A congregation rooted in welcome, on Chapel Hill Road
Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd sits on Chapel Hill Road in Douglasville, Georgia, a single-story church property that doubles as a polling place, a meeting ground for Scouts, and the launching point for one of the more far-reaching feeding ministries in Douglas County. The congregation is known across the west metro for the Daily Bread Ministry, a feeding program that grew out of a single woman packing sack lunches in her car and now distributes one to two tons of food every month to people without shelter or stable housing. The same ministry runs Camp Shinnah, a supervised tent community that gives up to two dozen people a legal, safe place to live while they work toward stability.
That hands-on outreach is paired with a Lutheran commitment to scripture and grace. The congregation belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran body in North America. Its motto is short and pointed: "Whoever you are, however you are, just as you are, you are welcome at Good Shepherd."
Sundays at 9:30 a.m.
Worship takes place on Sunday mornings at 9:30 a.m. Services are led by The Reverend Jamie Witt, pastor, and follow the liturgical rhythms of the ELCA, with Holy Communion, Scripture readings, preaching, and prayer. Every service is live-streamed on the church's Facebook, so members who are traveling, sick, or simply at home can join in real time. Recorded sermons and a small archive of older services are available for anyone who wants to revisit a recent message or watch an earlier one.
The welcome is intentional and warm. The church teaches that every person is created in the image of God and is to be included in the work of the kingdom just as they are, and that the Lord has said, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." Visitors, seekers, long-time Lutherans, and those who have never been to a church before are all expected and received.
From Arbor Station to Chapel Hill Road
Good Shepherd is a church that was deliberately planted. In 1991, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America called Pastor Mike Bovingdon to come to Douglasville and begin a new congregation. In 1992, the small worshiping community began gathering at the Recreation Club in Arbor Station. As the group grew, it became clear that a permanent home was needed. In 1997, the congregation began building at its current location on Chapel Hill Road, where the church stands today.
That founding DNA still shapes the congregation. Pastor Mike Bovingdon named the Daily Bread Ministry when it began in 2003, and many of the people who joined in those early Arbor Station days are still involved in the work of the church three decades later. The same pastor who helped plant the mission continues to be remembered by name through the ministry he christened.
The Reverend Jamie Witt, Pastor
Good Shepherd's current pastor is The Reverend Jamie Witt. Pastor Jamie grew up in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, and has spent the last fifteen years living just east of Atlanta. She first felt a call to ordained ministry while working as the Music and Worship Director at Community of Grace Lutheran Church, a role that put her in daily contact with the rhythms of worship and the life of a congregation.
She answered that call by entering Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota, completing her Master of Divinity through the school's distributed learning program in December 2022. Her internship year was served at Lutheran Church of the Resurrection in Marietta, Georgia.
Pastor Jamie speaks openly about the cost of getting to this pulpit. In December 2021, while still in seminary, she lost her husband of fifteen years, Brian, to cancer, leaving her the single parent of their then-thirteen-year-old daughter, Anna. She finished her degree while navigating that grief, and credits the people God brought into her life with helping her keep going. Anna is now a thriving fifteen-year-old. Pastor Jamie describes the call to Good Shepherd as a celebration shared with all the people who nurtured her through seminary, laughed with her in her excitement, and sat with her in her sorrow.
Anne Stephens serves as the church's administrator and is the main point of contact for many of the day-to-day questions about the congregation's life.
The Daily Bread Ministry: feeding Douglas County one ton of food at a time
The Daily Bread Ministry is the single most distinctive thing about Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd. It began in April 2003 in memory of Mattie O'Neal, a person in need who inspired Leila Myers to start packing lunches and driving around Douglas County looking for people who had gone hungry. Pastor Mike Bovingdon gave the ministry its name.
Twenty-plus years later, the Daily Bread Ministry goes out on Mondays and Tuesdays loaded with food, tents, tarps, and basic provisions for the unhoused and under-housed of Douglas County. The numbers have grown with the need. On a typical month, the ministry hands out between one and two tons of food. Weekly, the team serves roughly 150 people. Of those, about twenty are residents of Camp Shinnah and another forty live in other camps scattered through the woods around Douglasville.
