In his 1924 address to convention, Bishop Frederick Focke Reese mourned Whitney saying, “The Rev. George Sherwood Whitney, Rector of St. Paul’s Church, Augusta, fell asleep, suddenly, and most unexpectedly to its who knew him, on March 1, 1924, in the 58th year of his age. He came to Georgia front the Diocese of Chicago in 1897, as Rector of St. Thomas’ Church, Thomasville, and in 1907 become the Rector of St. Paul’s Church, Augusta, thus serving the Church in the Diocese for 26 years. May I quote what I said of him in The Church in Georgia?

‘During these 26 years he won his way into the esteem and affection of both clergy and laity and his Bishop. . . . He was rightly honored by election of his brethren and by appointment by the Bishop to practically every position of honor and service in the Diocese. In both parishes which he served he received the confidence and love of his parishioners to an extraordinary degree. He was an efficient and devoted parish priest. I have known no man who was more so. He was kindly and gracious in his manner, gentle and sympathetic in his personal ministrations to all alike, most self-forgetting and self-sacrificing fit his life, and brave and undaunted in carrying out the responsibilities which his duty called upon him to meet, and yet withal, most modest and unassuming. He was not merely it parish priest, but it citizen of the communities in which he lived. . . . He was respected and beloved by people of all classes and communions; a loyal Churchman, but it friend of all men and sympathetic to all good causes; an attractive and lovable man, a sincere and earnest Christian, a devoted and self-sacrificing priest, but one who loved his Lord and gave his life in His service.

He was a deputy to the General Conventions from Georgia from 1907 to 1922. Secretary of its Committee on Canons, 1910-1922, and it member of the Commission on the Ministry of the National Department of Religious Education. In the Diocese he was President of the Standing Committee, and of the Board of Examining Chaplains and a member of the Departments of the Nation-Wide Campaign and Publicity, and first Editor of The Church is Georgia.’”