THIS IS MY STORY - FRANK J. SMITH, Ph.D., D.D.

THIS IS MY STORY

FRANK J. SMITH, Ph.D., D.D

In many ways, it all started on a bus ride in April 2009. I was headed back home from Atlanta Metropolitan College, a black institution, where I was teaching history. I sat next to an African American lady by the name of Mary. Slim-built, mid-fifties, reading a devotional book. After I engaged her in conversation, she asked me what I did. I replied that I was a college professor, but that I was also a minister—to which she responded, “Oh, I could tell, I could just tell—I’ve been praying for someone to teach me the Bible!” I accompanied her onto the MARTA train, and before she got off at her stop in midtown Atlanta, she turned to me and said, “Don’t forget ‘the least of these’! Don’t forget ‘the least of these’!”—reflecting the words which Jesus had uttered in Matthew 25.

The next day, I had lunch with Dan Wolf, a Presbyterian deacon in a church up in the suburbs where we live. I had met with him previously, and, in discussing plans to do a ministry outreach on the college campus where I taught, he had asked me, “Do you have a vision for reaching the black community in Atlanta?” When I responded, “Yes, sir!”, Dan exhorted: “Do it, man, do it! Do it, man, do it!” About four times, he repeated those words. He was, of course, referring to the scene in the movie Amazing Grace, when the elderly John Newton encouraged William Wilberforce, contemplating whether to attempt to end the slave trade via legislation in Parliament, to “Do it, man, do it!” That conversation with Dan took place several weeks previous to our meeting in April.

Now, the day after the bus ride, and without knowing what Mary had told me, Dan said to me, “Well, you know, Frank, we must remember ‘the least of these.’”

Talk about getting a message!

As a result of those conversations, we started a Bible study in midtown Atlanta. About a year later, we were Providentially led to minister in a neighborhood called “the Bluff,” which is notorious as the drug-dealing and prostitution-peddling area of the city. For more than two and a half years, week after week after week, Atlanta Presbyterian Fellowship met for a Bible study on the steps of a derelict church building, in all kinds of weather and conditions. We even had to dodge bullets on one occasion at that corner. Then, in December 2012, an African American fellow—a convert to Islam—who owned a grocery store a few blocks away, allowed us to meet in the back of that store, without charging us a dime. Thus, our ministry’s weekly public worship began. After several moves, in October 2019, we began to lease a church building of a congregation that was elderly and planned to dissolve. In June 2020, we were able to purchase that property.

For more than a decade and a half, first as Atlanta Presbyterian Fellowship and now as Atlanta Reformed Presbyterian Church, we have served this needy community, an area characterized by brokenness and sinfulness and rebellion against God. It is also an area that is rapidly being gentrified. As a result of the transformation of the neighborhood, our congregation is right at the intersection of the Haves and the Have-Nots.

But our message remains the same—it is that of the gospel based upon the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, and the proclamation of His Lordship.