As soon as my daughter Lily and I stepped into the meeting room of the Atlanta Presbyterian Fellowship, we anticipated that this would be an experience involving the conventional and the unconventional. We were standing in an L-shaped living space in one side of a rented duplex. The room had rows of mismatched chairs arranged to accommodate 50 or so attendees.

The setup was quite unconventional and did not fit the standard RP model of worship. Or, did it? Both sections of the room had its chairs oriented to face the centerpiece of this unconventional sanctuary: the pulpit. Front and center in this affair is clearly the preached Word of God. How conventional and traditionally Reformed.

We were warmly greeted by Penny Smith, who said that her husband, Frank, was out and about collecting folks from the neighborhood. Dr. Frank J. Smith is the minister of this outreach effort, which was begun in 2010. Soon enough, Frank arrived and called Lily and me down to take a 9-cent ...