The food itself comes largely from the Atlanta Community Food Bank, with supplemental giving pouring in through the congregation's online giving platform and through regular collections. Souper Bowl Sunday each February is one of the year's biggest push Sundays for shelf-stable food. The ministry also relies on plastic grocery bags, which are reused to pack lunches, and on volunteers from Good Shepherd and other area churches.
Volunteering with Daily Bread is open to anyone who wants to help. Those interested can reach Leila Myers at mleila01@gmail.com. Financial gifts can be designated to Daily Bread through the church's online giving platform, with a drop-down menu for the ministry.
Camp Shinnah: a place called New Beginnings
Alongside the food ministry, Daily Bread runs Camp Shinnah, a supervised tent community whose name means "New Beginnings" in Hebrew. The camp can currently house 22 to 23 residents in tents on platforms built up to handle weather and traffic. Most of the residents are men, though the camp is open to anyone who has no other place to go. Some arrive after a stretch in jail; some are recovering from surgery; some are simply people whose last paycheck and last address are long gone.
Living at Camp Shinnah is structured. Residents agree to strict rules, agree to drug and alcohol testing, and are expected to work toward stability. The ministry helps residents obtain the documentation that allows them to apply for jobs: birth certificates from Mississippi, Georgia, even Germany; Georgia identification cards and driver's licenses; Social Security cards. The team helps residents apply for disability benefits when appropriate, and partners with the Community Service Board for counseling, addiction services, job placement, and housing referrals. Food stamp cards are required so residents can feed themselves between ministry deliveries.
The food served at the camp is the same food Daily Bread delivers across Douglas County. A grant from Douglas County allowed the camp to install more permanent platforms for the tents and a proper dining area. A local Scout from Troop 228 chose Camp Shinnah as his Eagle Scout project, designing and building a washing station so residents can shower and wash their clothes, an essential step toward being able to take a job and re-enter ordinary life.
Residents are encouraged to find work, save money, and move on to a more permanent home. The turnover is part of the design. In recent months, residents have moved from Camp Shinnah into apartments in Douglasville, been reunited with family in Florida, California, and Virginia after transferring parole, and stepped into jobs in the wider community. The camp is not meant to be forever; it is meant to be enough.
Henry's Corner: pastoral wisdom from a long-time counselor
One of the distinctive features of the church is Henry's Corner, a long-running column written by Henry Close, a member of the congregation. Henry Close spent his working life as a mental health chaplain and pastoral counselor. He taught at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, led seminars and workshops across the country and abroad, and has written more than fifty professional articles. His books include Becoming a Forgiving Person, Ceremonies for Spiritual Healing and Growth, and Metaphor in Psychotherapy, which was a book-of-the-month selection for two different psychology book clubs and has been translated into Chinese and Turkish.
Henry's Corner gathers the kinds of things Henry Close spent a career thinking about, retold in plain language, parable, and short essay. Recent columns include The Bad Samaritan: A Contemporary Parable, Revenge, Monster Phobia, On Reducing Stress, Learning to Listen, Step-Parenting, Beautiful but Terrifying, Some Facts of Life, The Compassionate Tree: An Allegory on Co-dependency, Cinderella and the Visiting Prince, and The Trees that Were Separated. Earlier columns include Simon Wiesenthal's Story, Honoring Father and Mother, My Name is Important, The Prayer of Confession and the Assurance of Pardon, A Boy and His Kite, and Thinking about Getting Married.
Many of the columns are short allegories aimed at everyday struggles: a young couple trying to understand intelligence versus wisdom; a beautiful duckling who discovers she is a swan; a kite named Hope whose soul unfolds only when someone takes the time to talk to her. Others are reflective essays on grief, on visiting the sick, on the discipline of rest, and on how the Reformed tradition's ordering of forgiveness before confession can change the way a congregation prays together. The column is a distinctive pastoral resource the congregation makes available.
What Lutherans believe
Good Shepherd offers a short, plain-language account of what the congregation teaches. Lutherans are the oldest and largest Protestant tradition in the world, born out of the Reformation under Martin Luther's leadership as he sought to reform the Roman Catholic Church around a biblical understanding of God's grace. Salvation and membership in the family of God are a gift won through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The church is saved by grace, not by works.
The Scriptures are the "sole rule and norm for life and faith." The Word of God is understood as a living word, heard in and through the Bible and through the life of the believing community. Worship and the church's understanding of itself and the world flow from that Word.
