OMA president took winding path

On Ash Wednesday, the Rev. Michael Muller shaved his beloved beard for Lent.

Two months later, after Easter and his election as the president of the Odessa Ministerial Alliance for the second time in a row, it was still nowhere to be found.

"Some of the ladies in the church decided they just love me without my beard and they won't let me grow it back," he said one sunny afternoon in his office at Odessa's Lutheran Church of the Risen Lord, where he has worked for the past 3 1/2 years.

As comfortable as he looked that day in his church office just off the main nave, he hasn't been there long; Mueller was 50 years old before he answered call to do the Lord's work exclusively.

Today, you can find him in his church or scurrying around town on alliance business as its president, which is a post that usually is bestowed on a different pastor every two years, and Mueller began his second in May. 

But the vestments you'll catch the OMA president wearing these days are just the latest in a vast array of different work clothes worn thus far by Mueller, who comes from a life as a titan of the corporate world and who even has several acronyms after his name.
Other than his most recent master's degree in divinity, the 59-year-old said he also has undergraduate or graduate degrees in chemistry, psychology, business and, believe it or not, law.

If you ask him about his education, however, he's apt to shift his body weight and try to change the subject.

"I try not to emphasize those things, and I'll tell you why: because it draws too much attention to me," Mueller said. "It's not about me. It's about God."

To explain his shying from the subject, he said he doesn't try to hide his education and work experience, but merely to not flaunt it.

"Then the next thing it begins to become all about my credentials, not about me," he said, referring to his capacity as a religious leader.  

Of course, it's hard to shift earthly attention away from a career that began as a project manager for ARCO, which at the time was one of the world's largest oil and gas companies.

"I basically had an office there on the 44th floor of ARCO Towers in downtown Los Angeles and never saw it because I was in Dubai or Byelorussia or Japan or Netherlands or someplace on one of those projects," he said.

Then Mueller's career catapulted from there, taking a course so fraught with twists and turns that even the great Greek epic poet Homer would have a hard time cataloguing.

During the next few decades, he said, he worked with talent contracts for NBC; then on to tweak programs within the television franchise's new parent company, General Electric; then, and this was about 15 years ago, he took a job working for a small bank, where he became the de facto director of research and development; then on to another banking gig in Iowa working for Wells Fargo.

Also, sprinkle into that stints in construction and chemical engineering - not to mention a growing list of degrees earned.

Mueller said it was when he worked for Wells Fargo, however, that God threw a wrench into the gears and reminded him that He had other plans.

"I was thinking, ‘This is perfect,' because I was making all kinds of money, and it was a nice little town to live in," the pastor recalled. "My boss was a couple thousand miles away in San Francisco. I've got all these really nice Midwestern people around me - good, hard-working, honest folks and that sort of stuff - and then God made it really clear to me that he wanted me to go into the ministry."

He said signs of trouble first appeared when the bank's corporate leadership began pressing him to tow the company's homosexual-friendly line through things like salutatory memos and even donations to gay rights groups.

"I told them that I was a committed Christian and that was not something I could do and maintain my integrity," Mueller said. "They said I wasn't tolerant. I said, ‘You guys are tolerant of everything except committed Christians.' And so I resigned."

"At the time," he continued, "God was making it very clear that I should go into the ministry."

He attended seminary at first by correspond­ence, he said, but eventual shifts in the seminary's educational structure forced him to move to Arizona to finish his studies and fulfill internship requirements before taking his first pastoral call in Odessa and becoming the alliance's president a few years later.

Speaking from his nearly 20 years of experience within the alliance - including his own turn as its president - the Rev. Jimmy Braswell with St. Andrew Cumberland Presbyterian Church said Mueller has shined most through his use of telephones and mail in conjunction as a sort of alliance bat signal to remind its busy members when they're supposed to meet.

"Pastors have a lot of things happening in their life - a lot of grief, counseling and emotion. It's easy to let the ministerial alliance become something that's easy to forget. He makes it easy to remember and it's good for us."

But Braswell said Mueller has succeeded most as the pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Risen Lord.

"They've had some difficult days in the past, and he has brought some really positive and intentional action to that church," he said.

Mueller's take, however, is bit more modest.

"The old joke in the church is that you take your first call and spend the first few years mangling everybody, then you go on to be a good pastor," Mueller said. "I know that I've made lots of mistakes because I don't have what experience teaches you, but I have been so blessed in what God has taught me and how he has used to me for other things."

"It didn't surprise me He already has something planned," Mueller said. "When you look in the rearview mirror of life, all the things you thought might have been bad for you end up being a blessing."