A Shepherd Watches Over His Flock

In Phillips County, Arkansas, the land lies low and wide, spread beneath a vault of southern sky that can humble the proudest heart. Cotton once puffed like clouds across these fields; now the stalks are fewer, the gins quieter, but the soil still remembers and the people still endure. Between levee and two‑lane, three small African Methodist Episcopal churches keep their doors cracked open to hope: Allen Temple, Carter Chapel, and Mount Gillian. All three look to one man when Sunday comes around and the world needs tending—Reverend Dale McDonald.

He calls them his ladies, these weather‑grayed sanctuaries of cinder block and creaking pew, "the closest I have to a wife," he says with a shy laugh, aware that the joke rests on a bedrock of truth. Reverend McDonald is forty‑something, broad‑shouldered, a bear of a man whose handshake can swallow yours whole, yet whose voice can soften to a hush when prayer turns private. Every other weekend he rises long before daylight, climbs behind the wheel in Pine Bluff, and heads east through the Delta fog—ninety lonely miles, each one a quiet promise that he will show up no matter who else does.

"I've been doing this since about 2018," he tells me, his words rolling slow and sure, Delta cadence tempered by gospel cadence. "I love to serve God's people. Nursing homes, home visits, funerals—whatever the need, I go."

Those miles wear on a man, but he carries them the way an old plow horse carries harness: familiar weight, accepted without complaint. The AME tradition asks that of its pastors. Unashamedly Christian, unapologetically Black, the denomination sprang from Richard Allen's quiet rebellion in 1787, when Black worshipers walked out of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia rather than bow to segregation. Two centuries later that same flint of defiance glints in McDonald’s eye when he speaks of his calling:

"The calling and anointing just stayed on me until I just couldn't shake it no more."

From Mischief to Ministry

Dale McDonald grew up one of six children in a house where money ran thin but love somehow stayed thick. "It was not easy," he remembers, "situations come up all the time—bills and things—but it was never a time where I never had nothing to eat." The kitchen might have been crowded, the bedrooms shared, yet there was always a plate on the table and—thanks to his grandmother—a place on the church pew come Sunday.

"Church was one thing I just could not miss," he says, a grin curling under his neatly clipped beard. "You were in the pew on Sunday—yes, I was. Grandma saw to that."

Still, holiness sat uneasy on a teenage rebel. He cut up in class, talked loud, chased girls, passed a joint around beneath the bleachers, popped the top on more beers than he can now count from the pulpit. He tried on the usual sins the way a young man tries on somebody else’s letter jacket—half for show, half to see if it might fit. All the while the faint tug of purpose worried at him like a splinter he could not dig free.

"I had a calling probably when I was about 12 years old," he confesses, palms open. "But I did not pursue the ministry until I was like 28."

Twenty‑eight found him out of excuses. The voice he’d kept at arm’s length pressed in until he marched to his pastor’s office and laid it bare. I think I’m called. The pastor only nodded, unsurprised: I knew it from the day I met you. Within months Dale McDonald was swapping back pew for pulpit, trading mischief for ministry, holding a Bible instead of a blunt.

Shepherding Three Flocks

His circuit is a triangle of backroads and fields. Allen Temple squats on the edge of West Helena, its white paint peeling beneath Delta sun. Carter Chapel stands farther out, tucked among soybean rows. Mount Gillian sits on a rise just tall enough to catch a breeze off the river. Some Sundays the choir is four voices strong; others it is Reverend McDonald alone, stomping time on old pine boards and singing “Amazing Grace” until the rafters vibrate.

Attendance dips; collections lighten. The denomination still expects apportionments, insurance, upkeep. "Meeting the demands of your supervisors… they still demand a lot," he admits. He stretches every dollar, fills communion cups with thrift‑store wine, patches the leaky roof himself when the Deacon Board can’t raise the funds.

