Our Rector
Thomas Eoyang, Jr., the rector of Grace Epiphany Church of Mt. Airy, was born and raised in New York City, the youngest of four children in a Chinese family that came to the United States after the Second World War. Baptized in the Episcopal Church with the rest of his family, he attended a Lutheran school from K-6, and graduated from the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, cum laude, in English history and literature, and went on to Stanford University for doctoral studies in comparative literature.
Leaving Stanford without finishing his doctorate, he spent the next twenty years in the medical and health science publishing industry, both in California and in Philadelphia, where he worked with nurses to publish textbooks and clinical references. In 2000, he left the W. B. Saunders Company in Philadelphia, where he had been Vice President and Editor-in-Chief for Nursing Books, to enter the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Discerning a call to ordained ministry while in seminary, and sponsored by the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany in Center City, Philadelphia, he was ordained to the diaconate and the priesthood in 2004.
Upon returning to Philadelphia after seminary, he worked first as the assistant to the rector at St. Peter’s Church, Glenside, and then as Interim Rector of Trinity Memorial Church in the Rittenhouse/Fitler Square area of Philadelphia, before being elected the third rector of Grace Epiphany.
In addition to his duties as rector, Thomas currently serves on the Resolutions Committee and as the chair of the Commission on Ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. He recently concluded two terms as a member of the diocesan Antiracism Commission, and has served as alternate deputy to the 2009 General Convention, as a member of the Search Committee for the President & Dean of Episcopal Divinity School, and on the EDS Alumni Executive Council. His ministerial and preaching emphases include social, economic, and racial justice, LGBT justice and spirituality, and spiritual development.