‍A Tale of Four Communities

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‍Over the course of a month, November to December 2025, I was based with the Anglican Church in Canada, Diocese of the Arctic. The aim of this time was to become involved with several communities and also the training offered to clergy and laity. How does a financially-strapped Diocese manage to enable mission and ministry in their challenging circumstances (49 parishes across 1.5 million square miles, most of which are not connected by road)? 

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‍This was a sabbatical project, not a holiday, so the follows is not a travelogue but a reflection on my time in Canada. The four communities were as follows: 

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‍Holy Trinity Church, Yellowknife and Diocesan Office

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‍The diocesan office is across the road from the Anglican church in Yellowknife (population of the town is around 28,000). I was able to stay in a bedroom in the basement, using their kitchen to cook my own meals. Most of those who work at the offices are either clergy or lay ministers at Holy Trinity. There was lots of laughter during the day despite all the hard work (many starting before daily morning prayer at 8.30am).

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‍During my first week I joined in the various activities at Holy Trinity. Attendance on Sunday looked to be around fifty-five people, including a number of children and teenagers who were involved in the service (crucifer and readers). Most were of European heritage, but there were a number of Canadian-Africans. Just a few were Inuit or First Nations.

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‍Morning prayer is held weekdays in the church, attended by the clergy and the lay ministers. At the moment, Holy Trinity is working through a paraphrase of the Bible entitled ‘The Story’. A Bible study based on the current chapter is offered at various times and age groups during the week, and the Sunday sermon is based on that chapter. I attended all the Bible studies at the church, including the one for the youth group. I’d say about a quarter of the members attended across the course of the four opportunities, and the discussions were very good.

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‍Catechism class is offered on Monday evenings. I attended twice. There were around eight people present, including three clergy and two children. The monthly ecumenical breakfast for ministers occurred in my first week, and it was good to meet those from other churches. The retired bishop and his wife took me to a Seniors’ Lunch, and I also went hospital visiting with one clergyperson. 

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‍Holy Trinity offers a free lunch on Tuesdays called ‘Bread of Life.’ I twice assisted with the preparations and serving. Around sixty people attended each time. Most were indigenous and some looked to be living rough. Yellowknife does offer shelter in the winter (temperatures dipped down to -38c overnight whilst I was there). The volunteers are drawn from a number of churches in the town. It was interesting that those being given such assistance were very different from the make-up of the Sunday congregation.

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‍My second Sunday featured the priesting of the minister at Holy Trinity. I was asked to chant the ‘Litany of Ordination’ and I was one of those who laid hands on her. Like many who serve in the diocese, she has come to ministry by serving in her local church, and her training has been through ATTS (see next section). Curacies (a time in which a trainee minister works under the supervision and guidance of a more experienced priest), as we would understand them in the Church of England, haven’t been possible in view of housing and money constraints. 

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‍I also went to the Vestry, church member representatives meeting, which reminded me very much of similar meetings in England. A desire to attract more young people, problems with the roof, the need for more volunteers, concerns about financial viability. All very familiar problems.

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‍Arthur Turner Training School (ATTS)

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‍Due to the remote nature of most of the parishes (and the expense of flights between them), a lot of training is delivered on-line. Twice a year in-person training is offered, in English one week, Inuktitut the other. I attended the former. Six students came, one of European heritage, the others Inuit. One, on the morning of his flight to Yellowknife, had hunted, gutted, and carved up a seal, placing the portions into a chest freezer, before travelling to the airport. He showed me the images on his iPhone. I told him, ‘The morning of my flight to Yellowknife, I checked that there was no milk left in the fridge and put out the trash!’ His family brought in raw frozen caribou meat in for his lunch one day.

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‍All of the students were housed locally, and we took it in turns to cook the meals and clean up afterwards. The week was dedicated to learning how to write and to deliver sermons, both the theology behind proclamation as well as breathing exercises. At various times the Inuit students struggled. For all of them, English is not their primary language. Their culture is an oral one, and they found it challenging to write down a sermon before delivering it. We also had interesting discussions about translating metaphors into their own context, for example ‘following a rabbit trail’ which they said would be better phrased as ‘following a wolverine trail’ or instead of talking about grape vines and branches we should refer to berry bushes. Their biblical knowledge was impressive. I was reminded how essential it is for the scriptures to be interpreted for people’s contexts. 

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‍Two of the students brought particular issues. One is addicted to gambling, which is a problem in many communities. Bingos and poker are popular, with huge prizes. Another lives with her partner rather than being married, which means she cannot be licensed as a lay minister. From what I was told, the indigenous culture didn’t have marriage ceremonies. Fathers would arrange for two young people to move in together and start a family. The idea of a ceremony (either church or civil) isn’t part of their cultural history.

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‍Most of the sessions were delivered by the recently ordained priest, some by Bishop Alexander. The material had been written by Bishop Alexander while he was still the Executive Archdeacon of the diocese. I felt the material was well laid out and presented, with plenty of space for discussion and practical exercises. The diocese hopes to appoint someone to take ATTS forward. 

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‍Fort Smith

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‍I accompanied Bishop Alexander for a two-night visit to this community, which totals 2,500 people. We attended various events, including choir and band practice in church (about a half dozen toddlers were brought along to the latter), a craft fair (I spent time speaking to the priest’s wife and other women there), and the Christmas parade. Six people were confirmed in the Sunday morning service, and another three had their first Communion.

