“I am a bishop, and I am called to warn people.” Once David Parsons exited Arctic post, the knives came out.
- Charles Perez
- 6 days ago
- 17 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
By Julia Duin
November 16, 2025
He was the bishop who disappeared.
In the world’s largest Anglican diocese — at least in terms of land area — retiring bishops have typically been present when their successor is chosen. Sometimes they pass on their crozier to the next man in line. Other times they pray, advise and bless the next shepherd of the massive 1.5-million-square-mile diocese.
But David Parsons, the larger-than-life personality who had shepherded the 34,171-member Diocese of the Arctic since 2012, was missing when the electoral synod met in Edmonton last May.
I was told that Parsons had already retired, so he should not expect to be invited. And so, there was not a word said in acknowledgement to a man who had labored 36 years on the diocese’s behalf, not only in icy Nunavut but in the theologically frozen precincts of the Canadian House of Bishops.
Which amazed me, as I’d spent a week with the man the previous fall, tromping about Nunavik, Quebec’s remote northern half, researching my profile on Parsons that ran last April in Religion News Service. His Quebec trip was his last pastoral journey before retirement. Considering how revered Parsons was among Anglicans worldwide for standing up to liberal Canadian bishops and even his own presiding bishop regarding biblical matters, I assumed the man would get a better sendoff.
I assumed wrong.
I had never met David Parsons — although I’d interviewed him during my time at Newsweek — until I met him for steak and fries the night before we flew out of Montreal. Our route was taking us along the eastern shore of Hudson Bay to villages like Inukjuak (near some of the oldest rocks on Earth), Puvirnituq and Ivujivic, a beauty of a spot on a fjord where polar bears wandered.
He had just turned 70, the mandatory retirement age in the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC). This was his farewell tour after 12 years at the helm of the Diocese of the Arctic, plus another 24 years as missionary, then priest. The diocese takes up the northern third of the country and requires four bishops (one main, three assisting) to oversee. Nunavik, at the far eastern end, has 14 communities; nearly one-third of the diocese’s 49 congregations.
“Sometimes a person gets tired of talking the church into being the church,” he was telling me over dinner. He was fretting about what he saw as a fixation on social issues such as same-sex unions or trans rights in dioceses in “the South” (major metros like Toronto and Vancouver) while his parishioners were either drinking themselves to death, committing high rates of domestic abuse or racking up some of the world’s highest suicide rates.
At the same time, these Inuit were believers in miracles and prophecies; their churches were filled with youth and the only ones in Canada that seemed to be growing.
“The South doesn’t want to support us because we’re too biblical,” he mused. “We believe Jesus is Lord, we’re not interfaith and we don't have the intelligence to run things on our own without the Holy Spirit.”
Parsons, an imposing 6-foot-1-inch man with a thatch of white hair and full beard, attracted a crowd wherever he was. The next day, while I was sitting exhausted in the Kuujjuaraapik airport lounge on a layover, Parsons was chatting it up with waiting passengers who spotted his purple clerical shirt and pectoral cross.
As we stayed at the local hostels and puddle-jumped on Inuit Air, one thing kept on leaping out at me: How after 36 years of ministry in the Arctic as a priest and bishop, Parsons was an institution that would not be easily replaced. He was famous around the Anglican Communion In as a modern-day Ireneus fighting against heresies.
“Bishop David has a prophetic bent and has brought biblical encouragement and at points admonition to southern leaders,” wrote one of my Canadian clergy sources. “The southern Canadian Anglican Church has seen a strong drift away from biblical orthodoxy (which) has resulted in a rift where Bishop Parsons has been asked not to attend the Canadian Anglican House of Bishops… at least for now! He’s my kind of guy!!”
Surely, I thought, this man will have a major farewell send-off next May when his successor is elected.
Instead, the opposite happened.
His last day on the job was Dec. 31. Starting Jan. 1, 2025, there appeared to be total amnesia in the diocese as to his existence. There was no mention of him on diocesan social media. When my 1,400-word profile on Parsons was published April 2, it was ignored. Alexander Pryor, the archdeacon who was basically running the diocese, didn’t acknowledge my emails informing him of the piece.
On the eve of the election synod five weeks later in Edmonton, I texted one of the diocesan Facebook administrators asking what was up.
