Fired Northview Pastor CJ Johnson Launches Patmos Church in Noblesville

Six hundred followers, one rented address on Mulberry Street, and a name taken from the island where John was exiled. Four months after being fired as senior pastor of one of Indiana's best-known multi-campus churches, CJ Johnson was back in a pulpit on Sunday, October 25, 2026 — this time in a church he started himself.

Johnson announced Patmos Church in an Instagram post on October 19, citing Revelation 1:9, where the Apostle John refers to the small Greek island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea. It was a place of exile and isolation, the post implied, where John received and recorded the visions of Revelation.

“A broken world needs a brave church,” one of the slides in the October 19 post stated. By the morning of October 23, the church's Instagram account already had more than 600 followers, according to the Indianapolis Star. By Monday afternoon, October 26, the Christian Post reported it had more than 750.

Patmos Church Noblesville: First Services October 25 at 802 Mulberry Street

Patmos Church is meeting at 802 Mulberry Street in Noblesville, in Hamilton County, north of Indianapolis. Services were set for 9 in the morning and 11 in the morning on October 25, according to posts on Instagram reported by the Indianapolis Star.

The name does a lot of work. Patmos is a small, rocky island, and in Christian tradition it is where John was exiled and received the visions recorded in the Book of Revelation. For a pastor fired in June and launching again in October, the parallel is hard to miss.

The launch was quiet in form and loud in meaning, and it occured without a denominational announcement. In a county where Northview Church, based in Carmel, draws thousands across several campuses, a start-up congregation meeting twice on a Sunday morning is a small thing — unless you know the backstory.

CJ Johnson Fired by Northview Church: Leadership Concerns and Investigation

Elders at Northview Church announced Johnson's firing in June 2026, approximately three years after defending his hiring as senior pastor in 2021. The Christian Post reported that former members of Southland City Church in Minnesota, the now-defunct congregation Johnson previously led, had warned Northview before the hiring.

In 2023, former Southland members accused Johnson of speaking dishonestly from the pulpit, lacking transparency about church finances, and threatening or manipulating those who questioned his ideas or leadership, according to The Roys Report. Northview's elders defended the hiring at the time, saying they had conducted a full due diligence process.

Jason Pongratz, executive pastor at Northview, told the Christian Post in July 2023 that elders had worked hard to ensure Johnson was the person God wanted them to hire. He said the allegations were a distortion of truth by some former Southland staff, and that some had begun reconciling with Johnson.

The June 2026 firing followed a different process. Northview said various concerns were brought to church leadership about aspects of Johnson's leadership style and interpersonal conduct, and that a significant allegation was brought to the elder team, which brought in a law firm to investigate. The church did not provide details on the nature of the allegation, and said the investigation's findings were inconclusive.

Although the findings in the investigation were inconclusive, we continued to review and evaluate patterns. On May 19th, all three of our executive pastors unanimously brought their own concerns to the elder board and shared their concern for the future of our church under its current leadership.

That quotation, from Northview's leadership update quoted by the Indianapolis Star, is the closest the church has come to explaining the decision in public. It describes a pattern, not a single event: concerns raised over time, and finally a unanimous appeal from the executive pastors.

Northview Church Pastor Firing: What Patmos Church Means Next

Churches that lose a senior pastor in a contested firing usually face the same fork in the road, as other long-serving pastors stepping aside after decades have shown. The congregation stays and heals, or a group follows the pastor out and starts again. Patmos Church looks, for now, like the second path.

That raises questions no social media slide can answer. Who is on Patmos Church's leadership team, and who holds the pastor accountable this time? How is the church funded, and who controls the money?

What happened to the relationships with the people who raised concerns at Southland and at Northview, including Michelle Creasman, who served as an elder at Southland from 2018 to December 2020? In 2023 she said she wanted to hold Johnson accountable and educate congregations so they could make an informed decision.

Creasman said in 2023 that her motivation was not to aid a hit piece on Johnson but to hold him accountable at his new church, and that his actions had impacted many people who were still recovering. Those words were spoken about Northview. They will be read again now by anyone deciding whether Patmos Church is their new church home.

For Johnson's supporters, the launch is a simpler story: a pastor who was fired, waited, and started again with a brave-church slogan and a congregation willing to meet him on a Sunday. For his critics, it is a warning about how quickly a pastor can return to a pulpit after a contested dismissal, with no denomination or elder board in between.

Both stories will be tested the same way: in the open, week by week, in Noblesville. A church plant lives or dies on trust, and trust after a firing is not granted by a name. It is earned in how money is handled and how the pastor answers hard questions — the same test facing new leaders beginning again in a historic American church and congregations in Britain fighting for the right to preach in public.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.