The Reverend Conrad Bennette Tillard, Sr., M.Div. Th. M., ABD has been a minister, educator, activist, and radio talk show host for over 35 years. He is Senior Pastor Elect of The Congregational Church of South Hempstead, a United Church of Christ Congregation in Long Island. Rev. Tillard is the former Senior Minister of The Flatbush Tompkins Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York, a congregation affiliated with the National Association of Congregational Christians. Rev. Tillard is also the former Senior Minister of the Nazarene Congregational Church, a United Church of Christ Congregation (UCC) in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where he served from 2006 to 2016. Before that, he was the Interim Senior Minister of the Eliot Congregational Church, UCC, in the Roxbury community in Boston. Today, he also heads, Black Clergy for Economic Empowerment in New York City. Rev. Tillard is a Baptist and Congregational minister, licensed and ordained at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church of the City of New York under the tutelage of the late Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III. He is affiliated with the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, National Baptist Convention USA, Inc., and The American Baptist Churches USA, and has held dual standing with the Metropolitan Association of the United Church of Christ, New York Conference.

Rev. Tillard is active in the City of New York, having served on community boards and organizations. He has preached in some of the leading church pulpits throughout the New York metropolitan area and the nation. He is also an Adjunct Professor at The City College of New York, in the Black Studies Department, where he teaches courses on; the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, Malcolm X, Harlem, and Hip-Hop. He also hosts a podcast, Conversations with Conrad. He is also completing his memoir, which chronicles his extraordinary journey to the Gospel ministry. Selected in 2021 as the Professor of the Year in the Black Studies Department at CCNY, in 2015 he received the Humanitarian Community Leadership Award, The Culvert News Community Awards and in 2009 as "Pastor of the Year" in Brooklyn, New York, by Church Women United and in 2005 and 2006 by Beliefnet.com as one of “The Most Influential Spiritual Black Leaders,” in the United States.

Reverend Tillard is an important ecclesiastical voice, at the intersection of culture and politics in America. He has been a student activist, minister, and community activist for thirty years. Rev. Tillard has had both a celebrated and chronicled ecumenical and interfaith journey. Earlier in his career, he gained national renown as the Hip Hop Minister in the late 1980s and 90s as an activist minister at one of Harlem’s most historic congregations, Mosque Number Seven during the crack era.

He has twice run for public office in New York, most recently for the New York State Senate in 2022. He was endorsed by the Mayor of New York City and the late New York State NAACP President, Hazel N. Dukes.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.), Columbia University affiliated, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (M.Div.), and Princeton Theological Seminary (Th.M.). He has also completed graduate work at Harvard Divinity School and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Rev. Tillard is currently a candidate for the Doctor of Ministry Degree (D. Min) at Duke Divinity School in organizational leadership. While at Penn, he was elected President of The Black Student League, and also inducted as a member of Sphinx Senior Society, the oldest and most prestigious senior society at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rev. Tillard is a proud Prince Hall Mason, active in the Boyer Lodge of New York in Harlem. He has been profiled on television and cable news networks and featured in national publications, e.g., The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, to name a few. He is featured in a number of major documentary films, including the Honorable Shyne (2024), Yusef Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn (2020), Hip Hop: Beyond the Beats & Rhymes (2006), and the Fall of Diddy (2025). He loves convertibles, Central Park, the beaches of Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and Connecticut; he considers upstate New York heavenly.

Rev. Tillard has explored Israel and Palestine. He is a jazz lover, and a proud father of Amir, a Los Angeles-based artist, Najmah, a Howard University Graduate and law student, Conrad Jr, a Fisk University graduate. And Barack, his erstwhile assistant pastor, who is a rising high school sophomore at the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts