About Us - The Good Shepherd Church of God in Christ

After much prayer and fasting, on January 1, 1989 Elder Tony Torain and his wife, Celestine, organized The Good Shepherd Church of God In Christ. For months they had sought the Lord about their next step in ministry and through a series of events, the Lord made it clear that they were to avail themselves to him for the establishment of a ministry.

In the fall of 1988 Elder Torain had been invited to a weekly community prayer group to surround him with the support of other believers in praying about founding a church ministry. Through the prayers of this group, God crystallized his will for the establishment of the church and when the church began, several members of the prayer group decided to join. At the end of the first service the church had seven members.

The church worshipped at the Ramada Inn in Woodlawn, Maryland for the first year and after that moved briefly to the Lord Baltimore Hotel in downtown Baltimore. While the facility was very commodious, the parking at the Lord Baltimore was problematic; so after a brief stint downtown the church moved to the Quality Inn on Route 40 in Catonsville. There the church grew numerically and in its identity as a church community.

At the end of its third year of ministry, the church began looking for property to purchase. After two failed attempts, the church leadership was led to the church property at 1721 Sexton Street, in the Morrell Park section of Baltimore City. This property had been a thriving Methodist Church in the 1960s and 1970s but with an aging congregation by the 1990s the membership had dwindled and those that had remained were elderly. The Methodist Conference made the decision to sell the property and The Good Shepherd Church decided to purchase it. On the first Sunday in December of 1995, the church moved into its present location.

The Good Shepherd Church seeks to minister to the whole man. In addition to the many fellowships and teaching ministries in the church, the church has a wide range of outreach ministries. It partners with the local school to help poor and struggling families, it has a ministry to incarcerated men and women, it has a monthly outreach dinner for families in the community, it has a ministry to the sick and shut-in, it has a food pantry that feeds hungry families, it has a ministry to college students and military personnel and since the church’s inception it has had a nursing home ministry. Our ministry philosophy grows out of the Great Commission in which the Lord Jesus commands us to reach out to the lost and hurting and to teach those who have accepted him.

The church seeks to be child-friendly, understanding that the childhood experience of person in church impacts his or her ability to seek Jesus as an adult. The church seeks to be nurturing. It is no accident that the name of the church is The Good Shepherd Church as it seeks to emulate the character of Christ that nurturing and pastoral. The church seeks to be welcoming to all and is open to the worship style of any culture as long as that syle is bible based. The church seeks to be a place where worship is spirit-led and at the same time orderly. And, finally, the church seeks to be well run using accepted management principles to bring order to the house of God.

OUR PASTOR

Superintendent Tony W. Torain, J.D. is the founding pastor of The Good Shepherd Church of God In Christ in Baltimore, Maryland. On a snowy day in January of 1989, he and six other Christians became the foundering members of this fellowship. Initially meeting in rented hotel space, the church moved into its present facility at 1721 Sexton Street in the Morrell Park section of Baltimore in December of 1995

A native of Mebane, North Carolina, Pastor Torain is a 1975 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he majored in English Literature. He graduated from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in 1979 with a master’s degree in New Testament Theology. In the spring of 1980 he graduated from Boston University with a Masters of Arts in African-American Literature. In 1984 he graduated from the University of Maryland School of Law with the Juris Doctor degree and in 1985 he completed the requirements for the Masters of Social Work at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. He has done further doctoral studies at Princeton Theological Seminary and at Regent University.

Pastor Torain began his career in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Personnel Administration at the United States Department of Health and Human Services. In 1987 he left the legal community to enter higher education as the Director of the African American Cultural Center at Towson University. In 1991 he was named the Assistant Dean for Student Services and Minority Affairs at the University of Maryland School of Social Work where he worked with social work students. In 1994 he returned to the legal community when he was named Dean of Students at the University of Baltimore School of Law. In 2002 he was given additional responsibilities at the Law School when he was also named the Dean of Admissions. In September of 2007, he concluded his service to the School of Law and entered full-time pastoral ministry. In January of 2010 he went to work as the Circuit Court for Baltimore City as the Deputy Clerk for Administration.

Superintendent Torain serves the Greater Maryland First Jurisdiction of the Church of God in Christ as the Superintendent of the Bishop Frank J. Ellis Memorial District, Administrative Assistant to Bishop J.H. Lyles, Jr. for Operations, Public Relations and Training and Interim Dean of the C.H. Mason Jurisdictional Institute. He has served the national church as an Associate Commissioner of Education, the teacher of the Deacon’s class and the class on Legal Issues for the Church in the Bishop O.T. Jones, Sr. Training Institute. He is currently a member of the COGIC Scholars.

Since May of 1985, Pastor Torain has been married to the former Celestine Best of Newburgh, New York. He is the father of two sons, Tony W. Torain, II, a law student at the University of Maryland School of Law and James Best Torain, a student at Haverford College.

The Affirmation of Faith

We believe the Bible to be the inspired and only infallible written word of God.
We believe there is one God eternally existent in three persons, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
We believe in the blessed hope, which is the rapture of the Church of God, which is in Christ at His return.
We believe that the only means of being cleansed from sin is through repentance and faith in the precious blood of Jesus Christ.
We believe that regeneration by the Holy Spirit is absolutely essential for personal salvation.
We believe that the redemptive work of Christ on the cross-provided healing for the human body in answer to believing in prayer.
We believe that the baptism of the Holy Ghost, according to Acts 2:4 is given to believers who ask for it.
We believe in the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit, by whose indwelling the Christian is able to live a a holy and separated life in this present world.