Building-focused mission trip planned to repair Ulukhaktok church
The Rev. Whitney DeWare’s first mission trip to Ulukhaktok, N.W.T., drove home for her the sense felt by many Christians in the Western Arctic that the church has abandoned or forgotten about them, she says. But it also showed her the enthusiasm with which they responded when visiting clergy reached back out to them.
Currently priest-in-charge at Holy Trinity Church in Yellowknife, DeWare was still a deacon when she visited Ulukhaktok in July 2025 to help lead Caring for the Wounded Heart, a Bible-based trauma healing workshop facilitated by the Canadian Bible Society and the charity On Eagle’s Wings Ecumenical Ministries.
A small, fly-in hamlet on the west coast of Victoria Island in the Arctic Ocean, Ulukhaktok has an estimated population of 461, according to the Northwest Territories government. It formerly had three churches: Roman Catholic, Pentecostal and Anglican. Today only the Anglican church remains—and DeWare learned on her trip that it had not had a priest serving there in 15 years.
“When people found out that there was a clergyperson [in Ulukhaktok], there were some people who had that cartoon reaction of their jaw dropping,” she recalls. “They were so excited that somebody was here because they haven’t had a minister in so long.”
Residents asked DeWare to lead a worship service, which she called an “eye-opening” experience, “just hearing people’s hearts about the need and the desire to have ministry.” In October 2025 she returned and led a baptism service at the Church of the Resurrection, which was so full of parents seeking to baptize their children that organizers, who had expected 50 people, had to set up for 80 instead.
The diocese of the Arctic is now recruiting volunteers for a building-focused mission trip to Ulukhaktok in September 2026 to carry out badly needed repairs at the Church of the Resurrection and its mission house. The trip is part of a larger diocesan-led initiative, the Western Arctic Church Replanting Project.
Bishop Alexander Pryor, diocesan bishop of the Arctic, says the goal of the project is to focus on the western part of the diocese for the next couple of years, with diocesan leaders praying daily for communities and “looking for the opportunities that the Lord might provide for us to strengthen the local leaders who are there; to fix up the buildings that have been neglected; and to get into these communities and send in mission teams from across the diocese and beyond to go in and just to rebuild the congregations.”
Overcoming challenges in the region
The Western Arctic Church Replanting Project began in March 2025, Pryor says, when in the span of three days he received phone calls from three separate people who said the diocese should reopen the Church of the Ascension in Inuvik, N.W.T.
The Inuvik church had closed in December 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic due to high costs, debts and a lack of volunteers. After the congregation and vestry officially dissolved in 2023, the diocese held on to the building, paying its property tax and bills, and put out an ad for a church planter. In April 2025, the first service inside the church since COVID took place and by June lay leaders from the congregation had begun holding weekly services there again.
Reopening the church in Inuvik, Pryor says, helped inspire the diocesan project to revitalize other congregations in the Western Arctic.
“Churches in the western part of our diocese are very weak,” the bishop says. “A number of them have functionally shut down, where the only Anglican ministry really happening in some of these communities is funerals being done when an elder dies.”
A major challenge in the Western Arctic has been a shortage of clergy, and particularly Indigenous clergy, Pryor says. Lay leaders head congregations in many communities. The Eastern Arctic has always been stronger in terms of clergy, the bishop says—with the Arthur Turner Training School in Iqaluit, Nunavut having trained Inuit clergy there since the 1970s.
Another challenge has been burnout of lay leaders, many of whom are residential school survivors. Anglicans ran several residential schools in the Arctic, including All Saints School in Aklavik , N.W.T. During the government-led truth and reconciliation process concerning residential schools, many lay leaders found it difficult to continue as representatives of the Anglican Church of Canada in their communities, Pryor says. The result was a shortage of lay leaders.
But with communities gradually coming to terms with the revelations of the truth and reconciliation process, he adds, “there’s healing that has come now where people are able to look to the church once more and say, ‘It’s time to be part of the solution.’ And it’s something that we want to be involved in building back up in our community.”
Diocese fundraising for Ulukhaktok materials and transport
In the case of Ulukhaktok, the church is engaged in literal building. DeWare is leading the church’s mission to Ulukhaktok, which she calls the start of the broader Western Arctic Church Replanting Project.
The diocese of the Arctic serves 49 communities, DeWare says, but many have church buildings in disrepair, with local residents unable to do the regular work necessary to maintain them. In the case of Ulukhaktok, people who would otherwise be able to help carry out that work are out on the land during the brief construction season. They need that time for hunting and fishing to prepare their food for winter, which arrives earlier than in other parts of Canada.
Two lay leaders who organize the small worship services that occasionally take place in the Church of the Resurrection pointed to the need for repairs, DeWare says. The property includes an old church building which still stands but is full of mould; a newer church building that requires siding, roofs, new windows, floor work, and improved insulation; and a mission house vacant for more than a decade.
Due to limited accommodations, the September mission trip aims for a team of no more than 12 who will camp out in the church building and carry out repairs, including door and window replacements and installing foam insulation and new vinyl siding.
Obstacles include transportation and the cost of getting the mission team and their materials to Ulukhaktok. The only way to get materials there is on a barge that arrives in the community just once a year in late August—which means all cargo must be on board before June, when the barge sets out from the Hay River up through the Mackenzie River into the Arctic Ocean.
The cost of buying all the materials needed for repairs is $85,000. The diocese of the Arctic has launched a fundraising campaign to help cover the costs, which as of Feb. 5 had raised just over $7,235 towards a $16,000 goal, or 45 per cent.
Meanwhile, the building team will likely meet in Inuvik and take a charter plane to Ulukhaktok, which costs roughly $5,000 per person. The diocese is encouraging team members to work together with their local parishes or church groups to raise funds for their travel.
DeWare is planning further trips to Ulukhaktok in 2026 before the building-focused mission trip, in February and June, during which she hopes to help train local leaders to run worship services. She says the goal is to have a minister at the Church of the Resurrection, and in the meantime to have frequent visits for teaching and training to identify leaders who can run services, and to repair the church and mission house.
Pryor—who will travel to Ulukhaktok to participate in the repairs—says a prayer and ministry team that includes Inuit clergy from the Eastern Arctic is also going to Inuvik and Aklavik in February as part of the diocese’s focus on rebuilding congregations in the Western Arctic.
“It is so easy to close a church down … to say, ‘We don’t have the people, we don’t have the money, we don’t have the time, we don’t have the gifts to do ministry in this community’ … It’s so easy to call it quits and to close the church to sell the land,” Pryor says. But based on past experience selling church property, he adds, “once we let go of that inheritance, it’s really hard to get it back.”
“I think [the Western Arctic Church Replanting Project] is just a really interesting thing, an exciting thing, a challenging thing as we look at these churches that were functionally closed—no active vestry, no regular worship—and instead of saying, ‘Let’s sell it and see what we can get for the land,’ saying, ‘No, let’s say our prayers. Let’s see what the Lord is doing. Let’s see if we can reopen these churches and bring the gospel to a new generation that’s asking to hear it, who want to know who Jesus is.’
“I just find that so exciting. It’s also exhausting, and it’s a whole lot harder than selling the building and closing the churches would be. But I’m excited to be part of that work.”
