Whether it’s substance abuse, domestic violence, or immigration exploitation, Jan Underwood doesn’t care how you ended up in a dire life situation. It is life’s mission to lift you up and give you a true fresh start. Through his All Saints Ministry, he serves the most vulnerable – specifically, women and children – by providing practical support that teaches them how to be self-reliant assets to society.
His path to the priesthood was unexpected and never something he set out to do. Quite the opposite. As a child growing up in England, he was forced to read the bible and attend church seven days a week. But when he turned 18, he turned his back on religion for good. He told his God-fearing mother, “I swear I’m not gonna walk in another church, and I’m not gonna polish my shoes.” As an adult, he chose a very different path.
Instead of taking a holy vow, he spent years in a profession far removed from the priesthood. Working for wealthy clients and criminal defense attorneys, he specialized in uncovering reasonable doubt so his clients didn’t have to go to jail. The work paid the bills, but it gave him insight into the darker side of life and stirred something inside him: “You can never work out how many bad things a human can do to another human. And you cannot even contemplate how bad they can do it to a child.”
His criminal defense work was balanced by his life as a husband and father of four. Here, surrounded by those he loved, he felt the warmth of family and could escape his heavy burden of work. Despite his wife being a devout churchgoer who attended daily, Jan held true to his no-church conviction and never joined her. “I am not going to church with you,” he told her. “You go on your own.” This firmly held belief changed dramatically on one fateful day when Jan found himself on his deathbed.
It began when he accidentally poisoned himself with xylene, a heavy-duty paint thinner, while spraying doors without a respirator. Inhaling the toxic fumes shut down his central nervous system, landing him in intensive care. As his organs and nervous system continued to deteriorate, he could no longer tolerate the increasing doses of morphine required to manage the agony. Moved to hospice, doctors warned his family he would likely pass away by Friday. Desperate, his wife pleaded with him: “Listen, you’ve got nothing to lose. You could go to church.”
Jan still held firm. “Listen, I’m English. I’m not doing that. I wanna die in my bed. And I’m gonna die in my bed. I wanna get cremated, and I wanna send my ashes back to England. That’s it.” He regretted his words as soon as they left his mouth. She was only asking for one visit. “Okay,” he conceded quietly. “I’ll go to church.”
Taken off morphine, Jan was loaded into a van and driven to his wife’s church. Still unable to walk or talk, they wheeled him to the back of the sanctuary. Watching the service unfold, he immediately remembered why he avoided Pentecostal churches: “They’re all jumping up and down and stuff, and I think, ‘Oh, this is like torture.’ People are coming up to me with a bad toe or a bad knee, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m just about to croak here.’” Mid-service, the pastor waded through the commotion, laying hands on believers in each row. When he finally reached the back, he placed his hands on Jan and shouted, “Fire!” A sudden, overwhelming force pinned Jan to the floor, “like being Velcroed to the ground.” Inside, he felt “just like somebody had stuck my fingers in the mains.” For four hours he lay in motionless silence until, to everyone’s shock, the sensation cleared. He stood up, spoke, and showed the crowd that he could walk.
The following Monday, Jan returned to the hospital and demanded a full battery of tests. He knew he was healed, but he wanted medical proof. After reviewing the results, his doctors admitted he looked surprisingly well, but warned him that dying patients often experience a final, temporary surge of energy. “Oh my gosh, that’s just my luck,” Jan recalled thinking. “Here I am running around like the Energizer bunny, and I’m about to drop dead.” Jan easily transitioned back to daily life with a newfound appreciation for faith and spiritual community. He became a devoted parishioner in his wife’s church, finding a true spiritual home. After six months of this renewed life — balanced between family, work, and faith — Jan woke up one morning and abruptly announced to his wife, “I’m going off to seminary now to be a priest.” Despite her protests, his mind was set.
Seeking guidance, Jan’s first stop was to visit the pastor who had laid hands on him. “Pastor,” Jan asked, “do you believe I should go off and be a priest?” Deep down, Jan secretly hoped for a no—an easy way off the hook. But, to Jan’s surprise, the pastor replied supportively, “I surely do.” Just like that, forty-year-old Jan walked away from everything and enrolled in the seminary. “I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t care about the money. I lost everything. I lost my business. I lost my wife. I lost my home. I couldn’t stop. But what I did come to the realization was that now I have nothing, but I only had God.”
Jan entered the seminary, in his own words, “big, bad, and ugly.” The path to ordination was far from easy, but he kept his eyes on the goal—and held tight to his wry sense of humor. Wearing what his kids called “his big black dress” felt comical enough, but the rigid routine was the real test. “You have to get up early in the morning and have to kneel a million times,” Jan recalled. “I’m forty, and here I am being told by somebody younger than me, ‘Kneel, stand, kneel, stand, kneel, stand.’ I’m thinking, ‘You tell me to kneel, stand one more time, I’ll throw you clean over that balcony.’ So it did teach me humility.”
