After House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) ascended to one of the most powerful offices in Washington three years ago, his wife, a faith-based counselor, turned her focus to the nation’s capital.
Kelly Johnson reoriented a religious nonprofit she was running back home in the Shreveport area into a ministry focused on female congressional staffers. Its new purpose, according to an IRS filing, was to help “the hundreds of unreached young women” working around Capitol Hill “find purpose, belonging, and Christian community.”
Through the organization, a part-time endeavor run solely by Johnson, she provides counseling, delivers speeches and conducts “spiritual heritage tours” of the U.S. Capitol that highlight the nation’s Christian history. In 2024, financial disclosures show Johnson was paid $50,000 for 10 hours of work per week.
The nonprofit, Onward Christian Education Services, has become part of the rising presence in official Washington of evangelical Christianity as its devotees, a key bloc of support for President Donald Trump, seek to inject a biblical worldview into American politics and government.
The centerpiece of Johnson’s organization is the faith-based counseling that she said she provides free to staff and the spouses of House members.
“I’m a missionary here,” Johnson said in an interview.
“It’s kind of a calling in this life for me,” she added. “This is what I love to do. This is my heart.”
The full extent of Kelly Johnson’s work in Washington is unclear, however. Some mysteries remain about her organization, including who is funding it.
Onward Christian Education Services brought in an average of more than $60,000 in contributions annually during its early years. Donors are disclosed to the IRS but redacted in publicly available filings.
Johnson said her nonprofit has “several large benefactors,” whom she described as “primarily just individuals who have an interest in this and have a heart in this.” She would not name them or disclose whether they are also supporters of her husband’s political campaigns, and she declined to voluntarily provide unredacted filings to The Washington Post.
The publicly available records contain inconsistencies and omissions. Johnson, who IRS filings indicate also does the bookkeeping, has occasionally revised annual revenue figures for previous years without explanation. On a 2023 annual form, she neglected to report her own salary, which accounts for almost 90 percent of spending since the organization formed.
The Post spoke to four people who work on nonprofit law and government ethics. They stressed there’s nothing wrong with the purpose of Onward Christian Education Services but raised concerns about how Kelly Johnson’s close connection to the speaker’s office could benefit the nonprofit.
“It should make everyone uncomfortable that the speaker’s wife would be raising money for a mission to serve congressional staff,” said Meredith McGehee, a former lobbyist for several nonpartisan groups that advocate for campaign finance transparency and anti-corruption measures in government. “It really dances on that blurred line of separation of church and state and using public resources for private interests.”
In a statement, Mike Johnson praised his wife’s ministry work and Christian counseling services as life-changing for many.
“She has a true gift with people and has inspired many other women to live out their faith, overcome their obstacles, and find peace and success, even in an environment as challenging as Capitol Hill,” he said.
Kelly Johnson has intentionally tried to keep her nonprofit’s second chapter out of the spotlight after what she considered an unfairly hostile reception to the couple’s religious views when Mike Johnson became speaker in October 2023.
Onward Christian Education Services previously operated for five years in Louisiana. The Post discovered the change in mission when a reporter requested recent IRS filings for the group, which had not filed legally required disclosures for tax-exempt organizations for two years.
Kelly Johnson submitted the organization’s 2024 filing after the inquiry, revealing its new purpose, though she did not explain the delay. A spokesperson said Johnson requested an extension for her 2025 IRS filing and has not yet completed it. The form is typically due in May and nonprofits can ask for a six-month extension.
After an initial interview, Johnson declined to speak to a reporter again. The Post has pieced together this portrait of Onward Christian Education Services through that conversation, an analysis of available public documents and written questions submitted to Mike Johnson’s office.
The Johnsons were ordained as Southern Baptist missionaries more than two decades ago, and in 2017, their church in Benton, Louisiana, formally ordained Kelly Johnson as a minister. The same year, she was licensed as a pastoral counselor through the National Christian Counselors Association, opening a practice at the church.
Though she has never held elected office herself, Johnson has also long been politically active. Two decades ago, when Mike Johnson was still a practicing attorney, the couple were vocal advocates for covenant marriage, a legal union with more limited standing for divorce, and participated in an interview with Diane Sawyer about their experience. Kelly Johnson has previously worked for Louisiana Right to Life, an antiabortion advocacy group.
She was intimately involved in her husband’s political rise. In 2022, the couple started a podcast together covering “hot topics and current events from a Christian perspective,” which they hosted until Mike Johnson became speaker.
Onward Christian Education Services was created as a tax-exempt organization in April 2019 to counter what the Johnsons described at the time as cultural attacks against people of faith and the traditional family. Kelly Johnson recently told The Post she came to see that education was important.
“People have forgotten our history and our Christian heritage,” she said. “For a long time, I felt that burden.”
The purpose of the nonprofit, according to early tax filings, was to “empower Christians to follow the Biblical commands to understand and meet the challenges of our day,” primarily through live seminars at churches across Louisiana and eventually other states. Kelly Johnson served as the CEO and the only employee.
