Anglican Church Radio broadcasts services, prayers, hymns in Inuktitut and English
The Anglican diocese of the Arctic has ramped up its airwave presence with the launch of a new radio channel broadcasting worship services, hymns and prayers in Inuktitut and English to listeners across Iqaluit and surrounding parts of Nunavut.
The first equipment check and test broadcast of 98.3 CIJC-FM Anglican Church Radio, broadcast from St. Jude’s Cathedral in Iqaluit, took place Sept. 9. A three-week period of official testing followed, as required by the federal government for any new radio channel to gauge potential interference with other broadcasts or air traffic.
The station’s current schedule consists of recorded material from Monday to Saturday, including daily prayers, hymns and Inuktitut gospel music in the morning, noon and evening. Broadcasts also include recordings of Bible readings in Inuktitut from the Canadian Bible Society.
On Sundays CIJC airs live broadcasts of the cathedral’s three morning services, two in Inuktitut and one in English. Parish priests the Rev. Ann Martha Keenainak, the Rev. Abraham Kublu and his wife the Rev. Samantha Kublu lead worship services at St. Jude’s.
The Rev. Chris Dow, former dean of St. Jude’s, initiated the radio channel project—inspired by Keenainak’s experiences using community radio for ministry in the hamlet of Pangnirtung after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“During COVID, we were restricted being able to attend church,” Keenainak recalls. After doing morning and evening services over the radio, she mentioned to Dow “how beneficial it would be here in Iqaluit, if we were able to get something going like that for elders that are not able to attend church services and for those that are at the hospital.”
Executive Archdeacon Alexander Pryor, drawing upon some of his experience in audio engineering, helped with technical setup of the station.
“FM radio is an important way of communicating in communities across the North, in part because the technology is really straightforward,” Pryor says. “Radio is also very important for the preservation of the Inuktitut language and regional dialects. With so much English content streaming in over [satellite internet service] Starlink, local community radio stations provide a reliable and accessible way for communities to produce and preserve their own content.”
He adds, “In many Arctic communities, FM radio became the go-to for churches during the lengthy COVID lockdowns, as the default option in many communities was for ministers to deliver their sermons over the local radio station since, even a few years ago, the internet speed and bandwidth wasn’t there for online streaming.”
St. Paul’s Bloor Street, an Anglican church in Toronto, also played a role in establishing CIJC. After Dow approached St. Paul’s, the church donated $20,000 to pay for equipment and set-up needed to establish the radio station.
The Rev. Benjamin Tshin, associate priest for outreach and worship at St. Paul’s, says the Toronto parish has “generally been a church that has been blessed financially” and agreed to support the Arctic radio station as an im-portant initiative.
“The generosity of our congregation to support others in Toronto, in Canada and around the world is an overflow of how deeply we have already been blessed,” Tshin says.
CIJC received a broadcast certificate from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission under an exemption that allows local low-power transmitters in churches broadcasting religious celebrations and ceremonies. It is not licensed as a community radio station, which would mean having hosts, radio shows or the ability to broadcast 24/7.
Pryor says with a 50-watt transmitter, the maximum allowed under the exemption, CIJC has been able to reach listeners in all of Iqaluit and the nearby community of Apex—both of which fall within a five-kilometre radius of St. Jude’s—according to initial tests. Thanks to radio waves skipping off the atmosphere, he says, the signal has also reached Pangnirtung, 300 km away.
St. Jude’s parish priests say their radio programming has been well received by local listeners.
“From the last service on Sunday, we finally saw new faces that came into the church since the broadcasting started,” Abraham Kublu said Sept. 25. “It’s very early to say there may be more people coming in, but it was a good sign that people are coming back to the church.” Keenainak describes it as a blessing to hear the Bible read in Inuktitut over the radio, particularly for listeners such as elders who may not be able to read anymore due to vision problems.
Pryor says the planned next step is the creation of a 24/7 online stream of Inuktitut-language programming accessible anywhere with an internet connection—keeping the same basic format while also featuring discipleship or catechetical programming from across the North.
To that end, he hopes the diocese will apply for a full 24/7 community radio broadcast license, allowing interested communities to apply for a low-watt local transmitter license to re-broadcast the signal with little cost or effort.
