Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of Q&As getting to know members of places of worship. The series will later expand to city leaders, educators, first responders and more. A new feature will be published each Monday. Some questions and answers have been amended for clarity and brevity.
Instead of answering his call to preach, Pastor David Mitchell enlisted in the United States Army and Marine Corp.
Twenty-four years, seven months and 29 days after living the “military lifestyle,” as Mitchell calls it, and moving 15 times in the 32 years he and his wife had been together, Mitchell’s family returned to Hampton, Arkansas, and his home church church.
Two years after he surrendered to the ministry and began preaching, Mitchell took over as pastor at Harmony Baptist Church on Highway 167 and has been there for the past five years.
Q: Would you mind starting with where you grew up and if you grew up in your faith?
A: I did grow up in the faith, I grew up in Hampton, Arkansas. Born in Camden, raised in Hampton, graduated from Hampton High School, was a member of Hampton First Baptist Church, the one behind the Day and Night store. My membership stayed there my whole entire life until I took over as a pastor of this church.
Q: Could you tell me about your journey after retirement and to Harmony Baptist?
A: God, he doesn’t lose, so when I came back, he put some burdens on me for two years (and) wouln’t leave me alone. You wouldn’t know it on the outside, I guess, (but I was) really tore up on the inside. I guess the reason I didn’t answer was because I didn’t feel the worthiness to be able to preach. … I didn’t think I had the skills, I didn’t think I knew enough about the Bible. Long story, my wife and I, for the two years we retired, we just really (were) seeking God. We were going to church, different churches, visiting churches, five or six times a year.
God finally just put an ultimatum on me. He said, “I’m not going to ask you again. Tonight’s the night. You can surrender to preach the gospel for me or I’m not going to bother you anymore.” It was that clear to me, and I was in a Pentecostal church and I’m a Baptist. A man came up and he put his hand on my head and he started praying for me and my wife like we were having issues, and we weren’t having any issues. … In the middle of the prayer, his prayer changed and he realized God was going to do great things to us because I answered God right there while he was praying. I said yes, and as soon as I said yes to God, things started unfolding. Churches started calling me, just out of the blue.
I preached …. in a jail. Everybody needs the gospel, but nobody needs the gospel more than those that are behind bar.s … I preached there for about a year and a half and all of a sudden churches started calling. “Would you fill in here, would you fill in here?” … God woke me up in the middle of the night one night about 2 a.m. and the Lord said, “I’m going to give you a church.” I woke up the next morning and told my wife, “the Lord said he’s going to give us a church and called me to pastor.” She said, “Where?” and I said, “Well he didn’t tell me that. I don’t know, I just know I’m going to pastor a church.” Three days later after that…(I got a call and they) said we’ve been looking for a pastor for about two years and we would like for you to come and preach. I was just coming to preach. There’s a process, there’s a human process. You have to go to a committee and do a background (check). I come in and preach one sermon here and they said, “OK, we’ll see you tonight,” and I said I didn’t know I was coming back tonight, I thought I was just preaching one. And they said well we’ve heard you and had a small discussion and we’d like for you to be our pastor.
I told my pastor that and he said well that’s just out of the ordinary, it doesn’t work out that way, and I said well God wanted me there. … God said stand us up as a full-time ministry, he didn’t say how long. I’m a by-vocational preacher. I have a full-time job and so one day this will be a full-time church with a full-time secretary and a full-time pastor and full-time youth minister. That’s the goal. I know what God’s given me, (a) clear vision, it’s just a matter of getting there. We’ve been working on it for four and a half years, and, glory to God, we had 18 people the first time I preached here. We had 100 last Sunday (March 15). That’s a 500% increase over the last five years. Our budget’s growing, our congregation is growing, our youth department is growing. Sometimes we try to push ahead of God’s plan for us, but he knows what he’s doing.
Q: After you retired, why did you and your wife return to the church and visit a bunch of different ones?
A: Seeking the Lord. I knew he was really calling me and three times a week wasn’t enough. I was the faith leader at Hampton First Baptist, so I took teams out and taught them how to knock on doors and how to interact with people and how to sell Jesus, so there’s my recruiting skills come into play. God gave me boldness and courage. I had spoken in front of as many as 5,000 people at one time in the Marine Corp. I was an instructor, I spent most of my time on a platform. I don’t have any great God-given gifts. I wasn’t an athlete, I can’t run a 100-yard dash in 40 seconds, but I can speak in front of people, and I’m not scared. I don’t stand there and my knees shake when I get up there. I can do an impromptu speech on anything, I can sell you this pen. And so I guess God using me… Obviously it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t getting enough of God. He would call me, I had a thirst, as the Bible said, and a hunger, I hungered, for righteousness, to be right with God and to know more about him, and the thing is, I read when I was young, I did the Bible flipping drills. They’d give you three words in the Bible and they may say, “Jesus came to seek and save,” and you’d have to find that verse in the Bible and step forward. … All of it was stored up in here, it just needed to be recalled. I think God’s given me a gift to take a historical document, which the Bible is, and live in revelation of that word and to turn it into meaning, which it is meant for in today’s world no matter what society is. Whether we’ve got space ships or we’ve got horses and carriages. The theology of God’s word is the same for all of us if we can understand it. Not that it’s ever changing, but we change. I think the big hardship we face today is that god’s word doesn’t change even though we do. We’ve got to stay true to the word of God.
Q: What is it like to be able to look back at your life and see where you are now?
A: A lot of times we don’t see God working in our life, we don’t see the places and the burdens that we bear in life are burdens, that even bad things that happen to us, God uses for good. … When I go back and look now at my different jobs in the military, the Lord’s always sent me places that have been. The army has always sent me places, the Marine Corp … It seems like I was always sent to units that were messed up that I had to fix. It always seemed to burden me. … Some of the jobs I had, I didn’t like. I was a recruiter, basically I had to be a recruiter. … I didn’t feel like I was a salesman, I didn’t feel like I was a speaker. I was an entryman, I fight the enemy, that’s what I do. But looking back, faith looks forward but faith looks back, too. My empathy … to be able to empathize with people, number one, walking outside my faith and not staying on that straight and narrow has allowed me to see things from (others’) perspective that I couldn’t have seen had I stayed that right road. Either way, God gets glory, whether you followed him your whole life and been right there humbling yourself or whether you strayed away, God can still use those things for his advantage.
Me personally, I can see now by being here, I can see every move God made looking back. I couldn’t see it at the time, I couldn’t understand it, but it helps me really have faith in God (saying) he’d never leave me nor forsake me. I knew he was there using everything in my life because I knew where he wanted me to be. We can’t always see that in our life — we can’t always say, “Hey, why God am I going through this?” But sometimes we just have to be tested and be hardened and refined for the duties ahead of us that God’s got prepared for us. In advance, the Bible says, so this is not some mistake that I just happened into. God planned from the beginning, how long it took to get me here. They were looking for a church for two years. I was preaching for two years. I said, you know, if I wouldn’t have told God yes, y’all could’ve been without a preacher for another year because … God was waiting to fill this position and it was based on my heart. It had something to do with me before he sent me down here, so they would’ve just been waiting. … God, he’s a beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. He doesn’t have a clock. We do, I’ve got a watch on, he don’t.
Harmony Baptist Church worships at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Sundays and 6 p.m. Wednesdays. Mitchell said all are welcome to worship.
The church is located at 4268 Junction City Hwy in El Dorado.