“Mike and Kelly Johnson ‘rang the bell’ to awaken our people to become Christian patriots,” Gevan Spinney, a local pastor who serves as president of Onward Christian Education Services’ board, told the Baptist Message, a faith-based publication, in an article that May touting the seminar.
Onward Christian Education Services initially did not submit any filings to the IRS. In 2022, when Kelly Johnson submitted forms for the first three years of operation, she blamed “a communication gap and misunderstanding of the filing requirements” for a nonprofit so closely affiliated with a religious denomination. The organization paid $6,475 in penalties to the Treasury Department.
From 2019 to 2023, Johnson reported working 10 hours a week for Onward Christian Education Services, earning between $35,383 and $64,485 annually. During the covid-19 pandemic, the organization developed prerecorded presentations of its seminars. The Johnsons’ podcast followed.
Once her husband became speaker, Kelly Johnson said, the couple had to spend more time in Washington and were no longer able to conduct regular church visits. So in 2024, she transitioned the focus of her nonprofit to the capital, folding in her counseling business and offering free sessions.
Johnson said she has 10 or 11 clients, whom she counsels through a lens of spirituality and the Bible about the issues that women face, including anxiety and depression, adjusting to a new city and problems with their families.
The organization maintains a low profile because, Johnson said, she fears for her safety. Her clients come through word of mouth, rather than advertising, Johnson said, and unlike in Louisiana, where she had an office at her church, they meet for counseling sessions at home or over FaceTime.
“People want things to be private,” she said. “If I had an office, there would likely be protesters outside of it. I would like to have an office. Boy, would I like to.”
Taylor Haulsee, a spokesman for Mike Johnson, said in a statement that “no House Republican Caucus or member office has ever been used for” outreach to staffers and that most of the nonprofit’s activities take place away from the Capitol complex.
Other programming since Onward Christian Education Services shifted to Washington has included Kelly Johnson speaking at a Christian women’s conference in Kentucky in 2024, leading the spiritual heritage tours of the Capitol and organizing a Bible study, which Johnson said was hard to maintain because “people are just so overcommitted.”
Johnson turned down a request from The Post for one of her Capitol tours. Haulsee said the tours are within House guidelines and they are “scheduled for small groups of people upon request, which is the same access available to any and all citizens to the People’s House.” He would not share who those people are or what they visit on the tours.
As she expanded her ministry into Washington, Johnson teamed up with “like-minded organizations operating in the nation’s capital such as Concerned Women for America, Inc.,” according to the 2024 IRS filing. Concerned Women for America is an advocacy group “dedicated to impacting the culture for Christ through education and public policy,” according to its website. A spokesperson declined to answer questions about the organization’s work with Johnson.
Government ethics advocates said the lack of transparency surrounding Onward Christian Education Services means the public cannot be certain whether donors are using the organization to gain access to the Johnsons or whether Kelly Johnson receives advantages, such as access to the Capitol for her tours, that other nonprofits could not get.
“Is it serving a political purpose or is it serving an actual charity?” said Philip Hackney, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who specializes in nonprofit law.
Without proper safeguards, young staffers could also feel pressured to participate in Johnson’s counseling and Bible study, said Davina Hurt, director of the government ethics program at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. She said it would be helpful to know who extends the invitations, whether the speaker’s name gets invoked and whether attendance is ever shared with the boss of a Hill staffer.
“The institutional concern one should have is the power that’s present in those situations,” Hurt said. “If you want to advance through the ranks, you will feel pressure to some degree.”
Haulsee said no staffers have ever been pressured to participate in Johnson’s programming.
McGehee, the former ethics lobbyist, said she is sympathetic to the challenges a prominent politician’s spouse faces figuring out an appropriate role in Washington. But Onward Christian Education Services should at least articulate a firmer wall between Johnson and the money, she said, to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest. McGehee questioned why Johnson needed to be paid at all to minister to congressional staffers.
“This is not about the value of the work,” McGehee said. “But it’s fraught.”
In 2024, an IRS filing shows that Johnson took a salary of $50,000 even though the organization brought in no revenue that year, depleting its reserves to $5,797. Johnson said she was too busy with her husband’s new position to fundraise. No more-recent financial statements are available.
Johnson deferred to her four-member board on questions about her salary. Three of its members, who have all been in their positions since Onward Christian Education Services began, did not respond to attempts by The Post to speak with them.
Board secretary Julianna Parks, an attorney and local government official in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, said they set Johnson’s salary annually by looking at what other nonprofit directors in the area make.
The Johnsons “insisted that it not be excessive in any way,” she said. “So we always erred on the lower side.”
Parks said she first met Mike Johnson professionally through the local law community and became friendly with the Johnsons when their children attended the same private Christian school. She declined to discuss any other specifics of the organization or how the board operates, including whether it had advised Kelly Johnson as she refocused her work to Washington.
“I don’t really feel comfortable answering specifically to this organization,” Parks said.
She said that she thought a story about Onward Christian Education Services was a bad idea, because she did not want to put a spotlight on the Johnson family during a dangerous time in the country.
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