Excerpted from Stephen Reynold’s “For All The Saints”.
September 10 —
Edmund James Peck, Priest, Missionary to the Inuit, 1924
Today we honour the memory of Edmund James Peck, an Anglican priest who died in 1924 after almost forty years in the eastern Arctic serving the Inuit and helping them to know Christ.
Peck entered the Royal Navy while he was still a child. He planned to make the Navy his life, but a series of near-fatal illnesses and shipboard accidents led him to experience what he called “the movements of grace.” His experience of Christ made him decide to give his life to spreading the word of eternal life, and in 1876 he volunteered for work in the Canadian Arctic.
His first post was at Little Whale River on Hudson’s Bay, where he spent seven years before being sent further north to minister to the Inuit around Fort Chimo. He then opened a mission on Baffin Island, where he laboured among the Inuit until his retirement in 1921. He died at Toronto, on this very date, three years later.
Peck was as handy with wood, bolts, and iron as he was with the New Testament and the Prayer Book, and he built the Anglican Church in the eastern Arctic not only spiritually by his preaching but also physically with his own hands. The Inuit were impressed by Peck’s readiness for hard work and still more by his honest interest in their culture and conditions — but still the reason for his presence often puzzled them. He obviously had no goods to trade, so they wondered what he was doing at the trading posts. Early in his career at Little Whale River he overheard one Inuit give this explanation to another: “Him? Oh, he fell down from heaven to save the Innu.” Peck laughed at the thought that he had come from heaven — but he gave his whole life to make the rest of the saying come true.
September 18 –
Founders, Benefactors and Missionaries of the Anglican Church of Canada
On this day 130 years ago in 1893 the first General Synod of the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada closed its deliberations with a Service of Thanksgiving. The Canadian Church was no longer three separate provinces, united only through their common obedience to the archbishop of Canterbury. It was now an autonomous national Church, united in itself as a full member of the Anglican family of churches throughout the world.
Today we commemorate this historic event in the life of our Church and take the occasion to give thanks for all those men and women who contributed in various ways, both great and small, to building the Anglican way of life in this nation of Canada.
We may well feel like the author of the Letter to the Hebrews who, as he reckoned up the heroes of faith, finally had to confess: “And what more shall we say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets.”
Just so, time would fail us now to tell of all the founders and missionaries who settled the Church and the gospel among us — Charles Inglis of Nova Scotia, George Mountain of Quebec and Francis Fulford of Montreal, John Strachan of Toronto and Benjamin Cronyn of Huron, John McLean of Saskatchewan, George Hills of British Columbia, and William Bompas of Athabasca.
And what of all those who never held high office in the Church — all the faithful clergy and people who joined together to build the churches and nourish the parish communities that dot this land: time would certainly fail us even to begin to tell of them!
We may use this feast to reflect upon the history of our own parishes and to recall with thanksgiving the founders, benefactors, and missionaries who, having laid the one foundation which is Jesus Christ, went on to raise, adorn, and sustain the Anglican household of faith in our own corners of Canada.
