As word got out about the cafe, the offers of help just kept coming.
"And then someone said why don't we make it a soup kitchen too? I love to cook. These people out here can cook well! So I was like ok, we can do that. Then another woman who works with me, she's a Creighton fertility care specialist, and she was like, I can walk with couples and do Creighton FertilityCare for people who are infertile or who have endometriosis or cysts on their ovaries or who want to do Natural Family Planning."
Johnson also recruited the help of local branches of Catholic Charities, St. Vincent de Paul, and other non-profits in the area to bolster the services and to provide legal help and counseling.
He said he hopes to bring Jesus to people in a way that is non-threatening, in a way that informs, but doesn't force anything. He said he wants people to feel heard, and for them to know that the cafe is a place where people can come and mutually share their gifts and their lives.
"The goal is really to have a place where the body of Christ can come together to give and receive," he said.
"I'm going there to receive too, I'm certainly going to give in there, but I'm also receiving. Like when I do a bible study with our parishioners, God speaks to me through their wisdom and through their love for the Lord. And whenever I'm with the poor I'm receiving as much as I'm giving, so its a place of mutuality, where I can give to you and I can receive your gift and we can accompany each other toward heaven."
Johnson is not foreign to mission work. Before he became a priest, he spent time serving with Mother Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity, in Calcutta, India. He's served the poor with a religious order in Jamaica, and several years ago he was on mission at the U.S.-Mexico border.
But the cafe is just a means, Johnson said, not an end. The goal is to point people to Jesus, and ultimately, to make saints.
"On the wall for (Mother Teresa's) home for the dying and the destitute, there's a quote on the wall that Mother Teresa said to God," Johnson said. "She said: I will give Holy Mother Church saints. And I remember when I saw that quote it pierced my heart, so it's on my ordination card...and this is my way of drawing people to the sacraments."
Johnson himself left the Church when he was young. What brought him back, he said, was the Eucharist.
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"The Eucharist is what brought me back to Jesus and so I believe if I could just get people to come to our campus, then I have the opportunity to point them to Jesus and the Eucharist because the Eucharist is where transformation happens," he said.
"The Eucharist is going to do everything else, I've seen Jesus work miracles, it's so cool," he said.
He's invited Protestants to come to Eucharistic adoration at his parish, and "I've just seen legit transformations... people who don't even know what's going on have these hardcore transformations because Jesus is alive, and I think we just need to believe that Jesus is God and that he can do what he says he does."
Johnson has endless stories of all kinds of providential encounters that have happened through the Full of Grace Cafe. There was Micky, a homeless man who wanted community and is now connected to a bible study. There was a distressed young man in the parking lot who needed a job - and was able to take a roofing job that another man had told Johnson about the day before.
Something else Johnson wanted to emphasize was the evangelizing aspect of the Full of Grace Cafe. He didn't just want to offer food or laundry services to people in need without also trying to tell them about Jesus, he said.
"One thing I noticed in seminary, helping out at Catholic apostolates, when they did work for the poor and with the poor, they wouldn't evangelize well," he said. "They would give people food, like handouts and stuff, but they wouldn't try to tell people about the story of salvation, and share Jesus with people and really proclaim the faith."