A. Gary Shilling, Episcopal Church’s behind-the-scenes preaching influencer, retires after 4 decades

A. Gary Shilling, president of A. Gary Shilling & Co. Inc., as photographed in 2012. Photo: Scott Eells/Bloomberg via Getty Images

[Episcopal News Service] A. Gary Shilling, who has influenced preaching in The Episcopal Church for nearly 40 years, announced Sept. 21 that he is retiring as head of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation.

Shilling, who founded the organization in 1987, will become board chairman emeritus. Executive Director Peter Wild will continue to lead EPF’s day-to-day operations.

“Few people in The Episcopal Church have given more to the enterprise of preaching than Gary Shilling,” Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe told Episcopal News Service. “For decades, our whole church has benefitted from his passion for forming strong clergy and lay preachers and his willingness to marshal resources in the service of his vision.”

Rowe was a seminarian when he participated in the Preaching Excellence Program, the foundation’s centerpiece program. “The training and mentorship I received there has been central to my formation and my ministry in the last 25 years,” he said, adding, “I will always be grateful to Gary and the Episcopal Preaching Foundation for their generous investment in me and thousands of other seminarians and new preachers.”

The Very Rev. Randy Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral, said in the foundation’s release that Shilling “has made a unique contribution to the careers of generations of preachers and their Sunday listeners,” including himself.

The Rev. Stephen Smith, who has been involved with the foundation since 2005 and now chairs its board, said in an interview that “Gary Schilling changed preaching in the church forever and for the better.”

Shilling, an economist, was leading his investment advisory firm in Springfield, New Jersey, when he created, and largely funded, the foundation. He said in the release that his initial motivation was simple. “Too many lousy sermons. What gets people into church – and keeps them there – is the sermon,” he said. “Plus, I simply enjoy hearing a good sermon.”

Shilling told ENS that for him one test of a good sermon is “whether you can remember on Wednesday what the preacher said on Sunday.” The sermon, he added, is for most congregants their main continuing point of contact with the church.

However, while he believed that strong and vibrant preaching would attract congregants and grow The Episcopal Church, that wasn’t Shilling’s only goal. He hoped that strong preachers would also inspire people in their religious life. “A good sermon changes people in a way that improves their understanding of God and Christianity,” he said in the release.

Shilling said the Book of Acts is his favorite book in the Bible because it tells the story of how Paul and others spread “this wonderful concept we call Christianity.”

Shilling, 89, who attends Christ Church in Short Hills, New Jersey, decided early on that EPF should work with new preachers as they grew into their ministry.

The annual Preaching Excellence Program, the foundation’s centerpiece conference known as PEP, offers seminarians and recent graduates an immersion experience in the art and practice of preaching. Seminarians, homiletics professors and rectors gather for a week of lectures, worship, workshops and small groups in which the students preach sermons for discussion and feedback. The foundation underwrites the cost of registration, travel, and accommodations, except for $375, which the student, their seminary, and their diocese pay in equal parts. Approximately 2,000 clergy have participated in the program since its founding in 1988.

The Rev. Elis Hiu-Mei Lui attended Preaching in Excellence in May. She was a transitional deacon when she preached her first sermon to a congregation at St. Mary the Virgin near Times Square in New York City in late August and was ordained a priest on Sept. 12.

Lui called PEP “the most retreat-like experience I’ve had in all my years of seminary.” The time she spent in personal prayer was a part of that, she said, adding that the conference also gave her and others “space for you to process and pray about what you’re learning and encountering.”

PEP allows participants to “get out of our respective bubbles,” Lui said, and connect with people from other seminaries and local formation programs who will be preaching in different settings.

“It was very neat to talk to and connect with peers who are being formed at this exact time, but also with the mentors who’ve been doing this for years.”

The preaching foundation expanded its mission over the years with preaching intensives for deacons, including conferences for deacons in the Anglican Church of Canada; a lay preacher program (with help from a $400,000 grant from Trinity Wall Street); an association for Episcopal Church lay preachers; preaching conferences for Spanish-speaking clergy; diocesan preaching conferences; preaching weeks between seminaries’ academic year terms; and Sermon Roundtable to train clergy and lay leadership in giving meaningful sermon feedback (funded by more than $1 million from the Lilly Endowment).

It offers Word & Witness, a monthly resource newsletter for preachers.

The foundation, with the Seminary of the Southwest, developed the Iona Collaborative, which offers a virtual formation experience for those to be ordained outside a residential seminary.

EPF’s Episcopal Lay Preaching Network, founded in 2025, will host the first national conference for lay preachers in October.

– The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is a freelance writer who formerly was a senior editor and reporter for Episcopal News Service.