Pastor: Johnnie Coleman - The Many-Splendored Faces of Today's Black Woman

Ebony, March, 1997 by Joy Bennett Kinnon

The Rev. Dr. Johnnie Colemon has been a prophet of prosperity for 40 years. The founding minister of Christ Universal Temple in Chicago, Dr. Colemon is the dynamic pastor of one of the largest churches in the Windy City. It's a long way from Columbus, Miss., and from the girl who was rejected by a campus sorority as too tall, too Black, and too unattractive. The only child of the late John Haley and Lula Haley Parker, the pioneering pastor was named for her father, who wanted a boy, and spent her early years developing the toughness and skills she displays today, by beating the local boys at marbles and basketball. She graduated from Union Academy as class valedictorian and went on to Wiley College in Texas, where she received a bachelors degree, excelling not only in academics but also in basketball, tennis and track.

After teaching for several years in Mississippi, she moved to Chicago to teach. In 1953, physicians told her that she had an incurable disease and that she had only six months to live. With the encouragement of her mother, she enrolled in the Unity School of Christianity, where she became an ordained minister and pioneered many "firsts." By 1956 all signs of her disease had vanished and she began her formidable ministry around a dining room table with a congregation of five -- her late husband, her mother, her mothers husband, and her aunt and uncle.

The progressive pastor has seen her ministry grow to more than 12,000. Her "teaching ministry" has more than 1,300 adult students in weekly classes and some 700 young people in a broad range of programs and activities.

"God has created his people to be perfect, whole and complete, and fined and surrounded in and with prosperity," she says. "Prosperity does not just mean money; it means health, joy and peace and all the good things that God is."

The pastor teaches her flock that once they accept that message, the abundance flow to them "from expected and unexpected ways." Colemon knows the abundance that she preaches. She has been abundantly blessed in her more than 70 years of living.

And she is not slowing down now. God, she says, has already given her the next assignment -- to build an elementary school, The Johnnie Colemon Academy. Plans are in the works to construct a $20-million facility, which will include a private school (pre-school to eighth grade); the Robert Mayes Performing Arts Center; a prayer tower; student dormitories and conference center, a sports and fitness center; and to expand other facilities on the church's 32-acre complex.

She is "Gods builder," she says. Her current facility is the third church she has built in her ministry. Her "dream church," dedicated in 1985, cost approximately $6.7 million to construct and contains 4,000-seat church auditorium; a separate 400-seat chapel; the Johnnie Colemon Institute, which is the teaching arm of Christ Universal Temple and its parent organization, the Universal Foundation for Better Living; a 5,000-square-foot bookstore, a 3,000-square-foot youth wing; a computer department, and a telephone prayer ministry.

Rev. Colemon has been widowed twice. She has no children of her own, but parishioners, children are often called "Johnnie Colemon babies" because they were raised in her church.

She has nothing but hope for the future. "Somewhere people should get tired of eating the husk and want to do better," she says.