“Pastor Mike” - Rev. Michael Walker

Rev. Michael Walker — "Pastor Mike" to most everyone — serves as pastor of Wesleyan Hills UMC in Memphis in addition to pastoring Braden Mason Church in Braden, a dual appointment in the Tennessee-Western Kentucky Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. He has served Braden Mason since 2020 and began at Wesleyan Hills in July 2026.

He grew up in Hoxie, Arkansas, a town small enough that everybody knew whose truck was parked where and why. Church there was Missionary Baptist, and it gave him his first vocabulary for faith: the hymns, the altar call, the sense that Scripture is worth taking seriously. Like a lot of people raised in the pew, he spent some years away from it. In 2011, God led him back — this time through the doors of Heartsong UMC, where he found a tradition wide enough to hold both the faith he was raised in and the questions he had picked up along the way. He has been Methodist ever since.

Ministry is his second career. He earned a BBA in Accounting from the University of Central Arkansas in 1999 and worked for years as a CPA before the call from God became too loud to ignore. He answered it at Memphis Theological Seminary, graduating with his Master of Divinity in 2021. The accounting years left their mark on his preaching: he has a low tolerance for spiritual fine print and proof texts, and a deep conviction that grace is the one account that never runs dry.

Some of the most formative work of his ministry has been alongside people in recovery. He believes the church is at its best when it looks like the room where honesty is the price of admission and nobody has to pretend they have it together. That conviction shapes how he preaches, how he pastors, and who he expects to find in the pews on Sunday morning.

Mike also writes and hosts The Daily Ripples, a daily devotional podcast built on the idea that small acts of faithfulness spread further than we can see. New episodes go out each morning at dailyripples.com.

He has been married to his wife, Cristi, since 2017. Together they have two sons, three daughters, and five grandchildren, with a sixth due soon.

When he isn't preparing a sermon or recording a devotional, Pastor Mike is usually somewhere trying his best to be the hands and feet of Jesus, one day at a time. And he wouldn't have it any other way.