This week the church honours a man called Robert McDonald. He was an Anglican priest who faithfully served in the western Arctic from 1862 until he retired forty years later. He based himself in Fort McPherson, a small trading post in the Yukon, but travelled around a vast area looking after the various Kutchin tribes that made their home in that region.
Robert was remarkable for three things. From the very first, he saw a major part of his work as recruiting and training native ministers. He was clear that the work of the Kingdom of God involved all the church, not just its ordained leadership. He saw himself as a resource for the people in his care, not as a master clergyman who had to keep all authority in his own hands. Quite ahead of his time!
Secondly, he proved to be a serious and highly skillful ethnographer. He had a number of ground-breaking studies of native language and traditions to his credit. And this was at a time when many individuals in the Anglican Church regarded such things as irrelevant or even harmful.
Thirdly, he has to be admired for his patience and resilience. McDonald was part Ojibway through his mother. Because of this “mixed blood”, many of the leaders in the Church Missionary Society treated him as a second-class priest. It is awful to report their reports on the work in the Arctic, where they talked about “our European missionaries… and Archdeacon McDonald”. Of course, he knew about and was hurt by such prejudice. He never, for a moment, let it affect his love for Christ, nor did it ever deter him encouraging others to feel the warmth of that love.
That is why we remember him with such affection. His devotion to the Gospel surmounted ignorance and discrimination for the sake of enabling the native people of the Arctic to become full and equal partners in the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Father Neil Gray
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