The Vineyard

In Raleigh, N.C., 13 Episcopal bishops laid their hands on the head of 30-year-old Rev. William Jones Gordon Jr. When the hands were lifted, William Gordon was not only bishop of Alaska's missionary district but the youngest Episcopal bishop ever consecrated. Said he afterward: "I was trudging along in the snow last year, behind a dog team, when I hear this Indian yelling to me he's got a message. It was from the House of Bishops. I read it and just about fainted."

In Los Angeles, the Rev. Stewart P. MacLennan said he had not realized that he had violated Presbyterian constitutional law by officiating at the fourth marriage of Cinemactress Lana Turner and Tinplate Heir Henry J. ("Bob") Topping. He had been much impressed, he said, by Miss Turner's "sincerity and the depth of feeling in her . . . There is a spiritual quality in that woman ... I became convinced that they . . . wanted to break with the past and put their marriage on a Christian basis." Since Minister Mac-Lennan admits violating the rules, a presbytery judicial commission will not have to try him, but only decide what degree of church censure to inflict.

In St. Louis, 38 top-ranking Episcopalians took their church's official leadership to task for obstructing church unity rather than promoting it. Target of the document was a "Statement of Faith & Order" recently prepared by the Joint Commission on Approaches to Unity. Their chief complaint: the commission's statement does nothing to clear up the church's ancient ambiguity on the subject of the "historic episcopate," Episcopalian equivalent of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Apostolic Succession (an unbroken line of bishops consecrated by bishops traced directly back to St. Peter).

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