The Rev. Doug Taylor is more than the Jesus Party. More than a book burner. More than a sinner. He’s a husband and father, who holds down two jobs, gets too little sleep and sometimes struggles with the effects his community ministry has had on his family.

Over 18 months, the Sun Journal periodically visited with the Rev. Doug Taylor and his inner-city children’s ministry, the Jesus Party. We hoped to find out what drove Taylor to keep preaching after almost 14 years. Here’s what we found.

LEWISTON – The Rev. Doug Taylor ought to be staggering.

Working two full-time jobs for seven months – bottling spring water in Auburn by day, making pizza dough for a local food chain by night – he rarely sleeps enough.

Yet, he looks ebullient.

Beneath strobe lights and slowly spinning disco balls, Taylor shouts, sings and bounces in place.

“Are you ready to praise the Lord?” he hollers. An instant later, squeals of “YES!” erupt around the low-ceilinged first floor of Taylor’s home. About 35 children and 10 grown-ups are gathered here for the weekly service, a Bible-thumpin’, song-singin’, sin-scornin’ celebration.

It’s Taylor’s time.

His Friday evening services, which he calls the Jesus Party, are what it’s all about.

“I’m trying to save lives here. I really am,” says Taylor, a former drunk and delinquent who grew up here. “People write these kids off. But this is my ministry.”

Like a missionary in the Third World, he bought a home on Lewiston’s Bates Street, at the epicenter of one of the most depressed neighborhoods in Maine. He has raised his family in the midst of crime and poverty.

He has worried for his four kids, his marriage and his own peace of mind.

“I’ve been really depressed, the kind that doesn’t go away in a day or a week,” he says. Sometimes, he’d walk along the Androscoggin River at night for three solitary hours.

But as he enters the Christmas holiday, Taylor figures he has finally put aside the bad feelings and found the strength to persevere, and even thrive.

“No man is immune to problems,” he says. “My trust is in God. He’s given me everything.”

In trouble

Taylor left home at 16. Every cop in the city knew him.

“I was a drunk all the time,” he says. “I took a lot of pills and smoked a lot of weed.”

He eventually found real trouble.

“I stabbed a man with a knife on Knox Street when I was 18 years old,” he says. The man made a sexual pass and Taylor stuck him in the leg with a chef’s knife. He was charged with assault. A short time later, police busted Taylor for burglary.

A judge sentenced him to one day shy of a year. He was serving his time in the Androscoggin County Jail when his first child, Elizabeth, was born.

He still managed to be there at his wife Sonia’s side.

“They took me out in an orange jumpsuit, shackles and chains,” he says. The restraints only came off in the room with his wife and newborn daughter.

“Every once in a while, I still dream that I get in trouble,” he says. “I will wake up and I’ll be like, ‘Did I miss my court date?’ It really jars me.”

Two decades later, he credits his jail experience with saving his life and his soul.

“More people could use jail,” he says. “For some people, it’s the best thing that can happen.”

Sitting in his home office, Taylor tries to explain his origins by pointing out the window to a group of passing teenage boys. The six walk slowly in the street, as if daring folks to hurry them along.

“I hung along with a crowd just like that,” he says.

On the street

Most locals know the Taylors.

Over nearly 14 years, the preacher figures he has ministered to congregations of children totaling more than 40,000.

Taylor’s round, clean-shaven face and white-shirt-and-tie appearance is as well-known to the kids here as the Kennedy Park gazebo and the police cars that often patrol.

“We’ve seen it all,” says Sonia, who works side by side with her husband. “Too many kids have no direction. Nobody watches out for them.”

To drum up support for each Friday’s Jesus Party, the couple visits with local families on Thursdays. When Taylor’s too busy, it’s a chore done by phone. When time permits, the couple climbs fourth-floor walk-ups and descends into basement apartments.

During a drive through the neighborhood earlier this year, the couple ran into a 6-year-old wandering alone on Knox Street.

It was 7 p.m. The boy was playing aimlessly on the sidewalk.

He smiled when the couple pulled over and rolled down a window.

“Where’s your mom?” Sonia asked, calling him by name.

“Working,” the boy said.

“Is anybody watching you?” Sonia asked.

“No,” he said.

“When does your mom come home?” Sonia persisted.

“8:30,” he said.

