Former U.S. Marine rodeo team member Mark Mitchell might be able to ride a bull, but sometimes he feels like the church he pastors is about to eat his lunch.
Not the people; the pipes — and the sewer, walls, floors, fireplace and chimney.
“Part of being a replant is starting everything from scratch,” Mitchell told The Baptist Paper. “I didn’t realize that I might be a project manager as well as a pastor. It seems that way sometimes.”
CrossPointe Church, a replant in 2022 of what in 1963 started as First Southern Baptist Church Gillette, Wyoming, continues to use the original building, constructed by Southern Baptist volunteers in the mid-1960s. Over the years, members and volunteer teams have kept the building and two parsonages in good outward repair.
But underground, pipes and other connections were corroding, fraying and crumbling.
There was so much snow in the winter of 2022 that at one point it was piled nearly seven feet high at one end of the parking lot. An extreme winter was followed by a spring with extreme rainfall. It didn’t take long for the snowmelt and rain to find their way to basements.
As a result, the church’s sump pump system failed and 300 gallons of water poured in.
The carpet in four rooms of the basement was destroyed and the bottom two feet of drywall had to be cut out and replaced to prevent mold build-up.
Aging cast iron pipes crumbled and sewage flooded the parsonage basement. Twice.
The cap on the fireplace broke under the weight of the snow and when the pellet stove was pulled out, the entire firebox had to be rebuilt.
And the primary parsonage flooded six times in the last year from snowmelt and rain.
“I’ve been so inundated with all this,” Mitchell lamented. “It’s just the work of the enemy, but if you weren’t bothering the enemy, he’d leave you alone. This has been a real spiritual battle, the battle of my life.
“At the same time, with the same level of difficulty, we have seen God work and move equally,” Mitchell continued. “Whenever you go into a church and defeat the strongholds there, it’s always going to be that way.”
Prayer and spiritual battles
CrossPointe — his fifth church in a 27-year ministry — first needed to learn to pray, Mitchell asserted.
“The churches were all dying and prayer was always the major issue,” he explained. “In every one, corporate prayer was a struggle. If they were even praying together, it was only James 5 prayers, prayers for their own needs. What I am focusing on here are Ephesians 6 prayers. We need to deal in prayer with spiritual battles. We need both but the bigger battle is the spiritual battle.
“If a church is dying, it’s not God’s will,” Mitchell declared. “There are strongholds that cause the church to die. To get over them, we need to have Scripture attached to every single prayer request, because we need to know we’re praying according to God’s will and not just the desires of our hearts.”
Mitchell also has led the church to interact with the community, beginning with his participation in meetings of the Gillette city council, school board and library board, and frequently giving the invocation. He has established relationships with community leaders “so I am able to be an influence within our government agencies.”
The years he spent in the 1980s on the rodeo team for the U.S. Marine Corps opens doors too.
Mitchell has led church members — mostly men — to minister to physical needs in Gillette, such as providing lawn care, removing unwanted junk from yards, repairing fences, shoveling snow, etc. Groups of “mostly women” clean houses for the homebound who struggle to do the work.
“We do it for free with no expectations but the hope of opportunities to share the gospel,” Mitchell said. “If we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing inside these four walls, then we should have more activity out there than in here.”
‘Culture of evangelism’
He noted the spiritual markers he set up when he arrived to help identify growth and strength, including people being saved — there have been eight baptisms so far — and attendance growth — from 20 to more than 40.
“We are working to create a culture of evangelism, a culture of prayer over spiritual needs, and a culture of discipleship,” Mitchell said.
“There’s a whole lot of activity in churches today but any activity divorced from prayer, from corporate prayer, is useless,” he asserted. “Corporate prayer is where the wisdom from God comes from. When we pray together in the will of God found in the Word of God, we are seeking God’s purpose and plan for the church. Without it we are just either guessing or imposing our own will on God’s church.
“My experience has been that the average church not only doesn’t pray together, they’re more worried about doing Bible study than anything else,” Mitchell continued. “Bible study is important, but if that’s all we’re doing, that’s like going to college to get an engineering degree but never going to a job to do the work of an engineer.”
CrossPointe prayer meetings “consist of praying for the lost in Gillette and how we can have compassion for them, among other things,” Mitchell said. “I came out of a rugged lifestyle. I know what it’s like to be in the dark of the night, battling the addiction, sick of that life but wanting more of it. It’s torture.
“The word translated ‘compassion’ in Matthew 15:32 can also mean ‘anguish,’” Mitchell noted. “Jesus had an anguish for the people. We need to have that heart. If we don’t have that anguish for them, we’ll never have the passion to reach out to them.”
There is more to be done to update CrossPointe building infrastructure, and to become a thriving congregation that makes a positive difference in the community and around the world.
“All in God’s timing,” Mitchell acknowledged. “If we’re faithful and obedient, and trust Him implicitly, we’ll be content with how He provides for us. And when things get tough, we need to be looking at how God is working in that rather than focusing on the storm.”