Bishop David was very faithful and zealous in his ministry in this diocese, but was also divisive in some areas and made some people react quite defensively, the anonymous writer wrote. He was very faithful, and many people love him dearly, but there are many others across the diocese who had a different experience altogether.
This was odd, as everyone I’d encountered in my short week in Quebec had all but mobbed Bishop Parsons, asking for prayer and counsel.
It is not accidental that the Executive Committee decided to let the bishop seat go vacant for a time so that there could be some space for listening and the healing of relationships, my source continued. He’s also absent from this election.
The message went on to say that my article hadn’t gone over well with diocesan leaders. They felt that some of the challenges I laid out in my RNS piece (recruiting, training and retaining clergy and managing aging parish buildings) were more the fault of the bishop than the harsh climate.
Not saying that’s always a fair assessment, but fair enough that he won’t be present to pass the pastoral staff to his successor.
So much for years of nearly non-stop travel as bishop in one of the toughest ecclesiastical climates in the world. There was no farewell dinner, no toast to his health, no gift for the wife, nothing other than a three-sentence paragraph posted May 15 on the diocesan Facebook page and a half-sentence in the diocesan newspaper.
Meanwhile, Parsons, his wife, Rita, and longtime friends Geoffrey and Rosalind Dixon were 2,800 miles away watching the live feed in New Brunswick. Although the bishop had told me beforehand that he had chosen to enjoy his retirement at home instead of going to the election. I quickly texted him and demanded to know the truth.
He said he did not wish to discuss it.
I emailed the provincial, the Most Rev. Greg Kerr-Wilson of the Province of the Northern Lights, asking why he hadn’t insisted that Parsons be present. The archbishop replied that retired bishops typically don’t attend these gatherings and former bishops presenting their crozier to their successor was not part of the authorized consecration service.
I emailed other contacts, most of whom refused to talk or said very little. His suffragan, Bishop Annie Ittoshat, refused to answer multiple emails. A former suffragan, Joey Royal, answered a few questions, then went silent.
A prophet, they say, has no honor in his own country.
The youngest bishops
On May 9, Pryor, 37, was elected the seventh bishop of the Arctic.
This made the archdeacon and Jared Osborn, 39, a priest out of Rankin Inlet who was elected one of two new suffragans, the two youngest bishops in the ACoC. Pryor had been recruited by Parsons in 2019, leaving a comfortable seminary staff position at Nashotah House to be a priest in Fort Smith, a small town near the Alberta border. In 2022, Parsons promoted Pryor to archdeacon, which meant a move north to diocesan offices in Yellowknife.
Pryor’s election was hardly a slam-dunk; it took six ballots before he was elected, with Ittoshat as runner-up.
Pryor was handed his crozier by Kerr-Wilson and for the first time in anyone’s memory, the incoming Arctic bishops wore miters and copes during their installations. Previously, such garb had been eschewed in the evangelical diocese. The founding bishops of the Arctic who established the Gospel in the High North and built it on theologically solid grounds were ‘low church;” that is, not into costly clerical robes and ritual. They included John Sperry, third bishop of the Arctic who translated parts of the Bible into Innuinaqtun, and Andrew Atagotaaluk, who rose from herding caribou as a boy to becoming the first Inuk bishop.
Born the same day as Atagotaaluk, yet four years his junior, Parsons was keenly aware of being the carrier of a sacred trust.
“The bishops before me were men of God and I didn’t want to mess up their great work during my tenure and I hope that others after me don’t do so either,” he told me. “Ours is not the time to blow out the torch. Ours is to carry the torch and pass it to those after us.”
One of his chief tasks as a bishop was guarding his sheep against the theological wolves prowling the church. He started making waves to that end from the day he showed up at the House of Bishops in 2013.
“If you do not teach the words of Jesus properly, their blood will be on your hands,” he remembers lecturing the other prelates. This did not go over well. But he says Michael Ingham, the ultra-liberal bishop of New Westminster and Parsons’ theological opposite, told him, “David you got to do what you got to do.”
The primate comes to Yellowknife
By 2019, the ACoC was assembling in Vancouver for a second vote on a controversial marriage canon amendment allowing same-sex marriage that seemed all but certain to pass.
But four months before the vote, the Arctic diocese had added three new suffragan bishops which the Province of the Northern Lights permitted them to do because of the vast distances required to get to far-flung churches. Although one would replace an outgoing suffragan, Darren McCartney, that still meant a gain of two bishops.
