If Pastor Jahkimmo Smith didn’t find the church when he did, he could have had a radically different life.

His close family weren’t churchgoers and he rarely attended Sunday school as a child.

But at age 15, he found himself frustrated with life and unhappy with some of the life choices he was making. He knew there had to be more.

One day he walked from his house in Bailey’s Bay over to St John’s AME Church to see if he could find what he was searching for there.

“I didn’t even have any proper church clothes, because I thought you had to dress a certain way to go to church, but found myself in church that day, hearing Reverend Howard Dill’s message.

“I actually ended up sleeping through part of the service, but when Rev Dill was giving the alter call and inviting people to accept God, I felt a strong nudging and went up. No one else came up, but I said ‘Pray for me. I think I want to be saved’.”

Looking back, he wasn’t even sure what ‘being saved’ meant, but soon after, members of the church began coming to his rescue. They provided him with the support and encouragement he needed.

“That was the beginning of my own relationship with the church and with God,” he said.

He hasn’t turned back on his faith since.

Tomorrow evening there will be a special service celebrating Rev Smith’s tenth anniversary as a pastor and fifth anniversary with Mt Zion AME Church.

He said he was excited about the milestone, which has caused him to reflect on what his life could have been like without God. “I was appointed to Mt Zion in 2009. And since I’ve come back to Bermuda [after living in the United States] a lot of my peers who I went to school with, and sat in class with, and even hung out with, have been shot, gone to jail or had to leave the Island [to protect themselves].

“I am so grateful that my life took a different course. And I think people need to know that there is another way. You don’t have to live your life that way. There’s a different route.

“I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon, so if things had gone a little different in my life I could have ended up as a headline in the newspaper or in a jail cell. But I’m so thankful that God intervened.”

Two people who entered his life early on were Rev Dill and his wife Emilygail.

Rev Smith said: “They became my surrogate family and took me in as a teenager. I went to their house to do my homework after school and they really encouraged me so that I could develop a love for scripture and the Bible.”

With their guidance his life quickly became different. Even his friends at school noticed the change.

“People started saying there was something different about me,” he said. “They saw me reading my Bible and by the end of lunch time there were usually people asking me questions about it.”

Rev Dill also gave him his first shot at speaking in church as a teenager.

Rev Smith assumed he would just speak for a few moments and then return to his seat, but instead he was asked to share the message.

After that he got invited to share at other churches around the Island.

Rev Smith decided to pursue full-time ministry after high school. He wasn’t sure how he would afford college, but worked hard to save money and later received a scholarship from Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina.

“I went to the US ‘on a wing and a prayer’ and with the support and prayers of many,” he explained.

He went on to get a Master of Divinity and last year, a Doctor of Ministry — a miracle considering neither of his parents finished high school, he said. At age 23, he found his first job pastoring his church in Buffalo, New York.

He said one of his greatest delights in ministry is helping people reach their divine potential. “With all the ups and downs in ministry, there are disappointments and successes, but those moments, I call them ‘glimpses of glory’, when I look at someone coming to church one week and then see them a year later completely transformed through God, that’s what makes my calling worthwhile.”

The special service in honour of Rev Smith’s time in ministry will be held tomorrow at 5pm.

Useful website: www.mtzion.bm.