After the evening ordination service, Bishop Alexander Pryor graciously made time for a few questions from Perspective.

When asked about the size of the Diocese of the Arctic, he opened up a folded road map of Canada. Dotted across the Arctic from the Yukon-Northwest Territory border all the way east to the border of Northern Quebec and Labrador and north almost to the edge of the map were marked 49 communities scattered through the vast territory.

“Everything is so much more expensive in the north than it is in the south. Travel is infinitely more difficult. Going for a confirmation is normally a four-or-five-day trek, and if you hit a blizzard, it becomes a week…. These are all fly-in communities, so it’s a lot of time spent in airplanes…Many of these communities just have one flight a day. Some will have one flight every other day.

So that’s what brought you all to Ottawa?

It’s often easier and certainly much cheaper for us to meet anywhere in the South, really. We did our Synod last year in Edmonton, and that was wonderful, and half of the cost that it would have been. I mean, our diocesan Synod cost us almost half a million dollars. That’s what it costs to do Synod. And that’s doing it in the South and staying at a monastery. Had we done it within the boundaries of our own diocese, it would be at least three quarters of a million dollars if not more.

Can you meet online sometimes?

On the older Internet technology, you really couldn’t have a stable video call work, but now since Starlink has spread out across the North, we’re able to do a whole lot by Zoom. There are real limitations though, especially when you’re working across languages and dialects and just with the different styles of storytelling, depending on people’s cultures. Zoom works very well for a very linear sort of business meeting, but when we need to discuss and go back and forth and reach consensus and really check in to see if what’s being communicated and what’s being interpreted is what’s being understood, that doesn’t happen as well. Many times, we’re using interpreters.

That’s why meeting together like this and being able to read the room and take the breaks when we need to and stretch our legs and sing a hymn and do what we need to do to make sure that we’re all moving forward in the same direction and hearing each other. … We’ve never done something like this before, where we’ve gathered for three intense days. Our diocesan synods are usually a week to 10 days long, because we only do it once every three years….

Is the Church growing in the Arctic?

Yes, though not everywhere. We have some communities that are struggling as many churches in the south are, but we are seeing a new generation coming into leadership. It’s really a fascinating … sort of thing, where they have elders in their late 70s and 80s who have been running churches, hoping that their children would step up and be called to take those places. They’ve been praying faithfully, and now they’re seeing their grandchildren called into leadership, which is just really, really cool.

There’s one community that I visited earlier this spring where after years of the elders praying that the next generation would step up, now they have a group of people in their 20s, who said, ‘We want to be on the vestry. And they voted in a vestry where the average age is under 30. And they called and said, somebody come and train us what it means to run a church. It is just so exciting to have young people who are on fire for the Lord.”

In many ways, we’re running to keep up with what the Lord is doing, which is just a lot of fun. We recently replanted the church in Inuvik. It had been closed for five years. It was one of our parishes that didn’t survive COVID. They had their last service in December of 2020 and then locked the doors and the church closed down after years of the sort of decline that is typical in many churches. Thanks be to God, we were able to hold on to that building. There was no pressure to sell it.

After five years of being closed and people praying, ‘Do we need a church in our community?’ In the span of one week, there were three phone calls from different people who hadn’t been speaking to each other from different parts of the country saying, ‘I think the Lord wants the church reopened in Inuvik…’[including a woman who had previously worked with another organization doing youth ministry in Arviat and in Rankin Inlet.

She was considering giving up her job down south and going full-time into youth ministry in the North and had been praying about it. She came across an article Bishop Pryor had written saying we’ve closed the church down but we’re praying for a church planter to come and till the soil.]

So, I called my wife and said, Christine, I’m buying a ticket to Inuvik to see what the Lord is doing and flew up the next day …. The church had been closed and freezing and thawing for five years, and the power and heat were turned off.  But by the grace of God, we managed with a little bit of help from someone at the power corporation … to get the power reconnected for the weekend. And with some help from those in the community reopened the church on Saturday to have a meeting and just talk about what we wanted to do. We had a service that Sunday, and 45 people showed up. At the end of that service, they said, ‘This was great. What happens next week?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. That’s up to you.’ They said, ‘Well, we want to have church. … And they’ve had church every Sunday since that Sunday 13 months ago.”

They’ve got four or five now who take turns preaching and who take turns leading the service. And that woman who called, saying she was interested, I installed her in February as a full -time minister, lay minister, in charge of church planting that congregation in that place. … Just amazing stuff going on.”

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