There was much speculation as to whether those extra bishops would provide the extra “no” votes to kill the amendment. Sure enough, the amendment passed in clergy and lay orders but failed in the House of Bishops by an estimated two votes.
The hunt was on for a scapegoat and blame was laid at the door of the Arctic bishops, especially Parsons who had gotten into a public argument with then-Primate Fred Hiltz.
“There was a debate on the marriage canon, and they called for the question,” Parsons told me later. “I said some of us still need to speak. The primate told me to sit down. Well, I didn't.” Gay marriage, he added, was a precipice into destruction, and “the rest of the Anglican Communion was saying not to go there. I am a bishop and I am called to warn people.”
Parsons later apologized for the tense exchange. After multiple bishops said they’d perform gay marriages anyway despite the vote, many indigenous and conversative bishops — including those in the Arctic — released a letter threatening to leave the ACoC. Parsons said he got called on the carpet for that letter at a subsequent HoB meeting.
Then the new primate, Linda Nicholls, said she wanted to meet with him. Flying up to Yellowknife, her message was stark: Some bishops found Parsons offensive and he would be barred from future bishops’ meetings until he got a psychological examination.
Parsons had had enough.
“I told her I’ve had psychological evaluations,” he said. “In the Arctic, we go through so many struggles because of all the suicides, we know that we need help.” He had seen renowned Toronto therapist Dr. Stan Skarsten before entering the mission field in his Church Army days.
“I can’t help peoples’ feelings,” he told Nicholls. “Most of us want to be loved. It’s not easy to be hated because you believe the Bible.”
That was in February 2020, a few weeks before Covid-19 shut down everything for many months. As for the House of Bishops, Parsons never went back.
Disaster after disaster
Parsons was not bishop when the diocesan cathedral in Iqaluit burned down in 2005 due to arson, but he had to deal with its aftermath.
“It was like the enemy threw a fireball against us” he said. Then in 2007, the Arthur Turner Training School (the diocesan seminary and Bible school) in Pangnirtung on Baffin Island closed because of dangerously aging buildings. This left the diocese with no clergy school venue for nine years, worsening an already dire clergy shortage. The Arctic is notorious for its low pay scales and clergy burnout due to the isolation of the Arctic and better-paying career opportunities elsewhere. Of the diocese’s 49 parishes and communities, only a third have full-time clergy; the rest get by with a pastiche of laity, deacons or retired ministers.
Several months after Pryor was elected bishop, I requested and got a lengthy interview.
When he became diocesan bishop, he faced disaster after disaster,” Pryor said of his predecessor. “The construction company that had held the loan for the (new) cathedral went bankrupt, so the diocese had come up with however many million it was to pay off the cathedral… So, the first few years of his episcopacy was dealing with the cathedral debt.”
Parsons did get the clergy training school back up and running in 2016. Realizing that unless the diocese staffed up in a meaningful way, it would never produce its own priests, he recruited Joey Royal to run the school.
Just before that, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released a final report in 2015 that focused on residential schools. Until 1959, the Arctic diocese had operated one in the village of Aklavik near the Alaskan border.
“The bishop at the time of course is the figurehead of the diocese,” Pryor told me. “So, if there’s blame to be had, if there’s hard feelings, if there are old wounds that are ripped open, by default he was the one who had to bear that.”
More crises followed inside and outside the church that Parsons was called upon to address and once his executive officer retired, “for five or six years he had no consistent help,” Pryor said.
What Parsons saw as eternally important – fighting for theological orthodoxy on the national level – didn’t get sold on the local front. The natives got restless.
“I know there are some in the diocese who wished we had enough staff so that the same level of attention could have been given to some of the vacant communities; the communities without clergy,” said Pryor, referring to some 10 communities around the Arctic that have a church building but no priest, deacon or even layperson to lead services. “Then there was the Covid pandemic, and it was one thing after another throughout his time.”
And the diocese was a sieve. Parsons no sooner brought in new blood than the old ones retired, died or just quit. One of the bishop’s more expensive — and fruitless — trips had been to ultra-remote Queen Victoria Island to train a lay leader, he told me, just to give believers there someone to lead worship. The man died a few months later of cancer.
