Mike Mills has been an Elkdale Baptist Church member for nearly 31 years.

“I was 30 when I started going there,” he said.

Mills said his wife had been going to the church for a long time, and it was an experience in his life that made him draw closer to the church.

“I hadn’t been going to church a lot,” he said. “I didn’t know that a lot of the women in my wife’s group had been praying a lot for me also. There were some things I had gone through in my life that had caused me draw closer to God.”

Ever since he started going to Elkdale, Mills said he kept going after all this time.

“The people at Elkdale are great, and one of our mission statements is change lives real relationships. And that is what it is like there. There is a place there for everybody.”

Mills and his wife spent time leading Sunday school for all youth age groups from first-grade to college kids.

Mills also runs the sound booth for the contemporary second service, and has served in mission trips around the country that Elkdale has visited including Tampa, Florida and Tennessee.

“Seeing some of the people that we are building for and seeing the joy in their eyes is some of the greatest experiences, and seeing the volunteers change other’s lives and them knowing they are helping others is great also.”

Mills said that groups don’t have to travel far to do good in communities.

“Selma is wide open for the mission field, and Montgomery as well,” he said.

Mills is a Uniontown native.

His father was a dentist and a Baptist and his mother was Catholic.

“We’d go to the Catholic Church in Demopolis or Greensboro,” he said. “I changed from Catholic to Baptist later on.”

Mills said he is just a Christian who happens to go to Elkdale.

“That is just where God chose for me to go,” said Mills. “The people is what makes the church, and that is what has kept me at Elkdale for so long.”