Long before he was Rev. Derrick Fields, he was a boy wedged into a grey Ford pickup truck with his four younger siblings, being hauled to church by a “sainted” couple who he said lived just up the highway from his family home in Aberdeen.
Today, Fields preaches behind the pulpit of the oldest Black church in Northeast Mississippi, one founded by enslaved African Americans, organized during Reconstruction and sustained through the Jim Crow era, integration and a pandemic.
It is a legacy Fields is keenly aware of every time he steps into Missionary Union Baptist Church.
“It’s a different kind of weight when you know that the church that you pastor now, enslaved souls started it,” Fields told The Dispatch on Friday.
Fields, 49, was born and raised in Aberdeen, where he graduated high school before going on to Itawamba Community College. After earning his associate’s degree in sociology, he attended Northwestern State in Louisiana, graduating in 1998. He earned his master’s degree in education there in 2001.
After a brief stint back home, Fields started working in student affairs at Mississippi Delta Community College, where he was eventually promoted to vice president of student affairs.
He spent his Sundays preaching at Bright Star Missionary Baptist Church in Merigold, a position he remained committed to after moving his family to Columbus – his wife’s hometown – in 2020.
Two master’s degrees – one in ministry and one in theology – later, Fields was starting his doctoral work, still driving 5 1/2 hours each Sunday to Merigold and back, when he got a call from the pastor of his father’s church, Pastor Joseph Stone Jr., letting him know Missionary Union was in search of a new pastor.
Stone was former classmates with a deacon at Missionary Union, who eventually extended the invitation for Fields to preach. By the fourth Sunday in October 2025, he was newly installed as the church’s pastor.
“God is a god that orchestrates. It’s kind of like a chessboard, your life. … He’s moving you from different places, and sometimes you don’t see what it is that he’s doing,” Fields said. “But ultimately, everything that’s happening … whether it’s delightful, whether it’s … tumultuous, it’s leading you to that particular ultimate end that he has for your life.”
‘Tell our own stories’
While Fields had heard of Missionary Union, it was his wife, Shavonda, who started cluing him in to the church’s legacy.
Organized during the days of slavery, Missionary Union services were first held in the basement of First Baptist Church. It was officially chartered in 1867, though four years later, it was purchased and moved to a small building at its present site, to which the congregation eventually added.
Interested in learning more, Fields got in touch with Rev. Marcell Keller, one of the former pastors of Missionary Union, who reportedly has an exhaustive history of the church. Fields’ hope is to retrieve the archive and preserve the church’s history in an easily accessible format.
“I want to, over the next year or two, begin to curate our history in a way that we can put it in a book, that we can maybe capture it in a documentary,” he said. “And then have some of the older sages – we have a lot of people that are 90-plus years old. … They’re going to be very instrumental in helping me tell MU’s story.”
Fields said it is an effort he believes is especially urgent right now.
“I think that’s very, very important in a time of history in which we’re living right now, where so much of … our contributions to this city, to this country, to this world, in many ways, (are under attack) and being erased,” he said. “It is incumbent on us to make sure that we curate and that we tell our own stories.”
Beyond preserving its past, Fields said he wants to see Missionary Union continuing to thrive in its present, whether that’s growing the congregation, reaching younger generations through digital media or helping new members find purpose.
Fields said he feels a deep responsibility – tied to both his pastoral responsibilities and the church’s “high visibility” – to be an active member of the community, whether that’s attending public meetings, taking part in community events or even connecting with youth through local schools.”
“One of the things that the church has to ask themselves to know whether or not you’re doing a good job is, if the church … closed for whatever reasons, would the community miss you?” Fields said. “If they don’t miss you, you didn’t do enough. I want to make sure that if something ever happened, they would miss us.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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