When Pryor became archdeacon in 2022, he learned the diocese had an operating deficit of more than $700,000. One burgeoning expense was fire insurance, for which Parsons told me they were already shelling out $100,000 a year. Then starting in 2021, unproven claims of graves near the Kamloops Indian Residential School touched off a nationwide surge in church arsons.
“Our insurance went up to $450,000 and where was that money going to come from? People were torching churches all over the country,” Parsons had told me. Not wanting to lose their cathedral (again) or any other of their churches, they had to pay up. (And in 2023, two more of their churches: St. John’s in Cape Dorset/Kinngait and Good Shepherd in Taloyoak on the Boothia Peninsula were set on fire.)
Pryor also learned that at least four parishes were withholding some $500,000 in diocesan contributions.
“They had substantial means but were not supporting the diocese or the work of the bishop’s office financially,” he said.
Clearly there were hard feelings at work, but why?
“I do think it comes down to residential schools, it comes down to indigenous relations, it comes down to the longstanding difficulties in communication and understanding across different people groups in the north,” Pryor said. “David is a part of that, but I would not say that was David Parsons fault.”
“In fact, Parsons was out there doing tasks that suffragans or regional deans typically take charge of. “I was training people to be treasurers and do finance,” he told me. “In Puvirnituq (one of the wealthiest Quebec parishes), they had a lot of money coming in but no concept of being part of a diocese.”
“Adding to the problem was the constant personnel shortage. “If you don’t have clergy in every parish, they don’t realize they need to send money to Yellowknife,” he said. “Lots of parishes weren’t paying.
Still, “There are people who found his way of doing things who found his way of doing things a little more direct and harder than they would have liked,” Pryor said.
I remembered the bishop talking about this during some of the evenings we spent at the local co-op hotels after church services.
“Sometimes I am too much like a wolverine,” he mused, “but I need to be more gentle.”
Most people would have reacted worse than a wolverine had they to put up with the inconveniences I saw him deal with in just one week. From the cheap airport hotel he stayed in to save money before catching an early-morning milk run along the coast of Hudson Bay to the sky-high airfare and constant delayed and canceled flights, it was always something. There was the never-ending suicides; the depressed clergy — with unsolvable problems; the weeks away from his wife and constant annoyances like no cell reception.
“It is a hard place,” Royal told me. “You’re traveling so much and it’s at great cost to you and your family. David was faithful there for years, for a decade and a half.”
The bishop had a plan for property maintenance; the issue was finding the resources and people to do it. I recalled him talking about the stunning amount of maintenance required for church property in such climates and how the necessary carpenters and plumbers didn’t exist. Or if there was a church from the South with a work crew including such people, they wanted to come up in the summer when the locals were off to fish camps or out on the land hunting everything from geese to whales and not in the winter when pipes froze and sheetrock cracked.
At one point he, at the age of 64, was requisitioned to help fix broken plumbing underneath a rectory in the middle of nowhere. The result: A pinched nerve in his neck.
Too many bishops
The deficit, which by the end of 2023 still stood at (Canadian) $765,368, would prove to be Parsons’ undoing.
In early 2024, the Arctic diocese informed the Northern Lights province that it planned to have its election synod of a diocesan bishop in October 2024. Parsons was turning 70 that same month and he had up to nine months from his birthday to train his coadjutor before retiring. He had trained for six months under Andrew Atagotaaluk and Atagotaaluk had trained likewise under his predecessor.
But the province said no.
On the surface, the reason was money; the diocese was in too much debt to afford paying the salaries of a coadjutor along with four other bishops. Until the diocese had more financial stability, the province wasn’t going to allow a synod.
“I was very thankful for it,” Pryor said. “We were broke and budgeting to go bankrupt – We needed to be told no.”
On the other hand, “It was claimed by many people the Diocese of the Arctic only elected those three suffragans in the spring of 2019 so that they could go and vote against the marriage canon and block it – which was total foolishness,” he added. “But – and this is only subjective stuff – David’s absolute end date that he would have to retire … he’s allowed nine months after his 70th birthday. He could have gone until July.
“My gut reaction is that some were concerned if permission was given to us for a coadjutor, that perhaps David would push back his retirement date, and we’d get an extra vote in the House of Bishops for General Synod. But that is just speculation.”
The Anglican Church of Canada's General Synod was from June 23-29, 2025, in London, Ontario. At the time the Arctic diocese applied for a coadjutor election, the agenda had not been set, so no one knew what sensitive matters might be up for vote. The possibility of five bishops from the Arctic being present and casting conservative votes was unthinkable for some.