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‍The congregation was mostly of European heritage, even though a large First Nations community lives nearby. The priest has an interesting background, Jewish man who converted to Christianity, is High Church, with his home full of Orthodox icons. He uses social media and offers ‘church merch’ as a method of mission. He had prepared Bibles, leather bookmarks, and leather key-fobs for each confirmand, bearing their name and confirmation dates. There was a feeling of celebration and excitement to the service. The church is growing in numbers and there was a good age range present. 

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‍                                                                    Kugluktuk

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‍For this two-night trip, I flew with Bishop Jared to the remote hamlet. The cost was £600 for the 90 minute flight, an example of the costs facing the diocese. In early December, there are only 2 ½ hours of light and snow covered the ground. 

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‍We stayed with the priest and his wife, both of whom originate from Zimbabwe. Although their English was excellent, I struggled to understand their accent from time to time. Most of the community have Inuinnaqtun as their first language, and I wondered how they managed with the priest’s English (he does not speak the native language). The Anglican church is the only one in the hamlet, as the Catholic Church shut down some years ago.

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‍On our first evening, the priest had invited anyone interested to attend an evening meeting in the church to meet the bishop. Two people turned up, both speaking openly about being burnt out from the years the church had been without a clergyperson. Average attendance is 15 on a Sunday, mostly indigenous. The orders of service are in both Inuinnaqtun and English.

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‍The next day we attended the Seniors’ Lunch. Bishop and priest went on to meet with someone recently widowed, and I visited the Co-Op store and the Heritage Centre. Although no alcohol is sold in the hamlet, people are allowed to bring it in, and sadly drugs are also used. Few people marry, and it’s not uncommon for a woman to have children by different men. 

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‍The days of the residential schools, in which children were removed from their parents and taught only in English, leaves a long shadow. Although some people did benefit from this, a lot of the children lost their native language and customs. They no longer know how to live off the land, and so are dependent on benefits from the government which they use to buy food (at high cost) from the two grocery stores in the hamlet.

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‍Eight families came in the evening for a baptism service, at which the bishop officiated. All of the attendees were indigenous. Although the church was warm, the service left me cold. The priest had told the families to bring their own candles (lit as part of the liturgy). From what I could see, he made little effort to make them feel welcome, in quite the contrast to what I’d seen at Fort Smith. Bishop Jared has been studying Inuinnaqtun, and he delivered the service in that and English. The hymns were sung unaccompanied in Inuinnaqtun. The best moment was when, after the candles had been lit, one of the lay ministers spontaneously led us in ‘This Little Light of Mine’. The congregation joined in quite enthusiastically. 

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‍Half of the 55 people present came up for Communion, and a good number also came back to the altar rail for prayer with Bishop Jared. Afterwards, we had a potluck supper (turkey and various pasta salads and soup, nothing exotic). The priest disappeared into the vestry area and made no attempt to talk to those present. 

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‍The next morning, Bishop Jared and I met with a parishioner, who gave her opinions on the church. She runs hunting trips, which are led by her son, usually for musk oxen. We snacked on dried musk ox during the visit, which tasted like very chewy beef.

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‍I have to admit that I was relieved once we were on the small plane (twenty-two passenger) back to Yellowknife. The whole time in Kugluktuk had depressed me. I wonder if the hamlet really needs someone from the indigenous population to be the minister there, although I recognise the difficulties in fulfilling such a brief. But I felt the cultural divide between an African and the Inuit was too large. 

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‍Overall thoughts

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‍As someone who is fascinated by different cultures, I most enjoyed the opportunities to hear from Inuit students during ATTS. I wondered about the emphasis on the written word for such an oral culture, although I recognise that the Church needs to have some standards in order to feel able to license people as ministers. In my own diocese, we are trying to support the many people coming forward for training who are dyslexic or have other neurodiversity diagnoses. They too struggle with reading and writing. I have been attending, and arranging, training events to enable people to better understand the neuro-diverse and my conversations with people from an oral culture has made me ponder the crossover on the issues. 

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‍I found it interesting to note the heritage of those who attended the four different communities. The preponderance of European background in Yellowknife and Fort Smith, versus Inuit in ATTS and Kugluktuk. The number of Inuit on the ATTS course is encouraging, as they should be culturally attuned to their communities. 

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‍Watching two very different priests (Fort Smith and Kugluktuk) brought home to me that a priest must love the people s/he serves. If s/he doesn’t care about or for them, I think all attempts at mission will fail. Cultural differences won’t help, but people will know if they’re not loved, with or without language barriers.

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‍The diocese put me in mind of the early church. Paul did his best to set up and encourage small Christian communities which were separated by great distances. The people leading those churches came up from the membership, and they wouldn’t have had much training or curacies. There would have been cultural differences across the communities, and the followers of ‘The Way’ were challenged to leave behind Roman practices. 

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‍In conclusion, one of the most spiritual moments I felt was when an Inuit student on ATTS talked about one of his seal hunts. He hadn’t managed a clean kill, and the seal had crawled away on the ice, leaving a trail of blood. He had found himself thinking of Jesus’ death on the cross, how bloody that would have been, how Christ sacrificed himself so we might live, even as the seal’s death would give life to many (not only his own family but the elders in the community, with whom hunters share their meat). There was a visceral reality to his life, far removed from the sanitised life I live (and the sanitised images we see of the crucifixion). He struggled with the way the course was taught, and the writing of a sermon, but he had an awareness from his own context which made me reflect on how I draw from and express my own faith. 

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