Sonia paused and switched gears.

“We haven’t seen you in a while,” she said, making the pitch for him to come to the party, before her husband pulled the car away.

“We’ve seen kids half that age on the street,” Taylor says a minute later. “You wonder what the parents are thinking.

“And you get hard,” he says. “It may not be good.”

During the same tour of the neighborhood, the Taylors found themselves welcomed into a Congolese family’s apartment. Above the couch sat a framed portrait of President George W. Bush.

Together, they prayed. Folks from the next building appeared, calling out for “Brother Doug” and “Sister Sonia.”

“I’m not traditional,” Taylor said later. “Nothing about me is traditional.”

Becoming neighbors

The Taylors began the ministry out of a second-floor apartment in 1995. Originally, they reached out to adults.

Only the kids showed up regularly.

“They hunger for God,” he says. “I think kids are scared. I think they long for something bigger than themselves and their parents.”

After two years, the children overwhelmed the Taylors’ apartment. The couple bought the place at 291 Bates St. The price: $27,000.

It’s never been easy.

“I’m living in a very rough, very dangerous part of town,” Taylor says. “This is a tough place to raise a family. We got gunshots out here. There are nights when my kids go to bed scared.”

It’s one of the things that has weighed on Taylor. He has often wondered about the fairness of putting his children through the ordeal of living here.

Three still live at home. Elizabeth, 19, moved out at 18 and returned home earlier this year. Danielle, 17, is attending a Bible college in Texas. Japheth, 14, is a freshman at Lewiston High School. Kaitlyn, 9, attends Longley Elementary.

At a recent Jesus Party, the three kids at home all had a role: Kaitlyn in the audience, Elizabeth watching the door and a baby and Japheth on the drums.

The biggest cheer of the night came for the Taylor who wasn’t there: Danielle.

“In two weeks, we’ll have our piano player back!” Taylor said.

The kids squealed. And Taylor smiled as wide as he did all night.

“My kids have been on the front lines for 13 years and there’s no place to hide,” he says. “I don’t have a summer home in Cape Elizabeth.”

Trash piles up on his front stoop and on a narrow strip of lawn between his house and the sidewalk. Homeless men sometimes ring the bell at odd hours, mistaking the home for a shelter.

“I minister to destroyed people,” Taylor says. “It’s like being on a battlefield here.”

The burden weighs heavily on the family.

Part of it is money. He funds the ministry alone, with a few donations from the community. There is no collection plate.

Taylor, who never finished high school, works days at Crystal Springs Bottling Co. in Auburn. He comes home around 2 p.m. and usually sleeps until 9 p.m. An hour later, he begins cooking for Sam’s Italian Foods. The job ends just in time for the next to begin.

A second calling

There are other sacrifices.

“This thing will cause marital problems,” says Taylor, who is 39. “I’ve had my wife holler down to me and say, ‘You’re concerned about every kid in the inner city, but you don’t know where your own kid is.'”

He worries that his children will think of him as a hypocrite.

“That’s my greatest fear,” he says.

It led him to a dark place a few years ago.

“I wondered if I should close the door and not open it again, ever,” Taylor says after a recent 16 hours of work.

For months, he put on his shirt and tie on Fridays, he welcomed the kids to the Jesus Party and he led them in prayer.

But he didn’t feel it.

That’s when he took his late-night walks by the river. On other nights he’d open plastic storage bins he keeps beneath his desk and read the news clippings he meticulously gathers and preserves.

He’d think about all he and Sonia had done for kids. He imagined the neighborhood without them.

And he prayed.

Slowly, he felt a second calling.

God told him to stay put, he says.

“He’s with me,” Taylor says. “I love Him.”

The Jesus Party guy

That peace of mind powers Taylor through the long hours.

“I wouldn’t trade places with anybody in the world,” he says. “I am the Jesus Party guy and I think that’s the greatest thing in all the world. In fact, I don’t know why everyone doesn’t want to be the Jesus Party guy.”

Of course, some do.

Recently a boy ran into Taylor’s office and plopped down in his chair.

“Ha, I want to run this place!” the boy said.

A moment later, the boy tried getting up and Rev. Doug stopped him. “Here. Sit down,” he said. “You can run this place. You have to pay the bills. You have to keep everybody safe.”

The kid ran away.