LEWISTON — After more than two decades, the downtown Jesus Party is over.

Brother Doug and Sister Sonia Taylor have decided to spend more time with their family and have stopped the Friday night parties of prayer and celebration that had been held in their home.

The couple, who have four children, had been hosting parties that drew as many as 60 children each week, parties that focused on prayer, citizenship, tolerance, peace and song. And, since it was always a party, there were always sweets to share.

Between parties, the Taylors would involve their own children and those from the Jesus Party in community events, honoring veterans, rallying for peace, railing against domestic violence, praying for relief from hunger, promoting unity, standing against violence of any kind and protesting what they saw as anti-faith causes.

At the family’s tidy, warmly decorated apartment on Friday, Doug Taylor said he spent the past several years trying to find a replacement to head the Jesus Party but failed. But, while the Jesus Party may fade, he said, “what I hope never fades away is Brother Doug.”

He will continue with what he calls his “backyard ministries,” and will continue his community activism and outreach. “I’m nervous about letting people down,” he said, and worries about what the children who had been attending the Friday night parties will do now. “It will be something else,” he said, and he hopes he has given them enough support so they can make good choices.

He called the ministry “Sunday school on steroids, a flower in the middle of the swamp” of downtown.

The Taylors’ and the Jesus Party’s community involvement is chronicled in two decades’ worth of news reports, and noted with a number of honors and awards for community service, including a National Service Award presented to the Rev. Doug Taylor by the Washington Times Foundation in 2001.

He was one of 64 award recipients that year, and was honored as “an inspiring example of someone who, through faith and perseverance, broke the cycle of failure and drug addiction and committed himself in service to uplift the lives of others.”

And, in doing so, there’s been some controversy along the way.

Taylor and his Pentecostal Kids’ Church The Jesus Party protested the distribution of condoms by PreventionWorks — formerly the AIDS Coalition of Lewiston-Auburn — at Trinity Episcopal Church in 2001 because they believed the distribution promoted promiscuity.

They have protested every Harry Potter movie as it was released, and held a book-cutting protest in Kennedy Park in 2001 upon the release of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” cutting pages from the book of the same name. The protest was intended to be a book-burning, but the Jesus Party could not get a burn permit for the park, so they cut the books instead.

The following year, on the eve of the release of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” the Taylors hosted an Anti-Harry Potter Conference to warn against the evils of witchcraft.

They protested the white-supremacist World Church of the Creator when it arrived in town in opposition to the Somali migration, protested the same-sex parenting story line of PBS’ “Buster the Bunny,” and have routinely confronted anti-war protesters with American flags and patriotic music. “I’m an American,” Doug Taylor said, and patriotism “is my ministry.”

The Taylors’ son, Japheth, is serving his second tour overseas in the U.S. Marines. His first tour was in Afghanistan; he is now in Iraq.

Community reaction to these protests have often been hard on his family, Doug Taylor said. But, he said, “I believed in what I was doing. I’ve believed in it for so long I don’t have any regrets. The pain was worth it. It made us stronger people.”

For example, earlier this year, the Taylors’ youngest daughter — a 15-year-old Lewiston High School student — was in class when the lesson turned to censorship. According to Doug Taylor, the teacher told students about a local minister who protested the Harry Potter movies, prompting a discussion of that activity. The teacher did not know Kaitlyn Taylor is Doug and Sonia’s daughter, and it was an awkward moment for the teen.

The pressure often felt by his children also tested his marriage of 26 years, Taylor said, but the family held together in its mission to help children.

It has not always been Doug Taylor’s mission.

When Taylor was 16 he left home and quickly turned to crime. He was drunk all of the time and regularly used drugs, he said. When he was 18 years old, he stabbed a man on Knox Street and was charged with aggravated assault.

The man who arrested him? Then-Lewiston police officer Robert Macdonald, now the mayor of Lewiston.

Taylor was in jail when his wife went into labor with their first child, Elizabeth. He was allowed out for the birth but went right back in.

When he got out, he got religion.

The couple moved from their suburban house to an apartment building on Bartlett Street and launched their ministry in 1995. Two years later, after the building was condemned, they set up a temporary ministry before finally settling in at their home at 291 Bates St.

Doug Taylor remembers that, while searching for the Bates Street building, a Lewiston man wrote him an impressive check to locate outside the city. It was a clear message to get out of town, Taylor remembers.

He wasn’t deterred, and has worked the past two decades to make amends and to improve the lives of Lewiston’s downtown residents, he said.

The proof of how far he’s come, he said, is that Mayor Macdonald — the officer who arrested Taylor in the stabbing case — has twice invited Taylor to offer the invocation at his mayoral inauguration ceremonies. Taylor said he and Macdonald often remark about the complete turnaround Taylor made, and Taylor said part of the drive of his ministry was specifically to gain Macdonald’s respect.

He said the same for Thomas E. Delahanty II, who is now the U.S. attorney general for the District of Maine, but who had been the superior court judge who sentenced Taylor for the assault and a later home invasion.

The two now shake hands when they see each other at community events, Taylor said, and share a smile.

“I remember what I was like,” Taylor said, and he is comfortable with “what I’ve become.”

Taylor credits four mentors for that progress, three of whom are now deceased.

His patriotic mentor was Gerry der Boghosian, who died in 2014. The two didn’t always agree on politics, but they agreed on the importance of patriotism and citizenship, and der Boghosian was one of the Jesus Party’s most active volunteers.

Taylor’s religious mentors were the late Pastor James R. Reynolds of the Deliverance Center in Portland and the late Bishop Clayton Alward of the North American Ministerial Association, who ordained Doug and Sonia in 2002.

He still leans on the Rev. Richard Bolduc of the Extended Hand Ministries on Garcelon Street for guidance.

The Taylors have not been regular church-goers while running their ministry, but Doug Taylor said that will likely change. He said the congregation at the First United Pentecostal Church on College Street should expect to see them more often.

And, to his critics, he said, “You haven’t seen the last of me yet. I’m not done standing up for what’s right.”

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