Qualla: Church of the Good Shepherd

Church of the Good Shepherd: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Epmeade, CC BY-SA 4.0. The argument was about pews. In Christ Church, Raleigh's first Episcopal parish, wealthy families paid annually for the right to sit in the better seats, and the poorer congregants were pushed to the back and the balcony. A faction said this was a quiet form of second-class citizenship inside the house of God. By the first days of 1874, the disagreement had broken the parish in two. The Reverend Edward R. Rich conducted the new congregation's first service in Tucker Hall on Fayetteville Street that February. They called themselves the Church of the Good Shepherd, and they meant the name as a statement.

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Church of the Good Shepherd: Born From a Schism, Built in Stone

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. The breakaway parish moved fast. Within a year they had a sanctuary on East Street, designed by the painter and clergyman Johannes Adam Simon Oertel and first used on Easter Day, 1875. The little wooden chapel served them for a quarter century. By the 1890s, they had outgrown it....

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Church of the Good Shepherd: The Pro-Cathedral That Almost Was

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Farragutful, CC BY-SA 4.0. For a few years in the mid-1890s, Good Shepherd carried the title of pro-cathedral of the Diocese of North Carolina. The bishop wanted it to become the permanent cathedral, and Rev. Isaac McKendree Pittenger, brought down from Long Island, was meant to lead that elevation. But th...

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Church of the Good Shepherd: St. John's Guild, the Library, and a Hospital

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. Rev. Rich did not see his parish as a building. He saw it as an obligation. In October 1877, forty men from Good Shepherd founded the St. John's Guild to expand education, music, and public health in Raleigh. Two months later, on December 12, the guild opened the city's first fre...

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Church of the Good Shepherd: Soup, Stained Glass, and the Long Argument

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. By 1979, Raleigh's homelessness crisis was visible. Boarding houses and low-cost motels were being torn down for gentrification, and shelters were few. The parish vestry approved a three-thousand-dollar trial grant. The Shepherd's Table Soup Kitchen opened in April 1980. In the f...

Image: Mx. Granger | CC0