As a congregation of the ELCA, Good Shepherd belongs to a denomination of about four million members in nearly 10,000 congregations across the United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The ELCA is a member of The Lutheran World Federation and sees itself as a church that is at once Lutheran, ecumenical, and committed to reconciliation in a broken world. The denomination's own self-description is included in the church's materials about the ELCA.
Scouts, a polling place, and the wider community
Good Shepherd opens its building to the wider community in a number of practical ways. The congregation sponsors a Boy Scout troop and a Girl Scout troop, both of which meet at the church. The building also serves as a polling place for Douglas County elections.
The church participates in several annual community efforts. Members join the Atlanta Hunger Walk and Run each year, walking with a team that includes youth and adults from Good Shepherd. Through Operation Christmas, the congregation supports a county-wide toy distribution to every child in need in Douglas County. Souper Bowl Sunday, held each February, collects shelf-stable food for the Daily Bread pantry. The church also partners with Inspiritus (formerly Lutheran Services of Georgia) and the Atlanta Community Food Bank, both of which have been long-term collaborators in feeding people across the region.
On a recent Hunger Walk and Run, a cold and stormy Atlanta day still drew nine Daily Bread team members onto the streets of Atlanta, raising more than $2,700 in donations plus $500 in matching corporate gifts, for a total of $3,275. The team included Pastor Bonnie and Dave Lanyi, members of the Dennis family, Lois Waldmann, and Don Larsen, who has written about the experience in the church's newsletter.
Seasonal rhythms inside the church include an outdoor Christmas Eve service, a Maundy Thursday service, a Good Friday service, an Easter Sunday service, and a Palm Sunday service, each marked with its own bulletin and music. A yearly Back to School Cookout and Trunk or Treat draw families from the wider neighborhood.
Youth and young people
Good Shepherd's youth have a connection to the wider church beyond Douglasville. Three young people from the congregation joined youth groups from across Georgia at Camp Grace for the All-Georgia Youth Gathering, where they explored the theme "What is Agape?" alongside Christian hip-hop artists Dave "Agape" Sherer and Joe Davis. The gathering gave the youth a chance to talk about God's love for them, their love for themselves, and their call to love their neighbors, as well as to worship and form friendships with Lutherans their own age from across the state.
What to expect when you visit
Visitors will find a small, friendly congregation that knows its neighbors by name. The sanctuary is on the church's property at 3099 Chapel Hill Road, just off the main Douglasville artery. Sunday worship begins at 9:30 a.m. and runs through a typical Lutheran liturgy with hymns, readings, a sermon, prayers, and Holy Communion. Members and visitors worship together; no separate seating or service is offered.
Those who cannot attend in person can join the live stream on the church's Facebook, where services are broadcast live and a running archive of recent sermons is kept. Recordings of older services from 2020, including Holy Week and Easter messages led by Pastor Mike and music by Randy Stephens, are also still available for anyone who wants to revisit them.
Devotional life at the church includes Wednesday Devotions and a series of Holy Week Devotions led by a small group of area pastors, who gather around a table to discuss the biblical figures involved in the Passion. The pastors describe the conversations as unscripted and inviting of listener comments.
People who want to help with the Daily Bread Ministry can show up ready to load and deliver food, or can give financially through the church's online giving platform. People who want to talk about baptism, confirmation, marriage, funerals, or simply about faith are welcome to email Pastor Jamie at pastor@mylcgs.org or call the church office at 770-949-9522.
Staying connected: giving, newsletter, and Henry's Corner
Good Shepherd is supported by the regular giving of its members and friends. Online giving is handled through the church's Breeze ChMS giving platform, where givers can direct their gift to the general fund or to specific ministries such as the Daily Bread Ministry. A physical giving option is also available during worship.
The congregation publishes a regular newsletter going back several years. Recent editions cover the church calendar, Daily Bread updates, pastoral reflections, and community announcements. Henry's Corner runs alongside the newsletter as a separate devotional and pastoral resource, with new pieces added regularly.
Anyone in Douglasville looking for a church to call home, anyone who has stumbled onto Camp Shinnah or a Daily Bread delivery and wondered about the people behind it, and anyone who has simply been searching for a Lutheran congregation in the west Georgia area will find Good Shepherd at 3099 Chapel Hill Road. Whoever you are, however you are, just as you are, you are welcome there.