Pastor Neal (Skip) Johnson is the new pastor for the Durand Seventh-day Adventist Church and Chaplain for the local Adventist hospital, AdventHealth Durand. Pastor Skip Johnson was born at St. Helena Sanitarium in Deer Park, California just up the hill from Elmshaven, Ellen White’s final home, on May 3, 1957. His home town is Centralia, Washington. He attended Auburn Adventist Academy where he first met Judi Ammon, the girl who would one day become his wife. They were married at the Calistoga SDA. church in Calistoga, California in 1980. They have two adult sons, Mathew and Nathan. Pastor Skip encountered God at age 17 during a student led afterglow service at Monterey Bay Academy where he had been invited to play his guitar. He joined a ministry group that traveled and preached his first sermon the next Sabbath.
His passion in ministry is training his members and students in four essential skills:
1. How to lead someone to Jesus
2. How to prepare someone for baptism by a method that allows them to prepare the next person
3. How to make a public evangelistic presentation using prepared sermons
4. How to effectively reach masses of people in high density foot traffic locations
Pastor Skip’s background includes serving a total of 30 congregations in six conferences across America, serving as Chaplain/Bible Teacher on three campuses, five years as a self-supporting missionary to the 12 tribes of the Colville reservation in Washington state, and most recently as a teacher at Maxwell Adventist Academy in Kenya, Africa. Prison ministry, health van ministry, church planting, community service, street outreach, literature ministry, internet ministry youth ministry and Biblical narrative preaching shaped his pasted work. He is the writer and trainer for two lay training evangelistic series and has trained hundreds in 90 events to date.
Pastor Skip has hand-copied the Bible cover to cover, memorized several books from Scripture, swam with man-eating sharks in the dark, performs under the name Sunday Joe McAllister in his secular stage ministry, has written 3,000+ songs and is a writer, gardener, cave explorer, vegetarian fisherman and high country hiker. He once jumped from a perfectly good airplane two miles up and plans to do so again in his 100th year, God willing. He has written more love songs for his wife than probably any other man in history, and believes there are still too few love songs in the world. He teaches guitar, enjoys song and hymn writing, and is interested in networking with those with similar interests. He has attended 200+ denominations and religious groups as a visiting Adventist pastor.
Welcome, Pastor Skip and Judi. We are grateful God has led you to join us in Wisconsin.
Juanita Edge, Communication Director