On Sunday, Sept. 24, the Congregational Church of Boothbay Harbor will welcome the Rev. J. Barrie Shepherd into its pulpit at the 10 a.m. service.

Shepherd retired in March 2000 after serving for the previous eight years as senior minister of historic First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York. First Church, situated on lower Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, is the mother church of New York City Presbyterianism and boasts a long line of illustrious preachers, from Jonathan Edwards in the early 18th century to Harry Emerson Fosdick in the 20th. Prior to that, Shepherd served for 16 years as senior minister of the Swarthmore (Pennsylvania) Presbyterian Church. Previously he has served as campus pastor and minister to Westminster Church at the College of Wooster, chaplain and assistant professor of religion at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, and campus minister at The University of Connecticut (Storrs, Connecticut).

Shepherd has written extensively in the area of religious studies. He has preached and lectured at Harvard (where he served two terms on the Overseers' Committee To Visit The Memorial Church and delivered a William Belden Noble Lecture in 1995), Yale (where he delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures for 2002), Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke and other universities and colleges and many of the major seminaries as well as in distinguished pulpits across the USA and in the United Kingdom, Europe and Africa. Among his many lectureships he lists service on the faculty of the College of Preachers of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

 The Shepherds now reside in Scarborough, Maine, where Barrie spends his time guest preaching, teaching, writing and playing the euphonium in various local musical ensembles.