Overview:

The growth of 2819 Church has been so rapid that the city of Atlanta ordered them to move from fheir previous home because of disruptive traffic patterns on Sundays. The new location, opened on Palm Sunday, features overflow parking at a nearby mall and shuttle bus service to the campus.

He ran the streets of Hollis, Queens, as a 12-year-old crack dealer, spent his 18th birthday behind bars in New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail, and a white New York Police Department cop once pointed a Glock at his head, daring him to “say something.” 

So it stunned people when Pastor Philip Anthony Mitchell, leader of 2819 Church — arguably one of the hottest, fastest-growing churches in Atlanta, if not Black America, one that’s so popular it regularly packs in 6,000 worshippers, including an overflow room — told Black parents to quit complaining when white cops kill Black children and teach their own to follow orders. 

“Stop blaming white cops for the killing of black kids!” Mitchell shouted during his April 13 sermon. “Instead, teach your black children to be obedient towards authority!”

Fierce Backlash

Not surprisingly, the backlash in Black social media was swift and intense. Some critics pointed to the many Black people, like George Floyd and Philando Castile, who either obeyed an officer’s instructions — or were minding their own business, like Tamir Rice and Ahmaud Arbery — but were shot and killed anyway. Others wondered why Mitchell would go there in a sermon just a month before the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s murder, which triggered angry, worldwide protests.  

Mitchell apologized and said his words were taken out of context in relation to his full sermon, focused on the larger point of submission to the will of God. 

“Without a doubt, I understand the framing I used about Black children and their relationship with police was and is harmful,” he said in a statement. “I know that Black people have been killed by the police when being both compliant and non-compliant. I sought to illustrate this tension from my own lived experience.”

But the apology, to some, fell flat.

“While his theology has long been problematic and he’s made other egregious statements, I don’t think this apology is offered had not there been such forceful response and reaction to what he said,” Black theologian and writer Candice Benbow said in a post on the social media platform Threads. 

“Black people deserve faith leaders who don’t just tell us the ‘truth,’” Benbow wrote. “We deserve faith leaders who advocate on our behalf, in and out of the pulpit. Consequently, the Bible cannot be the only thing in our hands.”

It wasn’t a good look for Mitchell, given his journey from drugs and crime to founding a church that has grown exponentially — and drawn a younger, diverse audience — while other, more established congregations struggle just to keep their doors open.

“Without a doubt, I understand the framing I used about Black children and their relationship with police was and is harmful. I know that Black people have been killed by the police when being both compliant and non-compliant. I sought to illustrate this tension from my own lived experience.”

PAstor philip Anthony Mitchell, 2819 Church

“My whole life is a second chance,” Mitchell said during a recent interview with Preston Perry and Jackie Hill Perry, the husband-and-wife hosts of the “With the Perrys” religion and pop culture podcast. “I’ve been severely disciplined by God as a young believer. It’s a second chance, on the backside of pain and discipline.” 

The son of Trinidadian immigrants who were devout Christians, Mitchell grew up hearing the gospel in his parents’ basement church, but he answered the call of the streets instead, running with crack dealers and gang-bangers when he was still in middle school. “I would hear my parents pray, I would hear them reading scripture. But it was very foreign to me,” he said. 

“I’m Not Special”

Thug life — fights, guns, dealing drugs, jail time — had a grip on him, even as he began to realize his gift for language and knack for leadership: “I’m feeling like a man out there in the streets. I’m feeling love and honor in the streets,” he told the Perrys. 

At North Carolina Central University in Durham, Mitchell says, crime faded into the background, but God remained at arm’s length, even as he fell into depression and despair. His epiphany came when a churchgoing friend let herself into his apartment just as Mitchell placed a shotgun under his chin, finger on the trigger. As she held his hand and prayed for him, Mitchell sensed divine intervention and changed course. He traded partying and womanizing for seminary; after graduation, he experimented with different styles before arriving at one he feels best reflects his relationship with Christ — and his authentic, streetwise self.

Though his core spiritual message borders on the fundamentalist, Mitchell’s church is more jeans and hoodies than suits, dresses, and Sunday hats. He stalks the stage like a rapper, gesturing and speaking with his entire body (“I’ve been criticized for being too animated. I feel what I’m preaching very deeply,” he says), thumping his Bible and using dramatic pauses to drive home his message.  

After finding his ministerial voice, Mitchell’s audience — mostly young, very diverse, and hungry for spiritual nourishment — began to find him. Relocating to Atlanta, Mitchell and his flock quickly began outgrowing one church after another; at one point, Mitchell was asked to vacate a meeting place in Atlanta because of traffic and shortage of parking spaces due to its estimated 6,000 members. 

Explosive Growth, Rave Reviews

On Palm Sunday, Jada Bates-Robinson described her first encounter with 2819 Church on TikTok: how, despite having to wait to park, wait to enter and worship in the church’s overflow room, she was enthralled. 

“Pastor Philip Anthony Michael was amazing,” she said. “The music was amazing, the people were just literally bowing before God. I have never been to a church that felt so authentic, and so raw, and so real. 10 out of 10.” 

To Mitchell, reactions like that — he’s been called a breath of fresh air in the church — are what worry him most about Christianity in the U.S. Young people in particular are turning away from religion, he says, because the larger Black church, its vision and its message have grown stale. 

“Why is it a breath of fresh air? It shouldn’t be a breath of fresh air,” he says. “I’m not special. I just see [God] for who he is.”

And he is willing to spread the word, by any means necessary, a message embedded in the mission statement he created for his church: 

“I will not be silent. I will cry aloud until all I’ve heard.”