HE retired last November after 44 years of preaching the Christian gospel, but Seventh-day Adventist pastor Donald Ezekiel Kent has no intention of slowing down.

"I grew up with the spirit of having a burden to save souls (and) with a passion to preach the gospel for the salvation of souls. My early preaching days began under the cellar and I have continued preaching until now. Retirement? I have not retired as a pastor. I have only retired from active preaching. I will continue to preach the gospel of the Kingdom of God until I die," says the man, who is affectionately called "DK".

And it is little wonder that he has this attitude.

For more than four decades, Kent ministered -- mainly to the poor and needy -- from 77 Seventh-day Adventist churches across 10 of Jamaica's parishes. In that time, he married his parishioners free of cost, and when their time came, he buried them, also without charge. Kent also carried out record-breaking money collections, which went into the Seventh-day Adventists' charity pool, and furthered the work of the Adventist ministry.

Church records show that he also chalked up a number of firsts in the ministry. Kent was the first in the Central Jamaica Conference of Seventh-day Adventists to raise $1 million for 'harvest ingathering'; the first stewardship director to collect $1 million in tithes; and the first pastor to have baptised 300 people in a single year. He is lauded by his contemporaries for his businesslike approach to religious organisation, having served as president of the Central Jamaica Conference -- comprised of St Catherine, Clarendon and Manchester -- then as conference secretary, and finally as director of the Central Jamaica Conference.

Now in his golden years, the sprightly and jovial pastor speaks with heartfelt pride about what he considers to be his most spiritually rewarding achievement -- winning souls for the Kingdom of God since first embarking on his mission in 1965.

A man of humble beginnings, Kent knew the hardships of rural poverty in the tiny district of Chambers Pen, Hanover, where he grew up rearing small livestock and cultivating food crops, while attending the local elementary school. He had his pastoral calling in early childhood and insists he was "born with preaching in his blood". His father, Kent says, was a distinguished elder of the Chambers Pen Seventh-day Adventist Church in the early years of the 20th century.

Kent followed in his footsteps and recalls that he first practised his preaching on the animals they reared. Prominent among his 'congregation' were their yard fowls. His eyes brimming with mirth, Kent tells how, with the help of his playmates, he corralled the unwilling and protesting birds under the cellar of the house, where majestically plumed roosters, and skittish pullets joined nesting hens to provide the budding preacher with the practise he needed to move confidently into human congregations.

Meanwhile, he prepared himself well for his ministry, complementing his passion and talent for preaching with a first degree in theology from Northern Caribbean University, formerly West Indies College, and at Andrews University in the US, where he followed up with postgraduate studies.

The veteran preacher has words of advice to young people aspiring to preach the gospel.

"Those seeking to enter the Christian ministry ought not to have making money as their main purpose. In fact, they should not be seeing the ministry as a profession," he says. "They should be dedicated to the Christian cause (because) those who come in merely to get a profession never stay long. The ministry is not a profession, it is a spiritual calling."