Yet the work that drains him also fills him. He baptizes babies, buries elders, and stands in living rooms thick with grief, one large hand on a quivering shoulder. "I go when people die in their family, gotta comfort them, no matter where they're at." On first Sundays he breaks bread at Allen Temple; second Sundays find him at Carter Chapel; third Sundays at Mount Gillian. Fourth Sundays he rotates, making sure no flock feels slighted. Fifth Sundays—when the calendar grants one—he tries to rest, though rest often loses to hospital visits.

A Second Ministry in the Halls of School

Weekdays he serves another at‑risk congregation: teenagers one bad decision away from expulsion. At Pine Bluff’s alternative high school he is part counselor, part drill sergeant, part big brother.

"I show them love," he explains. "I don't treat them like failures. They just messed up a lot of times."

He pushes them toward the stage where diplomas wait like unclaimed blessings, teaches life skills, shares the rough edges of his own past so they know mistakes need not become destiny. "Reach one, teach one," he says. It is not a slogan; it is a daily grind.

Bearing Family and Flock

Outside the churches and classrooms, responsibilities keep stacking. His father is now an amputee; his mother’s health staggers; his ninety‑one‑year‑old grandmother still bosses everybody around. He laughs when he says it, but there’s tender fatigue in the laugh. He is son, grandson, pastor, teacher—each role hungry for time. Marriage remains a prayer on hold. "I'm waiting for my wife. God got her somewhere." Until she appears, the three congregations remain his covenant.

The Gift on a Tuesday Afternoon

We met because I was late. A four‑hour sprint in a forty‑year‑old van called Josie turned into five; by the time I rolled up to Allen Temple the Sunday service was over. Inside, only Reverend McDonald, three church mothers, and a tangle of children tidying crayons remained. I apologized for the intrusion, explained the Hope & Generosity Tour, and asked if anyone might sit for an interview. The mothers, without hesitation, pointed their wrinkled fingers at the pastor—He’s the one. Um‑hum, he’s the one.

Two evenings later we sat in the fellowship hall, fluorescent light buzzing, recorder between us. He told his story straight—no polish, no pity. When we finished, I reached under Josie’s driver seat and produced a thick rubber‑banded stack of twenty‑dollar bills—fifty of them, adding to an even thousand. I slid the bundle across the folding table. His eyes widened, then brimmed. He started to speak, stopped, bowed his head. Finally:

"All I can say is thank you, brother. This will help keep the lights on, help get my people what they need."

He did not count the bills. He only nodded, slipped the roll into his Bible, and closed the cover as though sealing a prayer.

The Weight and the Wonder

Ask him about regrets and he shrugs. "I give people my time, and that's all I can do." Ask about temptation and he answers with weary candor: "As a pastor, you can't say what you want. People are always waiting for you to mess up." Yet the same public gaze that hems him in also keeps him walking straight. He lives transparent because he must.

Late that night I sat in Josie outside Carter Chapel, moonlight pooling on the hood. I thought about a boy who tried to hide from God behind marijuana smoke and locker‑room jokes, and about the man who now spends his paychecks on gasoline and funeral lilies. Somewhere between those two, a calling outlasted rebellion. That is the stubborn math of grace.

Phillips County still knows scarcity—vacant storefronts, fields gone to Johnson grass—but three steeples pierce the Delta haze, and every other Sunday a van from Pine Bluff rattles down the levee road, headlights cutting dawn. Inside, Reverend Dale McDonald hums a hymn his grandmother taught him. The crop he tends is souls, the harvest unseen, but he keeps sowing because that is what farmers and pastors do.

"I'm just doing God's calling," he told me. And then, softer, almost to himself: "It ain't always easy, but it's always worth it."

The Delta agrees. It has never been easy here—but beneath the hardship the soil remains impossibly rich. Plant a seed, and sooner or later something green will push through. Rev. McDonald plants words, plants mercy, plants stubborn hope. On good Sundays the church mothers sway and clap, the children giggle in the back row, and the pastor’s booming amen fills the rafters. On harder Sundays he still climbs into the pulpit, voice hoarse, heart heavy, and preaches to eight souls like they are eight hundred.

Either way the seed goes in.