John Coburn, bishop, leading force in ordaining women

Having long advised aspiring clergy to work in neighborhoods and engage in ministry first-hand, he took his own advice that year and left Cambridge. At 53, and the father of four, he moved his family to New York City and spent a year teaching high school dropouts in Harlem.

“I did it,’’ he said, “to practice what I preach.’’

Bishop Coburn, who subsequently spent a decade leading the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and who was president of the denomination’s national House of Deputies when it voted to allow the ordination of women, died Saturday in Carleton-Willard Village, a continuing care center in Bedford, where he had lived for a dozen years. He was 94, and his health had failed in the past few weeks.

“He made lasting contributions to the wider church through his writings and his preaching, but particularly through his unparalleled and precedent-setting leadership as the president of the church’s General Convention House of Deputies during years when controversial issues of prayerbook revision and women’s ordination were being decided,’’ Bishop M. Thomas Shaw, leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “He would say of ministry: ‘You are never done. Christ’s ministry is never over.’ John’s was a ministry of grace, and he has done it.’’

Ministry was present even in childhood. Bishop Coburn’s father, the Rev. Aaron C. Coburn, founded the Wooster School in Danbury, Conn.

His father hoped he might succeed him as head of that school. Bishop Coburn was valedictorian of his class at the Wooster School and went to Princeton University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s in political science. But instead of returning to Wooster, he went to Turkey and spent three years teaching English and biology at Robert College in Istanbul.

While there, he met Ruth Alvord Barnum, the daughter of a colleague, and they married in 1941 after moving to New York City, where Bishop Coburn attended Union Theological Seminary. Graduating in 1942 with a bachelor’s of divinity, he served as assistant minister at Grace Church in New York, then as Navy chaplain aboard the USS Sheridan in the Pacific.

In 1946, he became rector of Grace Church in Amherst while serving as chaplain at Amherst College and coaching lacrosse at the school. Slender and athletic, he had competed in the sport years earlier at Princeton, along with playing on the 150-pound football team, for those not hefty enough for the varsity squad.

From Amherst, he moved to Newark, where he was dean of Episcopal Cathedral until being named the eighth dean of the theological school in Cambridge.

He was elected bishop of Massachusetts in 1975, but his consecration was put off a year so he could finish presiding over the denomination’s General Convention, which voted to allow women to be ordained as priests.

“To be in the House of Deputies when that vote was taken was a religious experience,’’ he told the Globe in 1976. “When they walked back to their hotels, they were in a subdued mood, as if they had just left a service of Holy Communion.’’

When Bishop Coburn was elected to lead the Massachusetts diocese, the Right Rev. Horace W.B. Donegan, retired bishop of New York, called him “a poet, a prophet, a preacher, a mystic.’’

“I think he always carried with him a sense of lightness of spirit that easily blended over into humor,’’ said Bishop Coburn’s son Thomas of Warren, R.I. “That also drew him into the hurt points of the world, both in individual lives - which is why I think he was so cherished as a counselor - but also on the social issues of the day.’’

Before accepting the call to Massachusetts, where he presided over a diocese of 189 churches, Bishop Coburn had twice turned down such opportunities elsewhere. Previously, he was offered the post of coadjutor, an assistant who automatically succeeds the bishop. The diocese of Washington, D.C., elected him coadjutor in 1958, and the diocese of Ohio did in 1965.

“He was consistently responsive to, ‘Where is God calling me?’ and ‘Where is God calling us?’ ’’ his son said.

One call he answered was to write. Bishop Coburn wrote about a dozen books, among them “Feeding Fire,’’ a collection of his poems, and “Prayer and Personal Religion,’’ which was published in the 1950s and reissued this year.

Bishop Coburn’s wife died in 2002, and an earlier family death prompted him, several years later, to write what may have been his most powerful book, and certainly the most personal.

In the mid-1950s, his wife was hospitalized and Bishop Coburn was home when he discovered their daughter, about a year and a half old, had died in her crib.

“That, and its aftermath, was really the turning point of his ministry,’’ his son said. “Up until then, he’d been a fine pastor and leader, both intellectually and spiritually, but afterward, there was a softness and a compassion that emerged in his being and in his writing.’’

Several years later, he wrote “Anne and the Sand Dobbies,’’ about a family and the death of a child. With this children’s book, which he said was not specifically autobiographical, Bishop Coburn said he reached deep into the reality of love and loss.

“Life is too short to give people just stuff,’’ he told the Globe in 1964. “I am persuaded that if the Christian faith does not deal with basic questions that ordinary people have, then ordinary Christians will not be helped.’’

In addition to his son, Bishop Coburn leaves two daughters, Judith Coburn Klein of Truro and Sarah Coburn Borgeson of Sherborn; another son, Michael of Providence; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. tomorrow in St. Anne’s-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Lincoln. A service of thanksgiving will be held at 3 p.m. on Oct. 3 in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston.