On a wall of St. Matthew's Church in Fairbanks, Alaska, is a series of historic stained glass windows. One shows a typical summer Alaskan landscape with a smiling figure in the foreground. Against the mountains flies a small bush plane. There is a small blue square, a "blue box," on the rear fuselage of the plane. That, and the beaded cross the figure wears, hint that something more than being an Alaskan bush pilot may be going on.

The life and influence of the stained glass figure helped shape the Episcopal Church, and his ministry helped shape the church's understanding of ministry. He was always known in Alaska as simply "The Bishop" . . . the Rt. Rev. William J. Gordon, Jr., third Bishop of Alaska.

In the summer of 1943, Alaska was in the midst of war, with fighting in the Aleutians, and the legendary first Bishop of Alaska, Peter Trimble Rowe, bishop for 47 years, had died the previous year. He had been succeeded by the Rt. Rev. John Bentley, the suffragan since 1931. Bishop Bentley had recruited for Alaska the Virginia Seminary deacon soon to be priest who landed in Alaska that summer. William Gordon, a native North Carolinian and the son of a parish priest, was just 25 years old. And in love. Onboard ship to Alaska, he had met Shirley Lewis of Washington, a young secretary. That July they were married in Seward, Alaska, and then, shortly after Bishop Bentley ordained him to the priesthood, they were asked to move to Point Hope, high on the Arctic Coast, to St. Thomas' Church. Here the Gordons arrived in the summer of 1943. Over the next five years, as missionary-in-charge, he would travel 6,000 miles by dog team among the Arctic Coast villages and learn lessons from the Arctic and her people that would shape the rest of his life.

At the age of 29, while he was camped in an abandoned igloo between Kivalina and Point Hope, with the dog team resting outside in the wind, William Gordon was elected, by the House of Bishops, to be the next Bishop of Alaska. He succeeded Bishop Bentley, who had been called to the national church office. At the time, he was the youngest person in the history of the Anglican Communion ever called to be a bishop. His consecration was delayed the following year, until he had reached the canonically required 30 years old.

Following his consecration in 1948, he moved his family to Fairbanks, and began an episcopal ministry that soon captured the imagination of the country. After a summer of traveling on riverboats to visit his congregations, he earned his private pilot's license in 1949 and took to the air. He was soon known nationally as "the Flying Bishop of Alaska." In 1952, the Episcopal Church Women raised money nationally to buy him a new airplane that became known, from the UTO mite boxes, as "the Blue Box." By the time of his Alaskan retirement in 1974, he had logged more than 1 million flying hours in Alaska.

A strong proponent of the rights of Alaska native people, Bishop Gordon's vision of the church emphasized the call of all people, through their baptism, to ministry wherever and whoever they were. This emphasis led to significant changes in national church canons, to allow for the ordination of "sacramentalist" or "local" clergy, a deliberate emphasis on lay ministry in the commission on ministry canons, and a national/international interest in what would come to be called Total Ministry.

Retiring from Alaska in 1974, he traveled throughout the world sharing his vision of ministry as Project TEAM (Teach Each A Ministry) and then in 1976, became Assistant Bishop of Michigan. He died there Jan. 4, 1994. In June of that year, under a softly falling summer snow, his final services and burial were held in Point Hope, where it had all begun. o

The Rev. Scott Fisher is rector of St. Matthew's Church, Fairbanks, Alaska