PHILADELPHIA (October 22, 2003) -- Pastor Lee Berry's Northwest Territories "parishioners" live on one-third of Canada's land mass. There are 65,000 occupants across the frozen territory and no roads. The area Berry serves is about the size of Alaska and touches the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, coming close to Greenland and the North Pole.

The three modes of transit (besides walking) are snowmobile, dogsled and by airplane, the latter being Berry's choice to make pastoral calls. A 1972 alum of the seminary, Berry has been a pilot for about 30 years.

Cold up there? You bet. Berry says the mercury plummets to 50 below on the coldest nights and may get up to 75 for five or six weeks during the heart of summer. Nights and days can both be very long, nearly 24 hours at the height of winter and summer, making it truly at times the land of the midnight sun.

The territory's inhabitants are Inuit and Aboriginal and First Nations Indian people with a mix of loyalties to Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions. Berry says they have occupied the Territory for 5,000 to 10,000 years, and the pastor says they are enduring intensely rapid change as the dominant cultures of the globe clamor for gold, diamonds and oil in the resources-rich Northwest Territories.

"It is truly an invasion by the Southern culture to gain control of the Territories' precious resources," Berry says. "The result is that these peoples are seeing their own culture eroded by the influence of technology and alternative lifestyles. They've become nomadic, forced into communities in order to take part in a cash economy. These people have no way of participating fully in the economy. They possess no industry. The economy of the Territories is really built on failure."

Lee Berry

As a result, the people Berry ministers to in his "On Eagles Wings" program experience deep despair. Family violence marks the culture and the suicide rate is "many times" the national average. "The young feel they have no real opportunity to participate," he says. As a pastor from the "dominant culture,"

Enter Berry's "On Eagles Wings," which the LTSP alum views as "a partnership of Northern and Southern Christians from a wide variety of cultural and denominational backgrounds that celebrates our oneness in Christ. Rather than defending our differences we celebrate what we have in common."

Berry says he and others work for a ministry that strives to project hope in Jesus Christ. "We ask forgiveness for the sins brought on from our Southern culture and seek to find ways that we can walk together with Northern peoples," Berry notes. A focus of On Eagles Wings is to make use of volunteers from churches around North America to strengthen the partnership in Christ. The effort involves "equipping people of the North to teach people and children about the faith in their own style so that they make their own faith journey," Berry says. It is the antithesis, he notes, of the way the first missionaries imposed a style foreign to the host culture. And it is a walk, the pastor says, that usually does not involve clergy. Far fewer Roman Catholic priests serve on the Territories than used to be the case, and Berry says the three youngest are aged 75. "For the church to live on in the Northwest Territories it will need to be in the people," Berry says.

Lee Berry came to seminary after graduating from Muhlenberg College. He recalls initially thinking about going to graduate school to study social work. He recalls at LTSP playing football against Westminster and Gettysburg Seminaries on a team that also featured Northeastern Pennsylvania Synod Bishop David Strobel.

"The seminary was a small, strong community with few married students in those days," Berry says. He has fond memories of the faculty and remembers playing tennis with Martin Heinecken and has fond memories of William Lazareth. "They were neat people who had faith in the human experience," he remembers. Berry recalls himself to have been an introvert who was afraid of failing a preaching course. He says he was terrified at first of the notion of preaching in a room filled with people.

Today, Berry is known as a superb preacher by those loyal to the ministry who hear him spin heartwarming stories from U.S. pulpits about Northern peoples and their journeys with Christ. "I easily find hooks in my encounters with people," the pastor says. "I witness how they are in touch with their faith in moments each day. I think that if you preach a message that doesn't touch people then it is just a speech."

Berry's first call after seminary was to the Belfast-Wind Gap Parish in Pennsylvania, where he served seven years. He then served St. Stephen Lutheran Church in Warren, MI, a suburb of Detroit, "where I discovered I wasn't a city person. While in Wind Gap, he scrounged up enough money to learn how to be a pilot, and Berry earned all the ratings to become a commercial pilot. Then someone told him about LAMP, a ministry of missionary pilots.

Next came an opportunity to join LAMP and "go to Yellowknife - all the way at the top of the globe." He persuaded his wife, Sarah, to try the ministry out for "a couple of years." That was 21 years ago. Today, Sarah is an educator overseeing the teaching of school children in the Northwest Territories. After 17 years with LAMP, Berry says he saw changes in the direction of the ministry that he wasn't comfortable with. "I decided to try to continue the ministry I had been a part of and dreamed about On Eagles Wings. The dream came to life in February 1999 with the dedication of a new plane. "Dick Foster of Newtown, PA, donated $195,000 to help us buy the first plane," Berry says. It is a twin engine Piper Aztec that seats six passengers.

Berry confesses that he frequently gets tired working hard for the ministry. "I'm not good at taking vacations," he acknowledges. "But I'm very blessed to be part of a ministry partnership with such special people in the North."