Once ordained, Jan quickly learned that real-world ministry requires far more than basic humility—it demands endless patience, tolerance, and empathy. Those virtues were put to the ultimate test during one defining incident, which became the inspiration for his All Saints Ministry. At the center of this matter was someone whom Jan considered “the rudest human I’ve ever met.”
A friend called Jan out of the blue and asked if he could help an eighteen-year-old Cuban girl who had just arrived in America. His friend didn’t know what to do with her and pressed Jan for his help. “What am I going to do with her? I just have a little church, and I just do my Mass twice a week.” Finally, Jan reluctantly agreed to help his friend and see what he could do for the newly arrived immigrant. Despite testing his patience with her “mouth like a sailor,” and not really knowing what to do with her, Jan called a friend at a hospital looking for advice. This led to her being offered a job at the hospital cleaning baseboards.
She took the job, but was fiercely unappreciative. “Every day I’d get in a big fight with her,” Jan recalled, “I’d tell her, ‘You have to dress like this. You have to walk like this.’ She cussed me out all the time.” Day after day, despite his best efforts to help her be a better employee, her ungrateful attitude wore on Jan until he finally snapped. “Listen, I’m done. I’m not Jesus. I’m not the Holy Spirit. And I’m definitely not God. So you’re fired. You’re done. I can’t deal with you no more.” Much to his shock, she looked at him and fired right back, “You can’t fire me ‘cause I’m not leaving.”
It was a breakthrough Jan never saw coming. In that moment, he realized no one had ever said no to her or called her out on her rude behavior. With that realization, everything changed. She stuck with the program, stayed at her job – later becoming a nurse and a mother. Jan saw that his tough love approach actually worked. But that single success brought an unexpected avalanche. “He’ll fix you,” she began telling her friends, “He’ll help you.” Soon, up to twenty people a day were showing up at his door, leaving Jan to wonder how on earth he was going to care for them all.
Undeterred, Jan officially incorporated under the name All Saints Ministry. Beyond the name, he had no strategy or business plan. To make matters worse, his bishop made a stark reality clear: because his parish operated autonomously, Jan was entirely responsible for generating his own funds. In other words, he had zero budget. What he did have was an unwavering conviction that he needed to help anyone who came to him in their greatest time of need. He also knew his mission: guide the vulnerable to rebuild their lives and re-enter society as contributing members. The only question was how.
The answer lay in the formula that had saved the Cuban woman: stable employment. It was a win-win partnership—employers gained reliable workers, while those in need earned a wage and built resilience. Jan pushed forward, forging ties with like-minded people and organizations that could offer housing, legal services, and literacy education. He came up with clever solutions to tricky problems such as pairing mothers in shared apartments so they could cover each other’s shifts and provide childcare for free. What began with one woman soon transformed the lives of dozens, then hundreds, and eventually thousands who passed through his ministry’s doors.
When asked which story haunted him most, Jan recalled the day a mother, father, and daughter walked into his office. Calm and calculated, with every document neatly in hand, the mother told their story without a single tear. Though Jan never learned every detail of their trek, a typical journey from South America is a harrowing gauntlet—plunging through thick jungle, dodging criminal gangs, enduring searing heat, and braving disease. When money runs out, families walk the highways on foot, eventually joining massive caravans through Mexico until the cheapest coyote they can afford smuggles them across the U.S. border.
The details Jan did learn from this mother stick with him to this day—he calls it “the craziest story of my life.” Their long journey had begun as a family of five, but by the time they reached Jan’s office, they were a family of three; two of their children had perished along the way. Even worse, the mother had survived a brutal sexual assault, after which the coyote boss shot her rapist and gave her a refund. Jan confirmed her story with a simple, unusual request: “Show me your legs.” Seeing the deep scratches, scars, and insect bites, he marked the beginning of their healing with his signature tough-love message: “Listen, everything that happened to you in your past, I don’t care. Today is your fresh start. God’s given you this opportunity.”
Exactly 175 days later—the standard length of his program—Jan hugged the family as they stepped into a new life of permanent stability and employment. Since 2008, that same story has repeated itself thousands of times. The most vulnerable among us, in their darkest moments, meet Jan, receive a fresh start, and rebuild their lives with dignity.
Driven by a profound awareness of the trauma and hardship so many face, Jan remains focused on practical action. For him, true faith and ministry demand active, sacrificial service to those who suffer. When asked why he devotes his life to this work, Jan offers a simple, quiet truth: “That’s what I’ve been called to do.”
Colin Taufer
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