Thomas Shepard (5 November 1605 – 25 August 1649) was an English, afterwards American Puritan minister and a significant figure in early colonial New England.
[2] He accounts in his autobiography that he lived a dissatisfied and dissolute life, which led him to pray out in a nearby field, at which point he underwent the beginnings of a conversion experience.
He became a minister whose sermons and Puritan ways drew the ire of Church of England Archbishop William Laud, and he was forbidden to preach.
His written legacy includes an autobiography and numerous sermons, which in some measure of contrast with others of his day, tended to accent God as an accessible and welcoming figure in the individual life.
While it is difficult to judge in a modern context with which church Shepard would have maintained an affiliation, it is safe to say that his trinitarian beliefs would have aligned him with the Congregationalists not the Unitarians.