William White was born in 1748 in Philadelphia, the chief city of the Province of Pennsylvania, and was ordained in England, as every colonial Anglican had to be, for there was no bishop in all of America. He came home to serve the united parishes of Christ Church and Saint Peter's, the most prominent Anglican congregation in the colonies, and then the Revolution broke over the church like a flood. To be a Church of England clergyman in a country at war with England looked like treason; most of the clergy were loyalists who closed their churches and sailed for home or for Canada, and the church they left behind, with no bishop, no clear future, and a name that sounded like the enemy's, seemed likely to die. White did not leave. A patriot who served as chaplain to the Continental Congress, he stayed in Philadelphia and kept the doors open. He wrote, with characteristic plainness, that for part of the war "there was a part of that time, in which there was, through its whole extent, but one resident minister of the church in question, he who records the fact." He was that one minister, the only resident Episcopal clergyman in the whole state.

When the fighting ended, he saw what others could not yet imagine: that the church need not wait helplessly for bishops it might never get. In 1782 he published a small pamphlet, The Case of the Episcopal Churches in the United States Considered, proposing that the congregations organize themselves under a voluntary constitution, clergy and laity together, and seek the episcopal succession "as soon as conveniently may be; but in the mean time to carry the plan into effect." It was a daring and humble document at once, episcopal in conviction and republican in form, and it became the blueprint for the church that followed. In 1787 White himself was consecrated a bishop at Lambeth Palace in London, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, alongside Samuel Provoost of New York, securing the English line of succession for the American church.

Then came the long, quiet work of building. At the General Convention of 1789 White presided as the congregations of New England and the middle and southern states, who had been pulling in different directions, were drawn into a single body with one constitution and one Prayer Book. For nearly fifty years he served as Bishop of Pennsylvania and, for most of that time, as Presiding Bishop, and his great gift was not eloquence but steadiness. His biographer Bird Wilson wrote that in him "moderation and firmness harmonized in an unusual degree." He stayed in Philadelphia through the yellow-fever epidemics when others fled, ministering to the dying. He ordained a whole generation of priests. He held a fractured church together by patience and fairness until it was strong enough to stand.

He died in 1836, in his eighty-eighth year, still in office. The church he had found in ruins he left established and whole, a true part of the worldwide Anglican communion. He had built no monument to himself, only a church, and that is the kind of founder he was: the man who stays, who reconciles, who does the unglamorous work of holding the body together, and lets the glory go to God.