Carey Jo Johnston ’03 Honored with Distinguished Alumna in Mission Award
Since 1989, the Rev. Carey Jo Johnston ’03 has served as a mission consultant with Literacy & Evangelism International—first in the United States, and since 2008 in Canada. She works as both materials development coordinator for LEI USA and as managing director of the LEI Canada office. At Alumnae/i Days this spring, Pittsburgh Seminary recognized Carey Jo as Distinguished Alumna in Mission.
Just prior to joining LEI, Carey Jo received her master’s in theology with an emphasis in mission from Fuller Theological Seminary, as well as training from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (a branch of Wycliffe Bible Translators) in a course held at the University of Oregon. For more than a decade, she worked with LEI in equipping the church to share the gospel with the world’s more than two billion non-readers through the gift of reading and conversational English. Then she enrolled at PTS, earned her M.Div., and became ordained in the PC(USA). As a member of Shenango Presbytery, she served for two years as stated supply at Ellport PC in Ellwood City, Pa., before moving to Canada for further pastoral ministry and service with LEI.
In her role as a missionary, Carey Jo shares with churches about the work of LEI and leads training workshops for churches desiring to use the organization’s literacy and conversational English Bible content materials.
She has taught at LEI’s International Literacy Training Institute in Tulsa, Okla., for three decades, as well as at regional training institutes in Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Brazil.
Carey Jo has worked with numerous churches and missions to assist with their development of Bible-content adult literacy materials in more than 60 local languages. To do so, and to assist with the training of volunteers to teach adult literacy and English as a Second Language, she has traveled to 20 countries outside the United States and Canada. Those countries include Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nepal, India, Pakistan, South Korea, and Philippines.
Carey Jo transferred her ordination to the Presbyterian Church in Canada after moving there in 2004, when she became co-pastor of Knox PC in Bobcaygeon, Ontario, and a member of the Lindsay-Peterborough Presbytery. She fulfilled that call for a decade and has since continued to serve the local church through pulpit supply, as interim-moderator for a congregation, and on various committees of Ontario’s Oak Ridges Presbytery. She is a member of the Southern Ontario Cooperative for English Ministry and lives in Markham, Ontario, with her husband, Paul.