This article was updated with new content May 28.
The diocese of the Arctic has elected and consecrated three new bishops at its diocesan synod, running May 8 to 15 in Edmonton. Former Executive Archdeacon Alexander Pryor has been consecrated as the new diocesan bishop. Assisting him as suffragans will be bishops Anne Martha Keenainak and Jared Osborn. The three will succeed former Diocesan Bishop David Parsons and suffragan bishops Joey Royal and Lucy Nester, all of whom retired in 2024.
As the new diocesan bishop, Pryor says he plans to focus on raising up local leaders and empowering each parish across the Arctic diocese’s massive coverage area to grow into its own unique form of worship. Communities across the diocese are so widespread that they are often very different from one another in culture, context and composition, he says.
“The worship has to be what fits in that community so that they’re expressing their joy and their gratitude and their pain and everything to the Lord in a way that matches their voice,” he says. He has visited some communities where women still wear veils on their heads in services and others where parishioners have been singing their own translations of Anglican chants in Inuktitut for decades, not knowing where they came from. In continuing the program of lay leadership and clergy development the diocese has been building for the past few years, he says, he hopes to emphasize that there is no one expression or format that must be used in all communities, but that leaders should seek out God’s guidance to steer them.
Pryor was born in Newfoundland and grew up in a fishing family, according to a bio he wrote for his personal website. He trained to play the organ from an early age and earned his bachelor of music degree in the instrument at Memorial University of Newfoundland with a second degree in classroom, choral and instrumental music. He later switched to seminary at Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin in 2011, earning an M.Div there and becoming ordained in 2014. He has held a host of organist, choir leader and other musical positions in churches; beginning at age 11, he served at Nashotah House as director of residential life and director of music and worship. Pryor first served as a priest in the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC), a group of Anglican congregations which broke away from the Anglican Church of Canada in the late 2000s over same-sex marriage. He says he happened to be a member of an ANiC congregation at the time he felt called to ministry in his undergraduate studies, but a few years later, he believes God called him back to the denomination in which he was originally baptized.
As a priest he has served as rector of St. John’s Anglican Church, Fort Smith, N.W.T. and more recently as executive archdeacon for the diocese of the Arctic. As archdeacon, he has been responsible for much of the financial restructuring the diocese has undertaken over the past couple of years, he said in an interview with the Anglican Journal. He added that the diocese is on a path to greater financial independence from the rest of the church. He also worked with Royal on the training model to be used by the Arthur Turner Training School (ATTS), the Arctic’s theological school for both lay people and clergy, of which he has also served as interim director since Royal’s departure, he says.
Keenainak is Inuit, born in Pangnirtung, Nvt. Among other careers, she trained and served as an officer of the RCMP from 2002 to 2015. In 2016 she began attending ATTS where, according to a bio she submitted during her consideration for the role of bishop, she originally planned to simply deepen her faith and get to know God better. She said no to all questions about getting ordained until a spiritual experience during a class trip to Jerusalem changed her mind. While listening to the gospel of Matthew read aloud in Gethsemane, she says, she was struck by Jesus’ willingness to share God’s love even knowing what it would cost him. She made the decision then to follow that path herself, her bio states. She has since served as priest in charge in the parishes of St. James, Salluit; St. Stephen’s, Kuujjuaq; and St. Luke’s, Pangnirtung, as well as an administrator and instructor at ATTS and an assistant priest at St. Jude’s Cathedral, Iqaluit. She will be serving the northernmost areas of the diocese, says Archbishop Greg Kerr-Wilson, metropolitan of the ecclesiastical province of Northern Lights, which includes the diocese of the Arctic. He says he does not know Keenainak very well personally, but has run into her in several different parts of the province and had numerous parishioners approach him in even more regions to ask if he had met her—a fact which he says speaks to how widely across the diocese she’s traveled and to the quick rapport she’s been able to build with those she serves. As this article was being written, Keenainak had not responded to the Anglican Journal’s request for an interview.
Osborn told the Anglican Journal he was pleased with the immediacy of the connection and consensus between himself, Pryor and Keenainak on the need to foster local leadership and build up the independence of Arctic parishes. A great deal of responsibility falls on the shoulders of Anglican clergy there, he says, as they often have no one else to turn to when someone brings them a problem. “One of the things that’s often taught in seminary is people can come to you for help, but you have to recognise when you need to refer them to a professional,” he says. But in remote northern communities, there are limited resources to refer these people to. His home, Rankin Inlet, has mental health nurses who can help residents to some degree, but they are often temporary workers, he says, meaning locals may need to explain their whole history over again every few months—meaning, in turn, that there’s no one to walk with them in the long term. As a result, he says, northern clergy need training in how to do what they can to help while also being aware of the limits of what they can handle alone. Sometimes the act of simply being present is a comfort to people, he adds—“just to be there for the long haul and be able to say, ‘I may not know how to help you today, but I’m going to do my best to stick with it and see what we can figure out.’”
Having lived in Nunavut for 10 years, where he serves as chaplain to Rankin Inlet’s volunteer fire department, Osborn says his neighbours are just now starting to think of him as a permanent fixture, not a newbie who’ll be moving away again.
Obsborn writes in his bio that he grew up in the state of Maryland, received his B.Sc. from Cedarville University and worked as a software engineer at Johns Hopkins University until he enrolled in the Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania in 2010 to earn his M.Div. Immediately after finishing his studies, he served the school as IT manager. He says he had always felt God was calling him on an adventure to serve him in another part of the world, and he believed he was being led to serve in the diocese of the Arctic. There, he worked as a deacon and assistant priest at St. Jude’s Cathedral, Iqaluit and priest in charge at Holy Comforter in Rankin Inlet, Nvt. Like Keenainak and Pryor, he has been an instructor at ATTS. Osborn has also served as regional dean for the Kivalliq region and on the executive committee for the province of the Northern Lights. Kerr-Wilson says Osborn will be covering the central region of the diocese, where Rankin Inlet is located. He says he is impressed at the way Osborn, as someone not native to the North, has made himself and his family at home there—working quickly to familiarize himself with Inuktitut, for example.
Kerr-Wilson echoes Pryor and Osborn’s wish to see more new leaders raised up in the North. He says there is a need both because the Arctic needs local leaders who can serve from a position of familiarity and because it has often been difficult to source clergy for the remote region. One common strategy has been to recruit clergy from southern Canada or from other countries where, Kerr-Wilson jokes, they are less likely to know either how tough it is to live and work in northern Canada or the high cost of living there.
“The real solution is to be able to train and raise up local people who know the people, who know the culture, know the land,” he says. “Very often the clergy, they are the local social services … They are it. Something goes wrong, there’s a suicide, whatever it might be, and the local clergy person gets a call.” That means many northern church leaders, both lay and clergy, are on call all the time, making it an incredibly demanding job which is frequently unpaid, he says. He has never heard one of them complain, he adds, but the difficulty of the role highlights the need for strong preparation and comprehensive training.
