Halfway across the courtyard at North Carolina State University, freshman Ben Mitchell halted in the middle of the foot traffic. As his fellow college students streamed around him, Mitchell couldn’t take another step.
A few months earlier, Mitchell had seen a flyer for a free pancake breakfast hosted by Reformed University Fellowship.
“Being a freshman on campus, that sounded like a great opportunity to me—free food.”
He showed up and soon began attending Tuesday evening gatherings of worship and preaching. Having grown up in a family that was part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Mitchell skipped RUF every other week to attend a Mormon campus meeting that met at the same time.
But this particular Tuesday evening, on his way to the Mormon gathering, Mitchell had to stop and turn around.
“I was hit with an emotional brick wall,” he recounts. It was as if a voice in his head was saying, “You should stop and turn around. You should not go.”
Devout to Doubt
Like many kids in the LDS church, Mitchell was born in Utah. His dad’s parents were Mormon, and he describes his mother’s family as “Mormons since ‘Mormon’ was a thing.” Although his family moved to Texas when he was a child, the LDS connection remained.
“We were pretty devout,” Mitchell says.
When Mitchell was in middle school, around the age when Mitchell would be inducted into his first level of priesthood, the family briefly moved back to Utah. But around this same time, Mitchell’s father stopped attending church. He would stay home and watch televangelists instead, and Mitchell and his siblings could decide for themselves whether they wanted to keep attending. Mitchell stopped attending regularly and didn’t enter the priesthood.
Mitchell explains that his father had discovered the idea of “salvation by grace alone” through watching televangelists, and while Mitchell isn’t convinced that the teaching was theologically sound, it led to conversations that made Mitchell question the teachings of the LDS church.
Ultimately, the family moved to North Carolina and, in 9th grade, Mitchell admitted to the bishop at his mom’s church that he did not believe all the tenets of the Mormon faith and that he did not want to be Mormon.
“The bishop I met with pushed back on what I was saying, but it was never vitriolic or caustic,” Mitchell explains. He felt out of his depth trying to defend his beliefs to the bishop, but he stood his ground. Mitchell’s brother also decided to stop attending church.
“My mom was very sad about the whole thing,” Mitchell says. “She felt very alone in her faith.”
A Line in the Sand
Through the rest of high school, Mitchell watched preaching on TV with his dad and continued to wrestle with ideas of faith. He contemplated both Christianity and atheism, ultimately remaining noncommittal.
And then came that day on campus in the fall of 2019 in the middle of the sidewalk.
Mitchell says he had been grappling with the claims of Christianity and the claims of Mormonism over the previous months, and he remembers thinking, “I just need to commit to one and make a choice, because either one of these feels like a leap of faith. There’s some degree of ‘I just can’t know everything.’ ”
He decided to go to RUF and never turned back.
“That was the most palpable line-in-the-sand moment I can think of, other than getting baptized,” Mitchell says.
Chuck Askew, RUF campus minister at NC State, says that helping Mitchell navigate his questions and wrestlings was a joy.
“I was glad to listen to Ben process and wrestle with an understanding of grace and truth as he was trying to discern where he fit, whether he fit in the church of LDS or whether he felt more of a fit in Protestant Christianity,” he said. “I could see the Spirit working in him, so I never felt like I had to be active in apologetics or pressuring or pushing, but would continue to just help him reflect through the Scripture and allow that to be the weight that moved him.”
For the next couple of years, Mitchell continued to grow in his faith, even during the pandemic when NC State was shut down and RUF had to meet online. He began attending Christ the King Raleigh, and was baptized by Askew in December of 2022, after realizing that his Mormon baptism was not the same as a Christian baptism.
“It Gives Even More”
Graduation came in the spring of 2023, but Mitchell was not interested in using his business degree, so he got a job working for a construction company. He was also growing increasingly attracted to Julia, a young woman he met at RUF, and increasingly interested in ministry.
He applied for an administrative position at CtK, but wasn’t hired. Meanwhile, James Sutton, associate pastor at CtK, considered Mitchell’s resume and decided that Mitchell had the makings of a good pastoral intern. Sutton explained to Mitchell that he would have to raise his own support.
“I was terrified of support raising because I didn’t know anyone in the PCA, and all of my friends were broke college kids,” Mitchell admits.
Julia encouraged him to take the risk.
Over the next several months, Mitchell was able to raise the support he needed.
“People at CtK were very generous,” he says. “God worked very mightily in that way.”
He started the internship in the summer of 2024. In September, Mitchell and Julia were married.
Over the course of the year, Mitchell thrived in his role as pastoral intern. Sutton says what stands out about Mitchell is his commitment to the truth.
“He wants to tell the truth, which I suspect is tied to his background,” Sutton says. “Very quick to challenge anything he thinks is not true.”
While the funds for the internship were for two years, in the spring 2025 the Mitchells moved to Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, for a job opportunity for Julia. Mitchell left CtK earlier than anticipated, but is now looking to complete the internship at a PCA church in the Pittsburgh area while completing online courses through Reformed Theological Seminary.
While Mitchell is looking for the right place to complete his internship, he is also thinking down the road, wondering how the Lord might use him, his gifts, and his history. He wonders if he might play a role in apologetics broadly, and maybe with the LDS community specifically.
“I still have a deep heart for my family and my extended family, because the deception is so thick,” he says. “It is so easy to get ensnared by it. God is sovereign over all things, and the only reason I got pulled out is that he pulled me out. My desire is that I would help pull others out too, through God doing it. I hope in some way I can reach some of those people.”
One of the things Mitchell notices most profoundly is the lightness he experiences now as a Christian.
“You don’t realize how heavy the yoke is that you’re carrying and how light it could be,” he says. “Mormonism—there’s a lot that it asks and not a lot that it gives. Christianity—it asks a lot, but it gives even more.”