A Ministry That Stretches From the Gulf Coast to the Alaska Frontier

Wilderness, isolation, hard labor, nomination for Episcopal bishop, long-distance pastoral visits, frontier life and frontier death--the Right Rev. Bruce Caldwell has seen all this and more.

That was in Alaska, long before he moved to Wyoming.

But the lessons there and here remain constant, Caldwell said.

“The beauty of life is that you can never really assess it, finally. It’s always in change, motion. What you have to do is stay in relationship with it.”

Caldwell, 50, was consecrated and installed as the eighth Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Wyoming in September.

This priest’s son, Vietnam veteran, former parole officer and minister brings to the state more than two decades of experience drawn from the urban rush of New York City and Tampa, Fla., to his most recent work in the middle of North Dakota.

Although Caldwell’s tenure in Alaska lasted only two years, it profoundly affected how he perceives himself and his role as bishop, he said.

He and his wife, Brenda, lived in a log house, cut their own firewood, grew their own vegetables in a garden and raised bees.

“Time was different there,” he said.

So was his ministry, based in Fort Yukon, about 130 miles northeast of Fairbanks. Caldwell hired a pilot and flew from remote village to remote village, where he conducted revivals, taught the Bible and buried people.

“There was a lot of death, tragic death,” he said.

Caldwell learned the ropes of being a frontier funeral director: laying out the bodies, preparing them for burial, building coffins, digging graves and conducting services.

“It sort of got to the quick of life,” he said.

The work apparently attracted the attention of the other Episcopalians in the state, because he was nominated, but not elected, for bishop in Alaska, he said.

Caldwell then received a call to be the rector of St. George’s Church in Bismarck, N.D., where he served from 1991 to this year, he said. In June, Wyoming Episcopalians elected him bishop over four other candidates.

“It’s not something I aspired to, that’s for sure,” he said.

But Caldwell acknowledges that his family background influenced his lifelong interest in the ministry. His father is an Episcopal priest, and his wife’s father was a Southern Baptist preacher, he said.

The ministerial upbringing meant that he moved a lot. Caldwell was born in Ohio and reared in Michigan, and his family moved to Florida, then Wisconsin, then back to Florida.

After tours in Thailand and Vietnam with the Air Force, Caldwell returned to Florida to attend the University of Southern Florida.

There he earned a degree in sociology and met his future wife. After graduation, Caldwell worked as a parole officer.

In 1975, he entered the Episcopal Church’s General Theological Seminary in New York City, where his interest in the pastoral ministry took hold.

Caldwell worked in Harlem for part of his education, and the experience helped convince him that God wanted him to be a minister to the poor, he said.

As divine irony would have it, Caldwell’s first assignment after graduating from seminary was at an upper middle class parish in Tampa, Fla.

After that, Caldwell received a call to work for five years in a poor neighborhood in Tampa, where he and Brenda directed a children’s ministry.

“We could see the Spirit moving around us,” he said.

They launched a ballet school and an African-drumming school, and he locked horns with City Hall by demanding a traffic light for a busy intersection in their neighborhood, he said.

From Tampa, Caldwell went to Alaska, then North Dakota and now Wyoming, where he will work from the diocesan headquarters at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Laramie.

As bishop, he works as the diocese’s general administrator, serves as chief pastor and priest, ordains clergy and represents Wyoming in the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops.

His first job consisted of honoring what has been done since Episcopalians came to the Wyoming Territory in the 1860s, he said.

The Wyoming diocese owns an elaborately carved century-old crosier--a staff with a crook at the end--that represents the bishop’s office, Caldwell said.

Caldwell intends to travel throughout the state, making three-day weekend visits to the 52 churches, which are pastored by 37 clergy, he said.

“I’ve asked each church to do something fun” for his visits, he added.

The churches, clergy and approximately 10,000 members face common Wyoming themes of isolated communities, low incomes that make clergy recruitment and retention difficult, a loss of the state’s youth, and an independent spirit that can militate against institutions, including what Caldwell calls his own denomination-- “an imperial church based on a medieval structure.”

As bishop, Caldwell sees his job as an “apostolic” mission to encourage church members to spread the gospel.

“That kind of deep visitation and relationship is going to be necessary for the rest of my ministry here in Wyoming if I’m going to stay current with people’s needs and concerns.

“That’s the fun of the job. That’s what I like doing,” he said.