An organ scholar who likes to hunt grouse and ptarmigan, study systematic theology, and fish has been consecrated as the seventh Bishop of the Arctic.
Executive Archdeacon Alexander Pryor was elected on the sixth ballot during a synod held May 8-16 outside the diocesan boundaries, in Edmonton, Alberta.
Food and accommodations are so prohibitively expensive in the north that it was cheaper for the 71 voting delegates and 74 staff, observers, and presenters (including 20 children of delegates) to fly south from the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and northern Quebec for the eight-day synod. Even in May, some delegates’ flights were hampered by blizzards.
Pryor succeeds David Parsons, who served as diocesan bishop for 12 years. Three suffragans will assist Pryor: newly consecrated bishops Ann Martha Keenainak and Jared Osborn, as well as Annie Ittoshat, who was elected suffragan in 2019.
“I believe the diocese has undervalued and underused the role of the suffragan bishop,” Pryor said. He would rather have the diocesan focus on administration and have the suffragans “overseeing and directing on-the-ground ministry in the various communities and cultures within our diocese.”
Pryor, his wife, Kristina, and their four children live in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, where the diocesan offices are located, while St. Jude’s Cathedral is on the other side of the vast diocese in Iqaluit on Baffin Island.
The new bishop can drive to the five parishes around Yellowknife, but the other 44 are all fly-in communities. All the Arctic airports have gravel runways and are often fogbound during November, February, and March. In winter some clergy travel short distances by skidoo on well-worn trails.
Pryor was born in Sibley’s Cove, Newfoundland. His father was a fisherman and his mother a fish-plant worker, but when the cod fishery closed, “our family struggled with the alcoholism and poverty that was very common to so many.” The family relocated to St. John’s, where his father started working on offshore oil rigs. His deeply faithful grandmother lived with them. “She taught me to pray and trust God, even when experiencing the hard ups and downs of life. She fully trusted Jesus.”
Pryor also was blessed with faithful pastors “who invested in me.” At 9 he filled in for a sick organist by playing the organ with hymns he knew on the piano. The church then offered to pay for his music books and lessons, and by 12, he was hired as the assistant organist. The minister, Leonard Whitten, who later became a bishop, taught him how to choose hymns based on the collects, lessons, and church year.
By 16 he wanted to be a classical organ scholar, but the priest encouraged him to also attend an early service without music so he could worship and not just focus on the organ. As an acolyte, he quickly learned to love serving at the altar. By 17, with his driver’s license, he went straight after school to play music at nursing-home services. And his minister prepared him to preach his first sermon.
At Memorial University of Newfoundland, he earned his Bachelor of Music and then a second B.A. in music education.
“In university, I really struggled because I wanted to be a professional musician, but I knew that God was calling me to full-time ministry. A shoulder injury that made playing music painful led to a time of me being angry at God. But, like many other times since, I’ve learned that, after God makes his will known by prayer and in signs around me and in the words of other faithful people, it is always better to say ‘Lord, I am willing, if this is your will.’”
In 2013 Pryor was ordained a deacon and in 2015 a priest while in the Anglican Network in Canada, which is a founding member of the Anglican Church of North America. For five years (2014-19) he was director of music and worship at Nashotah House Seminary in Wisconsin, and while there his shoulder miraculously healed.
He left ACNA in 2016 because of jurisdictional complications and became part of the Diocese of Calgary under Bishop Gegg Kerr-Wilson. It was from Nashotah House that he was recruited to serve in the Arctic.
For three years, beginning in 2019, he was rector of St John’s in Fort Smith, NWT. In 2022 he became executive archdeacon of the Arctic, which involved travelling seven to 12 days each month.
He has served as a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada for nine years, but three days before synod opened, questions arose on whether he could stand as an episcopal candidate since he had once been a member of the ACNA. It was ruled that he could.
Now as bishop, Pryor has to fill several positions, including executive archdeacon, and director of the Arthur Turner Training School. (He served as interim director of the school after Bishop Joey Royal resigned last year.)
As archdeacon, Pryor has been responsible for much of the financial restructuring of the diocese. Eventually he wants to see the diocese become fully self-supporting. In the 1970s there were clergy in every community, and the Council of the North provided what would be, in today’s dollars, $18.6 million. Now the diocese receives less than half a million in grants, and some of the parishes are without clergy.
