The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
Ken devoted his life to the ministry
Tributes have been paid to Aberdeen Anglican minister of almost 50 years, the Rev Kenneth Gordon, who has died age 85.
Active in the ministry until earlier this year, he saw his death not as an occasion for sadness, but as his “graduation to be with Jesus”.
Born in Edinburgh on December 27 1935, Kenneth Gordon was the only child of Alfred and Alexanderina Gordon.
A stockbroker’s clerk from the city’s Corstorphine district, his father died when Ken was just 15.
Mrs Gordon, formerly Alexanderina Pittendrich, worked as a bakery assistant, bringing home unsold cakes at the end of the day. And it was with his mother that he first encountered Christian ministry, accompanying her to St Thomas’s Edinburgh, an Episcopalian church.
Ken attended George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh due to a bursary awarded after the death of his father.
A love of academic study would soon develop, leading to a place at the University of Edinburgh before moving on again, this time to Trinity College Bristol, for theological training.
He later achieved a master’s degree.
Although brought up in a church-going family, it would be as a teenager that Ken would feel a call to pursue the things of God more seriously.
Phil Gordon, Ken’s son, explained: “He was really influenced by the rector at St Thomas’s who he’d talk to and listen to.”
On completion of his training in 1960, Ken moved to St Helens in Lancashire, as curate of both St Helen’s Church and St Andrew’s Church.
But it would be on a weekend in the Lake District when a new love would enter his life in the form of trainee teacher, Edith Newing, better known as Jessica.
After a year of courting the couple married on April 4 1964 in St Andrew’s Parish Church, St Helens.
In 1971, Scotland beckoned. Ken became rector of St Devenick’s Church, Bieldside, Aberdeen.
Ken and Jessica would give their lives to the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney, serving within St Devenick’s for 30 years, and later at Westhill Community Church.