s a madman we’ve elected.
Richard Cohen writes a weekly political column for The Washington Post.
Democracy Dies in Darkness
© 1996-2019 The Washington Post
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Thank you for sharing. Richard Cohen knows who Trump really is.
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I decided not to turn that Richard Cohen into a post. But I needed to share it.
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To include Franklin Graham, Jay Sekulow, Foster Freiss and their herd in the category of faith communities demeans Christianity.
True disciples of Christ don’t brag about being “blessed”. They don’t boast of God’s stamp of approval, they express gratitude humbly. They plaintively ask God to watch over the world he created and the people in it. Boasting and bullying are an affront to Jesus Christ.
Freiss’ Turning Point USA is testimony to unGodliness.
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Charles Foster received a real and true award from Ethics Daily. The recognition given to him reflects accomplishment for the greater good. It is the exact opposite of the contrivances conferred by the Gates-funded Pahara and Eli Broad.
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Thank you all for your kind comments regarding our mission and message to mobilize the faith community for public education support and advocacy, and thereby cultivate God’s Common Good. Diane resonated with our project early on. No one has done more than her to advance it in Texas and beyond. Do help us plant our network in your state. We are presently in Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi, and have ongoing discussions and plans for Pastors for Children cohorts in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Indiana, Arkansas, Arizona, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas. If you have contacts in those places who can help further our cause, please contact us. Thank you and Happy New Year! http://www.pastorsfortexaschildren.com
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Charles,
That is wonderful news!
What a happy thought on which to start 2019!
You are needed in all these states, but especially Indiana and Florida.
You are leading a crusade for public schools.
Diane
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And, Ohio and Nevada need Charles Foster.
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The most “conservative” college in the nation, Hillsdale, claims its charter schools are superior because they teach civics. The Gates’ testing regime crowded out civics in favor of English and math in public schools. Gates, Neo-liberals like those at the Center for American Progress, and the religious right may not have conspired together to screw public schools and the American middle class and poor but, their agendas when combined achieved that outcome.
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To know what they think, I subscribe to their newsletter and I have learned that Hillsdale is a hotbed that supports false Alt-Right conspiracy theories and a return to the wild, wild, lawless west that was heaven not haven for every crook, conman and bully.
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