Methodist’s path leads to Maine Jackson serves as circuit-rider for 70 churches

The Rev. Dr. Sylvanus Jackson nearly lost his strength this summer.

It is symbolized in the handmade wooden cross made for him by a parishioner at a United Methodist church in Randolph.

After he realized that it had disappeared at a conference in Massachusetts, Jackson headed back to the conference center, determined to find it.

Yet when he asked the staffers at the center if a wooden cross had been found, they weren’t sure what he was talking about. “They told me that they had found some wooden stuff on a black string,” he said during in an interview earlier this month. “I told them, ‘What you call wooden stuff is my strength and my life.’ I was happy to find it. I couldn’t believe – they almost threw it away.”

Jackson, 59, suspected that in his new job as district superintendent of the nearly 70 United Methodist churches in the Northern District of Maine, he was going to need all the strength he could find. And he has drawn that strength from the church and its cross since he was a 15-year-old in Sierra Leone.

Jackson’s path has taken him from the West African nation of his birth to Boston University and to Bangor Theological Seminary, where he completed a doctorate last year while serving as pastor of Methodist churches in Randolph and Pittston.

As district superintendent, Jackson serves as a kind of circuit-riding problem-solver for congregations in the United Methodist Church in his region. His predecessor, the Rev. Vicki Woods, drove an average of 60,000 miles a year, spent almost 60 hours a month on the road, and wore out three cars during her seven years on the job. She is now a senior pastor at a church in Worcester, Mass.

Jackson’s district includes congregations in Penobscot, Aroostook, Washington, Hancock and part of Piscataquis counties. Most have fewer than 50 worshippers each Sunday.

“I am not a traveler by nature,” Jackson said, noting that while he visits churches in Maine by car, he ministered on foot in Sierra Leone. “When I became a minister in America, I thought it might be easier, but the challenges of ministry are the same no matter where you are.”

Born in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, Jackson was the youngest of four children. His father died before his birth. His mother died when he was 10. Five years later, his stepfather died and Jackson was forced to quit school.

“I thrust myself into the hands of the church, which became my surrogate parents,” he said. “At the death of my stepfather, my education ended because there was no one to pay my school [tuition]. I struggled hard to find work to continue my education. … Once I got into my church life, people saw in me potential, and they helped me.

“When I looked at my [early] life and saw what I had gone through to that point …,” said Jackson, his voice trailing off, “on reflection, I saw that God had a message for me and that message was, ‘Don’t lose hope. The door may be shut, but I will open a window, if you seek me.'”

That “window” was the help he received from his church that allowed the teen-ager to attend a teacher training college. When he was 20, Jackson got a job teaching primary school. After four years teaching primary school, he taught high school from 1966 to 1970. It was during the early 1970s that he decided to attend seminary, to “fulfill God’s plan for me.”

He graduated from the seminary in 1973, then earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Sierra Leone. He taught there for more than a decade before coming to the United States to pursue his doctorate in theology.

While he was a student at Boston University, tragedy struck again. His 19-year-old daughter died of throat cancer in Sierra Leone. He found it impossible to remain in a university setting.

“Again, I felt God’s hand in my life,” Jackson said. “It was during this period that I discovered that I needed to be more of a pastor than an academic. I wanted to be in touch with people and their problems because I have been there.”

He read a brochure about a doctoral program at Bangor Theological Seminary and was attracted to the fact that “academic life was intertwined with interaction with people,” he said, referring to the seminary’s requirement that candidates for ministry serve local churches.

Jackson, who began his job July 1, said he was surprised this spring when Bishop Susan Hassinger appointed him to serve a six-year term as district superintendent of the vast Northern District.

“He has demonstrated a passion and a love for small-member churches and demonstrated an ability to relate church to the larger community,” said the bishop from her office in Lawrence, Mass. “Both of those have been identified as needs in the Northern District.”

While the minister may live far from his native land, he maintains a close connection to Sierra Leone. Four of his children live there, while one daughter lives in North Carolina. Since he has been in the United States, Jackson has raised more than $30,000 that is being used to build a complex at his former church in Freetown. The first floor will house a community center and the second will serve as a parsonage – a rarity in Africa.

“We tend to think of northern Maine as something of a mission area because there are so many unchurched people living there,” said Hassinger. “Dr. Jackson comes out of a missionary tradition where just 10 percent of the people are Christians. He has a missionary’s heart.”

Jackson said his new job is to minister to pastors and their congregations rather than individuals. He added that he plans to be an enabler and an encourager, especially to the many small, struggling congregations in the district. One of his goals is keep such churches from closing. During Woods’ tenure, seven made the painful decision to disband.

The district superintendent also wants to help congregations attract more 18- to 30-year-olds. Jackson wrote his dissertation on what that age group wants in a church. He supports alternative services that incorporate dance and pop music in worship and often are more appealing to young adults than traditional services.

Jackson has spent his first four months on the job living in and working out of a Brewer hotel room while a new parsonage and office in Levant has been under construction. In June, the conference sold the old house in Bangor used by district superintendents for nearly 50 years. The new structure is expected to be ready for occupancy later this month.

While others may have found the arrangement inconvenient, Jackson interpreted it as a message from God.

“Being district superintendent is a big job,” he said. “So God begins by humbling you in a big way – by putting you in a motel so you don’t forget that people are homeless. God is showing me the way that I should handle this job: with humility, love and caring.”