The province’s decision cut Parsons off at the knees. What was his due: A closing synod at which he got to see his successor elected a coadjutor and say his farewells to the diocese, wasn’t going to happen in the fall of 2024. Whether the province would allow a spring 2025 electoral synod wasn’t at all certain. Either way, Parsons would not get any time to train a coadjutor before his deadline in July.
Parsons asked his executive committee if they wanted him to hang on until mid-2025 or retire, as planned, at the end of 2024.
“They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take it from here.’ And I was just fried. I was traveling constantly.”
Which didn’t seem unreasonable, in that Royal, the bishop’s right-hand man, was waiting in the wings. Royal had headed up the diocesan theological school until he was elected suffragan in 2019 and was the logical successor to Parsons, He had gone on sabbatical earlier in 2024 so, it was thought, he’d be back in the fall and ready to take over when Parsons retired. Royal did return, only to announce he was taking a position in Ottawa as international relations and operations manager with the Christian Embassy of Canada.
Royal told me his dyslexic son was not flourishing in local schools and “I needed to prioritize my family.” When I asked him if he also left to avoid being named diocesan, he hedged, then said the travel and hours that came with the job weren’t workable for him.
The move caused quite a stir among Anglicans, who wondered why Royal was stepping away so late in the game. And it blindsided Parsons, who barely got word of it before Royal announced it publicly in early October. With Parsons, Royal and a third suffragan — Lucy Netser — also leaving (Netser was turning 70), that freed up three salaries.
At the end of October, Parsons would officially announce his retirement.
“We had hoped that prior to my retirement, the diocese would have an episcopal synod to elect a coadjutor bishop, and I would spend three months with the bishop elect,” he wrote somewhat plaintively. “Unfortunately, circumstances prevented this.”
The circumstances being those outside the diocese who put the stall on the election and those inside the diocese whose stinginess led to a deficit. Starting in January, finances were looking much better (actually an operating surplus of $172,549) thanks to donor appeals across North America by both Pryor and Parsons the year before. Eventually, the province gave the go-ahead.
But Parsons was relegated to the dustbin and almost a year since his leave taking, there has yet to be any tribute to him. Geoffrey and Rosalind Dixon drove from Vancouver Island clear across the country to support their friends during the weekend of the synod. Geoffrey sees his friend as part of a long line of evangelical bishops whose orthodox theology has kept the Arctic diocese alive while the rest of ACoC slides into oblivion.
“David in his 12 years left a legacy in that diocese,” he said, “that Alexander and the other bishops will come to realize someday meant something.”
The watchman
Since the dawn of the church, it has been the job of the bishop to teach; a task that Parsons took to heart. While traveling around Nunavik, the bishop would show me file after file of basic Gospel presentations he’d passed onto his clergy in the hopes they’d use them as catechism for their flocks.
During the last month as he saw his microphone disappearing, he filled his DavidArctic Facebook page with page after page of teachings.
“Twelve years ago after being elected Bishop of The Arctic I cried, ‘What have they done!’ I felt unprepared, incompetent for the task ahead,” he wrote Nov. 30. As Canadian Anglicanism was continuing its long descent into some of the most liberal sexual ethics in Christendom, “God called me and trained me to be a watchman to sound the alarm that an enemy has invaded the land,” he said. “While families fragmented, churches emptied and authorities embraced confusion creating a deep freeze, The Arctic has continued to warm spiritually.”
Ever wanting to recruit more laborers to one of the church’s most extreme outposts, on Dec. 31, he posted one last appeal: “Today is my last official day to sit in the chair to protect, teach and guide a diocese,” he wrote. He then posted a montage of sketches showing a sheep behind a gate, a tearful child cowering from an accusing finger and Jesus reaching down to rescue Peter from the Sea of Galilee.
“The lying thief keeps many in prison,” the bishop wrote. “And our silence of Jesus’ victory doesn’t help. Who will go?”
Julia Duin, who’s worked for several newspapers over a 45-year period ending with a stint at Newsweek from 2021-2023, now edits investigations about religion for julieroys.com. She has master’s degrees in journalism from the University of Memphis and religion (Trinity Anglican Seminary) and has written 6 books. She lives near Seattle.
