New Episcopal Bishop To Be Ordained Today

The Rev. James Waggoner Jr. will become The Very Rev. Waggoner today when he is ordained the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Spokane at St. John’s Cathedral.

After that he will be the spiritual leader of 9,000 people in 44 churches across Eastern Washington and North Idaho.

“There is a readiness and an eagerness to begin a new chapter here in the diocese,” Waggoner said Friday during an interview. “This will be a time of reconnecting.”

Waggoner is replacing Bishop Jeff Terry, who died in February 1999 of complications from a heart transplant.

Waggoner, 52, is the eighth man to serve as Episcopal bishop of Spokane.

Born and raised a Southern Baptist, Waggoner said he has carried a strong relationship with the Bible into his Episcopal life.

“I have a real closeness to the Holy Scriptures,” he said.

He also believes God has been guiding his path to becoming Spokane’s bishop since 1974, when he and his wife, Gloria, converted to the Episcopal The couple had just returned to Huntington, Va., after his tour in the Navy when a friend invited them to attend St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.

After that first worship service, they joined a class preparing for confirmation. It was during his confirmation that Waggoner first felt his desire to become a priest.

“That wasn’t accidental,” he said of the friend’s invitation to church. “Somehow the Lord’s hand was involved in all that.”

He’s been a priest in Virginia for more than two decades. Waggoner said he felt similar spiritual connections this spring when he visited the Inland Northwest for the first time while being interviewed for bishop.

When he was asked by the search committee to come to Spokane to be interviewed along with three other priests, he vowed to be unemotional. But after spending several days in Spokane, he found himself attached to the idea of being the bishop here.

“It seemed like this was the place I was called to be,” he said. “So much so that had I not been elected, I would have had to do some recovering.”

Last April, Waggoner was unanimously chosen by a body of clergy and lay delegates to be the bishop.

“It was a spiritually powerful turning point in my life,” he said.

Today’s ceremony will involve several hundred participants, including clergy from the Episcopal Church and other denominations, choirs, civic dignitaries and members of Waggoner’s family.