He was later Archdeacon of Moosonee before being appointed as the first Bishop of Keewatin in 1902 and receiving a doctor of divinity degree from St. John's College in Winnipeg.

[5][6] The Hudson's Bay Company had neglected the spiritual welfare of its employees and the Indigenous people with whom they traded, so Lofthouse was sent out to found a church in Churchill, Manitoba.

He and his guide Andrew Flett had to walk for eight days up the coast from York Factory through roadless country to meet Lofthouse's fiancée in Churchill.

Journalist Charles Richard Tuttle published a humorous account of the couple's courtship, claiming the pair had never seen each other before Fallding got off the ship in Churchill, but George Simpson McTavish set the record straight in his autobiography.

After the couple's only daughter, Marjorie Gordon Briggs, died in Saskatoon during the Spanish flu epidemic,[10] Lofthouse retired in 1920 and returned to England.