The Anglican Fellowship of Prayer, part of the Episcopal Church’s life for almost 70 years, will close its doors on December 31 and donate its assets to the Living Church Foundation.
“Though the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer will formally conclude its ministry at the end of 2025, its mission will endure,” an AFP announcement said. “Through the Living Church Foundation, AFP’s resources and vision will continue to inspire prayer within the Anglican tradition for generations to come.”
AFP, born out of prayer groups held in the Diocese of New York during World War II, is a lay ministry supported by ordained clergy. It was established by the Rev. Dr. Samuel Moor Shoemaker III, who served as rector of the Parish of Calvary–St. George’s in New York City from 1925 to 1952, and his wife, Helen Smith Shoemaker. Its roots trace back to the couple’s “schools of prayer” and the numerous prayer groups established by Mrs. Shoemaker and her friend in ministry, Polly Wiley.
In the 1940s, Mrs. Shoemaker met Wiley, who was working as an executive assistant at the Church of the Ascension in Manhattan. Together, they led women to meet and pray every week at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue.
“Most who came to the weekly prayer meetings were totally inexperienced in prayer” and had to read written prayers, while others read from the Book of Common Prayer, the Rev. William DeArteaga wrote in a blog entry about Mrs. Shoemaker. “But step by step they developed a powerful intercessory prayer life.”
In 1952, Shoemaker became rector of Calvary Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By that time, Mrs. Shoemaker and Wiley had helped organize prayer groups in 90 parishes across the Diocese of New York. Six years later, in 1958, with the support of the Rt. Rev. Austin Pardue, Bishop of Pittsburgh, the prayer ministry was formally incorporated as the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer.
Shoemaker, who used his “imagination, evangelical preaching, and concern for the needy to revitalize and strengthen Calvary Church,” is also recognized as an important influence in the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. AA cofounder Bill Wilson said that Shoemaker “passed on the spiritual keys by which we were liberated.” According to the group’s page about the Episcopal priest, Shoemaker especially inspired the first three steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and many of the other steps.
It was at Calvary House—a multipurpose building that housed church facilities and occasionally operated as a hostel built shortly after Shoemaker became rector—that he met Wilson, Ebby Thatcher, and Rowland Hazard, who were also instrumental in founding AA.
“The early A.A. got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Groups and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and from nowhere else,” Wilson wrote, referring to the early 20th-century Christian movement focused on inner transformation started by the Rev. Frank Buchman in the United States, which also flourished at Oxford University.
The Oxford Group’s Four Absolutes—honesty, unselfishness, love, and purity—gleaned from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, were considered the guideposts of AA before the Twelve Steps were developed.
A New Chapter
What might Shoemaker think of AFP’s resources being entrusted to TLC? “I’m imagining that he would be intrigued because he was ahead of his time,” the Rev. Dr. John Throop, president of the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer.
Throop became president of AFP in 2014 during a board meeting at Calvary Church in Pittsburgh. Throop said that during Shoemaker’s time in the city, he began an initiative focused on social welfare. Called the Pittsburgh Experiment, the nondenominational ministry founded in 1955 provides spiritual resources to the working people of Steel City. At that time, a large portion of the labor force worked in manufacturing.
Decades before the concepts of “work–life balance” and “layoffs” were common, the Experiment assisted individuals suffering from job stress and corporate downsizing.
Throop cited the initiative, as well as Shoemaker’s influence in AA, as a testament to his visionary leadership. He believes the AFP cofounder would approve of the board’s decision. “Of course, this is a great way,” Throop said, imagining Shoemaker’s response.
The AFP president said the digital age and the evolution of the Episcopal Church contributed to the board’s decision to bequeath its resources to the Living Church Foundation.
“The Anglican Fellowship of Prayer thrived on a prayer conference model,” Throop told TLC. “And over the last decade or two, that has become more challenging because people have become more accustomed to the digital method of coming together.”
He said disaffiliations, particularly from the Anglo-Catholic side of the tradition, caused the movement to lose people. “Even though we were not officially an Episcopal Church organization, they just disaffiliated themselves from anything that was traditionally within the Episcopal Church,” Throop said.
Confronting these challenges—and that AFP is not a membership organization—Throop and his fellow board members pondered what would happen if the movement dissolved. Where would the financial assets go? How would the legacy continue?
Throop believes the foundation has both the digital capacity and the ability to reach people. He said the foundation’s leaders, including the Rev. Dr. Matthew S.C. Olver, executive director of the foundation and publisher of TLC, “saw pretty quickly that we were aligned in one of the branches of The Living Church’s ministry, which is the life of prayer.”
At the beginning of 2025, the Rt. Rev. Daniel Martins, retired Bishop of Springfield and an AFP board member, approached the foundation and introduced the idea.
“As Father Olver will tell you, he’d never been approached this way before,” Throop said.
“I was overwhelmed and I was also deeply grateful,” Olver said when he learned of AFP’s desire to make the foundation the steward of its resources and legacy. He said the foundation will receive funds from the prayer ministry and, in exchange, will continue to share its resources with the church.
Olver emphasized that prayer is essential to the health of any church and he praised AFP’s commitment to promoting prayer as a foundational element of the Christian life. “Our desire is to try to provide the resources … to help equip people in that aspect of their devotional life,” Olver said.
Part of the foundation’s commitment will be to acknowledge AFP’s support in its Daily Devotional, produce two to four podcast episodes annually on the topic of prayer, and create an online hub for prayer resources. The foundation will also hold up to two conferences a year on themes such as cultivating prayer, prayer ministry, the practice of prayer for ministry leaders, recovery, and discipleship.
The absorption of AFP into the foundation is not the first time the two ministries have shared history. Martins has been a contributor to TLC and Covenant, its online journal, for years. Among the most notable works produced by AFP is the book The Praying Church by Bishop Donald Hultstrand of Springfield.
Hultstrand, who died in 2018, was AFP’s executive director from 1975 to 1979. He also served as president of the foundation from 1991 to 2001.
Looking toward January 1, Throop said, “My prayer would be that there would be opportunities for digital teaching and for incorporation into a conference that would be live as well as virtual, and that there would be an open door to help people connect with one another to help in the growth of prayer.”
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
