St. Mark's Anglican Church, Barriefield

The Arthur Turner Training School (ATTS) is named after Arthur Turner, an Anglican priest and missionary, who served the Baffin Island community of Pangnirtung from 1928 until his death in 1953. The school exists to train ministers within the Diocese of the Artic, one of the largest dioceses in the world covering Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavik. Arctic ministry is demanding. It is multi-cultural and multi-lingual. It involves ministering to people dealing with grief and struggles. It involves living in remote places with extreme weather conditions, working across vast distances, with many unpredictable factors.

ATTS initially opened in Pangnirtung in 1970. It was housed in a group of buildings that had previously been home to St. Luke’s Anglican Hospital. For more than 35 years, the school trained Anglican clergy and lay people at that location, for ministry in the North. But with each passing year, the harsh Arctic climate took its toll on the buildings, and they were eventually rendered unusable. The timing was not good. Three hundred kilometres to the south, in Iqaluit - the central hub for the eastern part of the diocese - another problem had surfaced. St. Jude’s Cathedral had burned down in 2005, leaving the diocese with no resources to relocate the school. The last full-time class in Pangnirtung graduated from ATTS in 2007. It is estimated that 50 students passed through its programs during that period, including three future bishops.

Once work on a new cathedral was finished in 2012, ATTS again became a major priority of the diocese. Rev. Joey Royal, who at that time was the rector of Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Yellowknife, NWT, was part of the diocesan education committee that looked into reopening the school. He said finding money was a serious challenge. “In the North, everything is expensive, the costs are extremely high, and we have limited resources,” he said.

In 2014, a grant of about $50,000 from the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement gave the project the stimulus it needed to get started.

It was in late 2015 that St. Mark’s became aware of this ministry, and the plans to re-open the training school, through Evelyn Bowering. Her sister, Sylvia, lived in Yellowknife, NWT, and was also good friends with Rev. Royal and his wife, Jennifer. St. Mark’s support of ATTS commenced in the Spring of 2016 with a special “yellow envelope” fundraising campaign. That year, $2K was donated to ATTS, through the Diocese of the Artic, and to-date St. Mark’s has donated a total of $5,880 to this mission.

ATTS re-opened in Iqaluit in 2016 and Rev. Royal became the Director of the school and is its primary teacher. (The incoming class of ATTS students, with their director, is shown in the picture above). This first class graduated in 2018.

The ATTS curriculum, like all ministry schools, is a mix of theology, study of the Bible, and the Anglican tradition. But the ATTS program is also specifically tailored to the needs of the diocese’s predominantly Indigenous members. Courses are taught bilingually in English and Inuktitut, emphasizing Indigenous approaches to Scripture and theology.

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