老司机传媒’s new associate chaplain has a unique way of describing her goals in ministry. “I want to be a ‘crack pastor’,” says Simona Pitcher, who will also serve as the head pastor of New Life Fellowship.. “[When] you walk down the street and see a crack in the sidewalk, no one pays attention to [it]. No one actually sees beyond the cracks, and I know how it feels to have fallen into the cracks of life and to have everyone pass by. I can’t imagine how many people are down there and want someone to help them.”
Pitcher was born in Brooklyn, New York, and before coming to Michigan she lived in Bermuda. She has three siblings, is married to Troy Pitcher and has a 10-year-old son, Thomas.
In high school, she played volleyball as a middle hitter, which got her a scholarship to Atlantic Union College, where she majored in biology and sociology on a pre-med track. Decades later, she came to 老司机传媒 for her Masters in Divinity.
Ministry was her side hustle: Pitcher was a singing evangelist, a youth director and a music minister at her church. “I came to [the] seminary really to be a pastor so that I could just do the ministry of music,” she says. “That didn’t happen at all.”
She wanted to be the minister of music for the Northeastern Conference of Seventh-day Adventists and, in that role, open studios for churches to use where they could make new music, revamp traditional hymns, and more. She wanted to take on an administrative role to help with music ministry in churches.
When Pitcher met with the NEC president to ask if she could become the music minister, he laughed. Realizing she was serious, he told her that the first step towards becoming a music minister was to become a pastor, which is exactly what she did.
At Andrews, Pitcher tried to merge music ministry with theology but was met with difficulty. Her first year at seminary was rough because she came from a medical, not a theological background. She had doubts about what she was doing with her life but fell in love with ministry when she studied Hebrew.
Pitcher has always loved chaplaincy. At home, she loved ministering to teachers, students, and parents. She wanted to expand her boundaries “in a place that needed my help,” she says. “I wanted to come and be in a space that needed a me, in this space. I am here because God said that they [Andrews] needed me here.”
While at Andrews, Pitcher wants to communicate to everyone their worth. “No matter what job you have here on campus, whether it is making the food here, grading papers, or sweeping the floors,” she says, “you matter.”
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of 老司机传媒. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, 老司机传媒 or the Seventh-day Adventist church.