David C. Wilder is the former Managing Director of Lumen Institute Inc. (Manhattan, NY), an international organization providing highly personalized formation for business executives and cultural leaders in character, faith andleadership. David oversaw the planning and implementation of Lumen's national and international expansion. David is a graduate of Syracuse University where he studied at the renowned Maxwell School for the advancement of citizenship, scholarship and leadership. He has degrees in political science and business administration. Prior to joining Lumen in 2003, David worked as a sales executive within the transportation and pneumatic conveying industries.

David has been a featured speaker at numerous catechetical and evangelization conferences. David is the former director of the John Paul II Family Faith Center, a multi-media apostolate of Catholic apologetics and evangelization. David taught high school catechetics and epistemology at Tyburn Academy in Auburn, NY, a college preparatory institution providing character and faith formation within the Catholic Tradition. He is the former the Co-Director of the RCIA Program at Our Lady of the Lake Parish (Sparta, NJ) and training consultant to SportsLeader, ConQuest Boys Clubs, and Three to Get Married Pre-Cana Marriage Preparation within the Archdiocese of New York.

David specializes in high-impact, bridge-building evangelization, apologetics, and parenting techniques that use logic, humor and the art of example to drive the methods of Catholic persuasion. His techniques are highly practical, meant for all audiences, and have proven to produce clear, convincing, charitable results in any setting - from the board room, golf course and family reunion .to the CCD class, around the dining room table or the inevitable airplane conversation. David and his wife Terri have been married for 34 years and have five grown children and nine grandchildren. They make their home in the Finger lakes of New York.

Father Daniel J. Wilder’s path to the priesthood began in Saranac Lake, New York. Classmates at Saranac Lake Central High School were unsurprised when he entered the seminary after graduation: he had served at the altar into his senior year and was active on the youth council for the Diocese of Ogdensburg. On May 26, 1973, the day of his First Communion with his twin brother, David, he watched the priest elevate the Eucharist and thought, “I’m going to do that someday.” He left after two years of seminary, convinced God might have other plans, until a pilgrimage to Medjugorje in May 1989, when he said the Blessed Mother and the Lord “relit my vocation.”
His ties to the Diocese of Peoria formed through Msgr. Eric Powell, whom he met on a trip to Rome and who helped arrange an audience with St. Pope John Paul II, and through Bishop John J. Myers, whom he met while helping organize a National Rosary Congress. Accepted as a seminarian for Peoria, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Wadhams Hall Seminary College in Ogdensburg in 1990, then a master of divinity and a master’s in theology and church history at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. He celebrated his first Mass on May 26, 1996, twenty-three years to the day after that First Communion.
His early assignments were as parochial vicar at Holy Family in Lincoln and at St. Columba and St. Patrick in Ottawa. After two years as chaplain at the St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Newman Center at Western Illinois University in Macomb, he served as pastor of St. Mary in El Paso and St. Patrick in Minonk, then of St. John the Evangelist in Walnut and Immaculate Conception in Ohio. In 2010 he received permission for missionary work in India, Africa, Central America, and South America. Released for work outside the diocese in 2013, he spent much of the next eight years in California as chaplain at JSerra Catholic High School in San Juan Capistrano and assisting at St. Killian in Mission Viejo, Holy Spirit in Fountain Valley, and St. Hedwig in Los Alamitos. By the time of this 2021 profile he had finished that Orange assignment and was unassigned, with a Mass and gathering planned sometime that year.
Asked what had given him the most joy, he pointed to administering the sacraments, proclaiming the Gospel, and walking with people through the ordinary events of faith and family. He named Father Jim Steuer of the Diocese of Albany as his “spiritual father,” the priest who, after an unscheduled confession, helped him discern his vocation and taught him that ministry is “heart speaking to heart.” He also credited his mother, Patricia Wilder, whose life put God first and who was, in his words, “the real deal.” On the 9,125 days of his priesthood he refused to single out a few highlights. Every day, he said, echoing his mother, is extraordinary, “because God has brought you to that moment.”