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Dean Jackson recalls his childhood days of traveling with his missionary parents to donor churches during furlough. "Night after night, my father would describe our ministry in Japan, and then at the end of the service, I'd watch people shaking his hand. This was the late sixties, and beefy veterans of World War II would come up and say, 'Well, Brother Jackson, I suppose it's a good thing that somebody goes and tells them dirty Japs about the Lord.' If I heard that phrase once growing up, I must have heard it 50 times."

The young Jackson was hard-pressed to reconcile the comments of those American Christians with the world he knew in the Far East. "I met a lot of wonderful people—but I never met a 'dirty Jap.'" The Jacksons made friends with neighbors, business people, and civic leaders—Buddhists and Christians alike—finding them most often to be gracious and intelligent.

In time Jackson followed his father's footsteps into the Assemblies of God ministry. After serving churches in Amarillo, Texas, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he came in 1991 to a setting almost as foreign and cross-cultural as the Japanese mission field: Provo, Utah.

It has been said that while Salt Lake City may be the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), the heart lies 35 miles south in Provo, where Mormons make up 94 percent of the population. This city is home to Brigham Young University (BYU)—less than a mile from Jackson's modest church, Rock Canyon Assembly. You cannot drive the tidy streets without noticing well-known Mormon names: yard markers for "Osmond Real Estate," signs pointing to the 23,000-seat Marriott Center arena on the BYU campus. The impressive Missionary Training Center swarms with a new batch of 5,000 young men every three weeks, gearing up for their two years of door-to-door service to the church.

There are no slums, and only one liquor store for 100,000 residents. Few restaurants open on Sundays. The city virtually shuts down on Monday night: it's "Family Home Evening."

The Provo phone book lists but one Catholic and only 15 Protestant churches for the whole city; most have attendance below 100. Meanwhile, the listing of 158 different Mormon "wards" takes up nearly five columns in the White Pages. (The average ward has 250 worshipers.) The BYU listings take up another five columns.

Into this environment came Dean and Marlys Jackson with their two small children. "The first Sunday morning I was here we had a good service," he remembers. "People in our church really seemed to enter into enthusiastic praise and worship." That week he got a phone call from a Mormon Sunday-school teacher wanting to bring junior-high students for a field trip. Jackson was thrilled.

"The next Sunday morning, there they were: two whole pews of girls in nice dresses and boys in white shirts. My congregation took one look and got suddenly icy. The atmosphere turned stiff and uncomfortable. I stood there knowing that those kids sure weren't sensing the presence of God in our service, and I felt terrible."

Jackson soon learned that to his beleaguered parishioners, Rock Canyon Assembly had for 50 years been a shelter from the storm, a place to escape the prevailing culture. Everyone had a grievance to tell, a case of how they or their child had been discriminated against by the LDS power structure. And most of them wanted their burly, six-foot-three pastor with the second-degree black belt in judo (from his Japan days) to help them fight for justice and maintain the wall of separation.

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February 7 2000, Vol. 44, No. 2