After 20 years of preaching from the same pulpit, Alan Jackson has to dig an old sermon out of the barrel now and then.

But he doesn't just brush it off and re-use it. He re-writes it, adding a new story from his ever-changing life and a fresh look at the Scripture text.

"Sometimes I look at my old sermons and shudder," Jackson says. "I was much less forgiving as a young man."

"Even though I've become more understanding and compassionate, yet I've become more opinionated and bold the last 20 years," Jackson says.

"The difference is that I'm more adamant about the essentials and more forgiving about the non-essentials."

The Westminster congregation is honoring the 57-year-old Jackson today for his two decades of service at the church, situated on six park-like acres in an old east Medford neighborhood.

Jackson has preached 950 sermons, performed 150 marriage ceremonies and baptized 50 infants and nearly as many adults at Westminster. His tenure breaks a ministerial trend of staying seven years or less at the same church.

"People tend to stay quite a while in the Rogue Valley because it's such a nice place to live," says his friend and colleague Dwayne Brown, the minister at First Presbyterian Church in Central Point for 10 years. Another colleague, Larry Jung, has been the minister at First Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville for 14 years.

There's no bishop in the Presbyterian Church to move ministers from place to place, Brown explains. So if a congregation and a minister click, it's a match made in heaven.

"He's done a lot of growing," says Tam Moore. He met Jackson when he showed up for choir practice his first visit to Medford. "And he's a really good friend to a growing congregation."

The congregation has grown from 90 to 400 worshipers since Jackson's arrival. And the campus has grown: members built a new 350-seat sanctuary in 1989, a $900,000 project. They also turned a hay barn into a meeting place for their thriving youth group, added basketball hoops on the parking lot and began sending summer teams of youth and adults to build houses in Mexico.

"Ten years ago, I started praying quite deliberately that young families would show up here," Jackson says. "All I can say is that it's an answer to prayer."

With the young families came a request for a service with guitars instead of an organ and a service where the preacher walks around the stage, animated rather than standing stoically behind a pulpit. Jackson gladly complied.

"It's a setting similar to listening to a speaker around a campfire at summer camp," Jackson says. "I preach the same sermon, but it's more relaxed."

Jackson has given his congregation a renewed love for the history of the Presbyterian Church; its Scottish roots run in his blood. His father, William Jackson, was a church organist from Glasgow and came to the United States to work at Whitworth College in Spokane. But he died when Jackson was 2 years old.

His mother, Isabel Ross, raised seven children. Three became ministers, one a teacher, one a social worker, one a salesman, and the only girl retired from IBM as a research librarian.

"My mother is a certified saint," Jackson says.

The church rewarded Jackson after 17 years of service by giving him a three-month sabbatical tour of Scotland and England. He toured with his wife, Carol, a Rogue Valley Medical Center nurse.

"As hokey as it may sound, my very best friend in the world is my wife," Jackson says. "We like hanging together. I love to travel and spend time with Carol."

The Jacksons have three children: Beth Bloomquist of Medford, married to Todd Bloomquist; Alan Jackson of Spokane, married to Dolly Jackson; and Heather Koehler of Ashland, married to Russ Koehler. They also have a 3-year-old granddaughter, Emma Bloomquist.

Jackson almost didn't make it into the ministry. He could be celebrating 20 years as a tenured professor of an East Coast university.

"My patron saint is Jonah," Jackson says. "Like Jonah, I ran away from what I knew God was calling me to do."

Jackson knew he was bound for the ministry after working in Los Angeles in 1963 shortly before the Watts riots. After earning a master's degree from San Francisco Theological Seminary in 1969, Jackson had a full scholarship and teaching fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. He was teaching a freshman speech class and doing well in his own classes for his doctorate.

"But something wasn't right," Jackson says. "I had the strongest, growing conviction that I wasn't where God wanted me to be. It was much more than a nagging suspicion."

So he decided to quit, stunning his academic advisor. He returned to his home state to become a pastor of two small churches in the wheat country of Eastern Washington for nine years before coming to Medford.

"I remember a college classmate who told us, `He's too good for Medford. He's for better things and he will move on,"' says Lawrence "Mac" McEachron, chairman of the 1969 hiring committee.

But instead, Jackson and his family made Medford their home, Westminster members their extended family. For that, his congregation is thankful, McEachron says.