The Arctic was first a mission of the Church of England’s Bible Churchmen Missionary Society (now Crosslinks). Today, many non-Inuit clergy from the south, when faced with the Arctic’s harsh climate and remote locale, leave after five years. Pryor hopes to ordain more Inuit clergy who will be familiar with the various cultures, dialects and conditions of the north.
None of the 49 parishes are independently incorporated; they are all part of the diocese. Many inherited from the federal government large pieces of land in the late 1950s and 1960s, when the Distant Early Warning line of radar stations was being built. Mission houses and churches were built on these properties, but many of the original buildings are now falling into disrepair, while the value of the land has only increased. There is a massive need for housing in the north. (One retired cathedral dean was couch-surfing for a time.) There are also massive costs involved in heating buildings.
The synod passed a canon to allow the creation of the Arctic Anglican Development Corporation.
Pryor would like to see new multipurpose buildings, which might have a church hall doubling as a community hall, used also for daycare and after-school programs, plus offices, including one for visiting nurses. On the second and third floors there could be affordable housing, with one unit set aside for clergy. All spaces would be heated by the same furnace. “Such structures would have a positive impact on our communities,” he said. After-tax income would be given to the diocese.
Pryor is also excited about a flexible distance-ed program that he and Royal designed for the Arthur Turner Training School. It is an apprenticeship-type program of modules in both English and Inuktitut that can take as little as two and a half years to complete, or longer for part-time students.
The school year runs from mid-October, after the fall Cariboo hunt in the west and the seal hunt in the east, and ends in mid-May before the goose hunt in the western Arctic. Students study at home, but meet for a full week together twice a year. There are now about 40 students enrolled. Last fall, six deacons graduated, along with eight newly licensed lay leaders.
This fall, Pryor is enrolling in a course to learn to speak Inuktitut. Not much of it is spoken in Yellowknife. When he visits Inuit communities, he always has an interpreter, but he would like to have conversations with the elders in their native tongue.
While the Arctic generally has more people in the pews than most southern dioceses, the eastern Arctic is much stronger than its western counterpart. “There has been absolutely enormous growth in northern Quebec. We need to re-evangelize and re-church-plant the west,” Pryor said. He would like to see eastern worship leaders visit and encourage the western parishes.
The mission statement of the diocese is twofold: “To proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ and to enable all Christians for ministry.” In his charge to the synod after he was consecrated, Pryor urged that “we test everything we do, every program we run, through the lens of that statement.”
Like his predecessor, Pryor believes in a prophecy that Anglicans across the north have talked about for years, that through the Arctic, God will revive the church in the south.
The Arctic has always been a theologically conservative diocese, so while many southern dioceses are blessing same-sex marriages and authorizing gender-transition liturgies, Pryor plans to stick with what he calls “biblical anthropology.”
“Life in the north is very raw, very hard. Young men 18 to 25, who have finished high school but have no clear answers for what lies ahead, form the largest group of suicides. In our clergy messenger group, there is a suicide mentioned every week. Parents lose children in tent fires; a son is eaten by a bear. Men go out fishing or hunting and never come back. There are no funeral homes in the north, no morticians, except in Yellowknife and Iqaluit. The church people prepare the bodies. There are often no social workers. We are it. We need Jesus. There is no one else.”
But it is not all doom and gloom. “There is also great joy and blessing and great warmth. The Arctic reminds me of Newfoundland communities. In small towns you can’t be anonymous; everybody knows everybody, and everybody mourns and celebrates together.”
And celebrate the synod did. Despite being held in the south, the consecration service concluded with a feast of arctic char and beluga whale meat.
“We will be clear where we stand on biblical anthropology, but we want to refocus on the work we’ve been called to do: the cure of souls, the making of disciples in the north,” Pryor said. “Remember, the Lord is playing the long game. We need to be in for the long haul of rebuilding churches and communities for the next 40 or 50 years. We won’t shy away from those [sexuality] issues, but we don’t want to be distracted by them, either. We have young people coming forward to be on vestries; they see their grandfathers aging and they are willing to take their place. We have young people, new believers, coming into church asking to be discipled. We need to invest in this window of opportunity and rethink our priorities.
“I am learning to be bold. The Arctic Inuit have been very faithful and very quiet as churches; now there is an urgent need to pass on the faith to the next generation. We must be bold in our humility.”
Sue Careless is senior editor of The Anglican Planet and author of the series Discovering the Book of Common Prayer: A Hands-On Approach. She is based in Toronto.
