Your sponsors, Liz and Felix Bearden, are moving and your site administrator will no longer be able to support the site.  The powers that be at GSPC have determined that it is not worth it to continue this service.  The site will contain the information currently existing until the end of August 2010 but no updates or new articles will be published.

Thanks to our contributors and regret that we must shut down the site.

Felix & Liz Bearden

By Meg Duly

Many of you remember, Dr. Fifield has touched our church as interim pastor. He has also touched this church with the service of Margaret Ann Fifield Duly. Margaret along with her brothers, Stephen McIntosh Fifield and Harry Amos Fifield, Jr., and First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta, are celebrating his 100th birthday this year. The church and the family are placing mementos in the archives room at First Church on Sunday, June 6th to be viewed from 9am to 1pm with services at 9:00 and 11:15. We are sending this to ask you to join us for this celebration. And we wanted you to know some of what he achieved answering his call from God.

Papa was born in Schenectady, NY June 22, 1910. His family moved to Florida when Granddaddy returned from WWI. Papa graduated from the University of Florida. He went on to Princeton Seminary were he graduated in 1936. His first church after ordination was in Steelton, PA. There he and Mama were married in 1937 and Steve was born in 1940. He spent a short time in his second church in Deland, FL before enlisting in the Navy during WWII. One of the pictures we have is of a memorial service on board his ship, the USS Cabot. It is on 11/26/44, the day after a Kamikaze pilot crashed into the ship. Papa is pictured next to the captain. The service is the burial at sea of the 62 men who were killed. Margaret Ann was born in 1945 while he was at sea. We have the letter he wrote her telling her about her mom, big brother, himself and God. This was in case he did not come home.

But come home he did. His first church after the war was in Lynchburg, VA. Harry Jr. was born there in 1952. Papa was called to First Church Atlanta in 1953 where God did His finest work with this man. When we moved to Atlanta the South, and for that matter the whole country, was in a deep struggle over Civil Rights. Our father initiated the coming together of seven other pastors to develop the Minister’s Manifesto which was eventually signed by 80 brave ministers and published in the Atlanta Journal November 3, 1957. It spoke of preserving freedom of speech, obeying the law, maintaining our public schools, rejecting hatred, fostering communication between the races and recognizing we cannot solve these problems alone. Only with God’s help can real solutions come.

In October of 58 the KKK bombed the Atlanta Jewish Temple. Papa and the Session of the Church immediately opened our doors for the Temple’s congregation to meet until the Temple could be repaired. The Sunday service of First Church was carried live over WSB Radio. Papa said from the pulpit, as angry as we have ever heard him, “Anyone who would carry a cross and destroy a House of God is a blasphemous hypocrite.” Our family was barraged with vulgar and frightening calls from members of the KKK. This went on, all hours of the day and night, for weeks until the FBI told us we had no choice but to get an unlisted number.

The 60s were also a time of struggle over the Vietnam War, drugs were a growing crisis and people were experimenting with “free love”. A “Hippie” culture grew up in an Atlanta neighborhood close to First Church. It was full of drug abuse, run away teens, Flower Children and the homeless. Papa started one of the first urban ministries in Atlanta. He used the talents of our young, youth minister, Alex Williams, and sent him into this ministry. Lives were saved from drugs, teens were reunited with families, and young people found something far greater than flowers to worship.

On Sunday June 3, 1962 a group of art enthusiasts boarded a plane at Orly Airport outside of Paris. They were bringing back art they had gone to Paris to purchase for the new High Museum, built next door to First Church. The plane crashed on takeoff and all but two stewardesses were killed. WSB called Papa early that morning to tell him. He rewrote his entire sermon. This sermon called upon memories of the loss of his 62 men in the Kamikaze attach years earlier. With an aching heart (we had lost 16 members of the church) he let his congregation know of the tragedy. In between services he had the awesome duty to tell two little boys that both their parents had died in the crash.

Papa’s preaching style can be summed up very easily by the phrase he used so often at the end of his sermons. When he retired from First Church, a silver cup was placed in the pulpit with this phrase on it. He would preach a powerful sermon, never wagging his finger at the congregation, never threatening them with hellfire, always inspiring them and then he would look out over his people and ask, “And how is it with you?”

He retired from First Church Atlanta in 1976. Papa had 17 interim pastorates after that. Papa died in June of 2002 just three months after Mama died. They had been married for 64 years. Both their lives have enriched us and so many others. If you find the time we would be honored to have you join us on June 6th at First Presbyterian Church. We ask for your prayers for this day of honoring our father.

Sincerely,

Steve, Margaret Ann and Harry

This posting will contain links to material for Undershepherds.

• Flyers are available. Click on title to see “You might be an Undershepherd.” to read or print.

• Business Cards (click here for sample) for key contacts in Undershepherd. Felix needs contact phone number, email address for each person.  Once Felix sets up the form you may print them on Avery 8871 card stock or equivalent.
• Greeting Cards. Good Shepherd general purpose card.  may be printed on Avery Form 8315 or equivalent.

For those who need but do not have cards, you may need to remind Abuelo from time to time that you still need them.

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Welcome to this, an experimental web log for Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church. This is a place on the web where important, or not so important issues may be discussed concerning our church, our community, our faith and our feelings. In the near future, we hope to be adding authors who from time to time will write articles about GSPC on which we can comment and discuss. In the mean time, for those of you who wish to suggest topics that you wish to discuss, please feel free to use the comments under this title to make suggestions. Note that our authors have sole discretion as to what appears in the comments.

We would like to remind you that this is not intended to be a substitute for the main church site at www.goodshepherdpc.org site, the link appearing on the right but is intended to attract attention to our church and provide a web based means of communicating with each other.