Jack W. Sawyer Jr. met Carolyn Snow through a campus ministry at the University of Alabama. They graduated in 1973 and married on this date in 1974. Reading J. I. Packer prompted the Sawyers to join a Presbyterian Church in America congregation. Jack was a Christian school teacher and football and basketball coach when his session encouraged him to study at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi (1976–1978). He transferred to Westminster Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1980.
The Sawyers joined Calvary OPC in Glenside, PA, where Jack became a deacon. He helped Dr. and Mrs. Paul Woolley at their home, learning much about Helene Woolley’s early life in the Tsar’s court. After serving as a ruling elder at Community OPC in Blue Bell, PA, Jack began his pastoral ministry “down under,” becoming ordained by the Reformed Churches of New Zealand on October 26, 1984. He replaced G. I. Williamson as pastor of the Reformed Church of Silverstream (1984–1988), and ministered at the Reformed Church of Hastings (1989–1994). Jack wrote a chapter about “The Glorious New Zealand Experiment” for the OPC’s seventy-fifth anniversary book, Confident of Better Things, and was contributing editor of Trust and Obey: A Forty Year History of the Reformed Churches of New Zealand.
Returning to the States, Jack was received by the Presbytery of New York and New England in 1994 and installed as pastor of Westchester OPC in Mount Vernon, NY. In 1996 he became pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church, an independent church in Forest, Mississippi, and continued that ministry after the congregation became OPC (1998–1999). He would then pastor Pineville Presbyterian Church in Pineville, Louisana, from 2000 until his death in 2019.