Pastor Welton T. Smith was born and raised in the Detroit metropolitan area. As God would have it, he accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior at a young age and has not looked back. The evidence of God’s hand upon his life was witnessed early, and Pastor Smith quickly became a servant of the Lord.
Pastor Smith spoke with rolling out about self-care, how he’s been able to teach the word through this church, and how to get through the tough times we live in today.
How do you protect your mental health in the times we live in today?
I think the truth of the matter is, that this is a great revival we’re living through right now. The problem is a lot of us don’t see the season we’re in as revival because many of us have always thought revival was a church service. But there’s another revival going on. That’s not a revival of the church, as much as it is a revival of life. I think when it comes to self-care and mental health, many of us think that Jesus is not concerned about things such as our mental health, or self-care, but that’s not the case. In John 10:10, Jesus sums it up. He said: “I’ve come that you might have life and that you might have life more abundantly.” I believe that one of the greatest forms of self-care a person can ever walk in, is that you figure out how to find God in life, not just in church. I believe that a great form of self-care is finding something to get lost in until you figure something else out about yourself.
How did COVID-19 affect your church service over the past few years?
COVID-19 kind of shifted the world out of nowhere. And it went from the world we knew to a world we’ve never seen before. So when it happened, people kept asking me, “how do we shift?” I pray a prayer every day to the Lord to give me faith for the future so that I don’t miss out on the future and get lost in my past. I prayed every day, that in the midst of this, God obviously is doing something new on the Earth. In Isaiah 43, he said: “Behold, I do a new thing.” Whenever God’s doing a new thing, the worst thing you can ever be caught doing is still trying to do the last thing. I don’t know what the future looks like. But I’m excited about it. Because the past got kind of boring. I’m excited about the future because I don’t know what it [will] look like. But I know God’s in charge of it. And I don’t have to be afraid of anything. God is in control.
