As we honor Pastor Appreciation Month, we share heartfelt thoughts about serving from Andre Mitchell, lead pastor at Deliverance Temple church in Muncie, Indiana.
Pastor Andre, what would you say is the biggest challenge or challenges that a pastor will face?
“Pastoring. First of all, it has to be a call from God. And so, wrestling with that call number one is one of the biggest challenges you'll face. And then once you get through that, then you have to deal with the outside world, spiritual forces attacking you, human forces attacking you, and you realize that you are human trying to live up to the call of God. And so, there's some wrestling that goes on with that and it does bring challenges. Challenges with your work schedule, challenges with the culture of today, culture divide, political divide.
So, there's several challenges, but as long as you start off with being called by God, then those challenges all have to bow to God's call on your life.”
What do you wish people knew about what goes on behind the scenes in church leadership?
“The major thing I wish people knew is how much a shepherd takes home with them. That every hurt that they have is personified in us. We may not hurt exactly the same, but it hurts. And so, when people don't show up to church and they're going through pain, sometimes that pains us. It's not that we're looking for numbers, but we're wondering ‘where are the sheep, how are they doing?’
And so you're trying to check up on people and just knowing that all of those pains go home with us and sometimes they wake us up at night. But I would say on the flip side though, the joys go home with us as well. So, sometimes members only tell us the bad things and they forget to tell us the good things. They forget to tell us the thing we've been praying for weeks has been taken care of. So. we like to let them know that, 'Hey, let us know the good stuff. We need to hear that too.”
You are what is called a bivocational pastor. Can you tell us what that means and how it works into your church life?
"Well, in my church life, what that means is I'm a volunteer pastor and I work outside of the home to help pay the bills. And so I don't take a salary from my church and my salary comes from General Motors, but that means that I am proverbially burning the candle at both ends. And so that means I am quite busy. I do have my own nine to five, and then I'm pastoring full time. But there's many pastors throughout this country specifically who are in that mode because we have families, we have lives, and sometimes what we can afford, the church can't afford. And so we need to work to make ends meet. And it just means that we're stretched thin, but it also means that the grace of God is there for us to lift us up and carry us through those times when time is short on in our lives."
So your job at General Motors, I understand you have a pretty late shift or early shift, whichever you call it.
Yeah. So the late shift I work, the midnight shift is just like 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. and that actually works better for me for ministry so that I'm able to do meetings in the morning, I'm able to do visits and things, but that means I'm up late. But also when members have crises, they can call me because I'm not asleep. They don't have to worry about interrupting my sleep. But the hard part about it is that when I do lay down in the daytime, somebody's cutting grass, the birds are chirping. Just the other day I was trying to get some rest and a neighbor was putting a roof on, so I didn't get very much sleep. You can't really tell people in the daytime to stop making noise, but it's okay. It works out.”
So, looking at what's going on in your church or your own life, is there anything that God has specifically been doing or pointing you to, or things that have happened in church that's 'Wow, that was a God thing'?
There's too many things to think of. But one of the things that I think has been probably the middle of my pastoring, this happened, I end up writing a book about it. The book is called 'God Loves Me.' And I realized that I communicated to so many other people that 'God loves you, God loves you, or God so loved the world that he gave his only son.' But in the process of telling everybody that God loves them, sometimes we forget that God loves us and that His grace is there for us. And sometimes we feel like we've got to dot every I and cross every T.
And from that point, from probably around 2015 onto around now, I've just been surprised at the grace of God toward the one human individual [me] that if it was just one of us on the face of the earth, Jesus still would've died for us. And that just blows my mind. And the more I think about that, it makes me more grace-conscious and less legalistic and just happy about how much God loves me. And then it makes me want to respond and live my life for him because he did everything for me and he did everything for us."
In our complete podcast interview, Pastor Andre shares that while growing up, becoming a pastor "was the furthest thing from my mind ... and I went to college and I was trying to get away from my city and get away from God." But God was persistent. He shares more about being an unpaid volunteer pastor, relying on his General Motors role to support his family. He also acknowledges that pastors need constant grace from the congregation, as well as God, because sometimes things can "slip through the cracks." Here's our podcast:
