Donna Johnson

Donna Belle Johnson, 88, of Fort Dodge, passed away on Wednesday, December 20, 2023, at her Fort Dodge residence with her granddaughter.

Funeral Services will be held 1:00 PM, Saturday January 6th, 2024, at Laufersweiler Funeral Home. Burial will be Union Cemetery in Humboldt. A visitation will be held Friday, January 5th, 2024, from 5:00 to 7:00 PM at Laufersweiler Funeral Home.

Donna is survived by her 3 children, David William (Susan) Johnson of Grand Prairie, TX, Catherine Ann (James) Mosley of Fort Dodge, and Matthew Perry (Sarah) Johnson of Hardy; 16 grandchildren; Joshua (Courtney) Johnson, Stephanie (Tyler) Cox, Caleb (Emilee) Johnson, Anna (Paul) Gibson, Rebekah Johnson, Micah (Angelica) Johnson, Abigail (Michael) Nations, Deborah (Derrick) Torres, Josiah (Julianna) Johnson, Elisabeth (Gabriel) Martinez, Benjamin (Ashley) Chavers, Elizabeth Chavers, and Naomi, Lydia, Jacob, and Solomon Johnson; and 29 great grandchildren.

Donna is preceded in death by her husband, Perry William Johnson, parents, John Edmond and Bernice (Robinson) Wagoner, and her brother, John Cecil Wagoner.

Donna Belle Wagoner was born on August 10, 1935, in Cedar Rapids. Her first job as a youth was a job at the local dime store. She attended and graduated from Spencer High School. After graduation, she was hired at the Spencer Daily Reporter, where she covered weddings, funerals, and social news; becoming the paper's own private secretary and assistant, even in charge of payroll. In 1955, she was joined in marriage to Perry William Johnson from Royal, Iowa. At the time Perry was a salesman for Graham Tire of Spencer. In January of 1959, Perry started in the insurance business and the couple moved to Rolfe to start their family. David was born to them in June of that year. Donna was active in Women’s Circle at the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, in Rolfe.

In the 70’s, Donna was chosen as a “Gideon’s” wife to speak and counsel women at the then Rockwell City Women’s Prison facility. She also began individual and small group discipleship Bible Studies with high school students in Rolfe. After, she and Perry accepted a ministry role at the Rolfe Presbyterian Church, teaching and mentoring the high school Sunday school class students. Highlights of those years was their planning and successful evangelistic rally with Nikki Cruz in Pocahontas, and their partnering with then Iowa States’ Football Chaplin, John Warder to host another evangelistic rally. Between the events, it is believed that Rolfe High School and the surrounding area was turned upside down to faith and hundreds of lives influenced for Christ.

In the Mid- 70’s, Perry began an Evangelism Explosion Training Program at Humboldt’s Oak Hill Baptist Church, and they began attending via a distant commute from their rural home on the Brinkman homestead outside of Rolfe. Perry became a Deacon and Donna a Deaconess, loving her role in hospitality. She also served faithfully for many years as the director of their Cradle Roll Ministry to infants and their mothers. She loved babies and loved helping equip moms to train their children in the Lord. In addition to sharing the Lord and scripture with anyone who would listen, she designed a line of scriptural auto antenna emblems for Neil Hendrckson, of Mary’s Book and Bible Store of Fort Dodge (Now operated as Faith Works by Catherine and Elizabeth), once again the message of the gospel was communicated to hundreds, this time through her artistic talents.

By the late 80’s, Perry felt the Lord steering him to different things in ministry. As a Gideon, he had filled pulpits but was asked in 1987 to assume the leadership of Gilmore City Baptist Church in Gilmore City. After much prayer and discussion, he and Donna held their first service in January 1988. Within a couple of years all of their children were involved at that ministry. Donna was the church secretary and gladly assumed Sunday School training of the children and using her hospitality gifts for the next 18 years, even beyond Perry’s death in March of 2005.

With Perry’s passing, Donna’s world changed. Ministry was no longer a team of her and Perry, but her and just her Lord. She began helping Catherine in the mission of spreading the gospel with scripture driven gifts at Faith Works in 2006. She helped design coffee grounds packaging and price hundreds of products, eventually taking on a secretarial role of paper filing, an immense task back then, but she insisted on being a volunteer. Donna later became a member of Harvest Baptist Church of Fort Dodge and several years later, attended Praire Lakes. Her final fellowship was at Agape Church. During her final months she loved repeated sermons by Pastor Craig Groeschel of Life. Church on TV.

Cataracts and an eventual surgery in early 2018, wove Catherine into more than driving up to cook her daily evening meals since 2017. That continued until Catherine’s leg injury, surgery, and months of recovery. In November 2019, Donna moved in with Catherine’s daughter, Elizabeth, in her Fort Dodge home. Although referring to it as that “nursing home place” sometimes, she loved being with her “doll baby.” Elizabeth, with Catherine’s help, assumed more and more of Donna’s full-time care needs as her memory declined due to years of an inactive thyroid.

Through many moments, joys, tears, laughter, and challenges, Donna could still sing! She retained words of almost all the songs she and Elizabeth sang during the routines of her daily care. Catherine took charge of meals, coordinating changes, improvements and sometimes hourly revisions of her care. Most of all, she kept the two agreeable and smiling, made Donna laugh and surrounded her in an atmosphere of scripture, windows into a tree’d view and love.

Immense thanks and gratitude to Elizabeth for thousands of hours of attention in these last 4 years and being there through her last breath.

“Absent from the body, present with the Lord! What a blessing!”