wfn.org | Yukon Presbytery Celebrates Centenary of Arctic Church

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10-March-1999 
99098 
 
    Yukon Presbytery Celebrates Centenary 
    of Arctic Church, Ordination of Inupiat Ministers 
 
    by John Filiatreau 
 
BARROW, Alaska - The unquestioned highlight of the recent spring meeting of 
the Yukon Presbytery - the ordination of two Inupiat Eskimos as 
pastors-at-large - hadn't even been on the agenda. 
 
No one knew that Timothy Gologergen and Isaac Akootchook, both longtime 
commissioned lay pastors and unpaid heralds of the Gospel in remote native 
villages of Arctic Alaska (and also, in Gologergen's case, Arctic Siberia), 
would become full-fledged Ministers of the Word and Sacrament during the 
three-day parley at Barrow, the northernmost city in the United States. 
 
But the Holy Spirit moved among the whites and Inupiats who had gathered 
prayerfully at Utqiagvik Presbyterian Church at "the top of the world," and 
as the meeting droned on, what at first had seemed impossible came to seem 
only unlikely, then plausible, then do-able, and finally, inevitable. 
 
After a whirlwind examination process and two unanimous votes of 
affirmation, the assembled men and women of the presbytery laid welcoming 
hands on the Inupiat ministers in rites reminiscent of rugby scrums. 
 
Having come to a meeting of minds, these dozens of normally cantankerous 
Alaskans were rewarded with a warm and joyful sense of community. One 
wouldn't have been surprised to see tongues of fire dancing over their 
heads. 
 
As usual, however, the Holy Spirit hadn't acted alone. 
 
Give an assist to the presbytery's Native American Consulting Committee 
(NACC), which had remarked in a bitter letter to the presbytery last 
October that it "prefers not to ordain Isaac and Tim posthumously." 
 
Timothy Gologergen is 79. Isaac Akootchook is 76. 
 
Gologergen, "apostle to the Arctic West," has been an elder of Nome 
Presbyterian Church since its founding in 1975. He was commissioned as lay 
pastor for Chukotka Native Christian Ministry in Siberia in October 1992. 
 
Akootchook, "apostle to the East," was called as a commissioned lay pastor 
in November 1987. He is an elder of Kaktovik Presbyterian Church on Barter 
Island, and also was among the organizers of Kuukpik Presbyterian Church in 
Nuiqsut (1975) and Atqasuk Chapel in Atqasuk (1990). 
 
Gologergen was accompanied to the meeting by Anna, his wife of 50 years, 
Akootchook by his wife, Mary, to whom he has been married for 54 years. 
 
The NACC pointed out that it was Yukon Presbytery that "set the precedent" 
for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s ordaining of devout Christians 
"without any academically accepted theological and educational training." 
It cited the cases of two fabled Inupiat ministers, Roy Ahmaogak and Samuel 
Simmonds, "whom you regarded as Ministers that walked just like Jesus 
Christ." 
 
The letter - which accused the presbytery of "scandalous neglect of duty" 
and downright "abuse" in this matter - clearly hurt some feelings, ruffled 
some feathers and occasioned some bitter debate. 
 
And accomplished its mission. 
 
When the presbytery council met on Feb. 25, the day before the presbytery 
meeting was to start, it voted "to delete the following wording from the 
minutes of Nov. 2, 1998: `Whereas, raising issues in this way hurt and 
surprised staff and committee members; Therefore, Council of the Presbytery 
responds to NACC:  That: Council states that charges against staff and 
committees is unsubstantiated and without merit; and That: Council 
interprets the NACC letter to be a cry of frustration and hurt.'" 
 
Frustration and hurt are exactly what the Native American Consulting 
Committee members were feeling when the letter was drafted. 
 
No such feelings were evident on either side during the presbytery meeting, 
however. Participants clearly were inclined to be accommodating, and, even 
when they disagreed, managed to do so without being disagreeable. Some said 
the sense of camaraderie was a tribute to Moderator Arlayne Knox, a retired 
schoolteacher with a soothing manner, an instinctive grasp of parliamentary 
procedure and a habit of tireless persistence. 
 
Knox set the tone at the outset with a moving "Prayer for Family Blessing" 
by Robert Louis Stevenson: "Let peace abound in our small company. Purge 
out of every heart the lurking grudge. Give us grace and strength to 
forbear and to persevere. ... Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet 
mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it 
may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us the strength 
to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant 
in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune down to 
the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another." 
 
Shortly before the Revs. Gologergen and Akootchook renewed their ministries 
at age 79 and 76, respectively, the presbytery reluctantly approved the 
retirement of the Rev. Gene Straatmeyer, 65, effective April 30. (One of 
Straatmeyer's cronies rose, apparently to offer a testimonial, and said: 
"I'd like to speak on behalf of those of us who are retired. We don't want 
him!") 
 
Straatmeyer devoted eight years of his 40-year ministry to leading the 
Native American Theological Consortium, a program at the University of 
Dubuque that trained Native American laity for ministry and recruited 
Native American candidates for Master of Divinity programs. 
 
He was among the architects of the hurry-up process whereby Gologergen and 
Akootchook were given summary oral examinations on theological and ethical 
issues and on the Scriptures and "The Book of Order." 
 
When that process had ended, he charged the two newly ordained men to 
"preach the Word with your mouth and your life, and travel with your feet." 
 
Straatmeyer said a 1972 study identified 112 Native American churches in 
the United States, and only 12 Native-American pastors, whose average age 
was 57. He said he thought there might be as many as three dozen Native 
American pastors in the country today - "not nearly enough." 
 
Then he added happily, "We upped the count by two today, praise the Lord." 
 
In a prescient college paper titled, "The Northern Alaska Eskimo and the 
Presbyterian Church," Straatmeyer wrote more than 20 years ago: "One way to 
get indigenous leadership, I believe, is to upgrade the office of lay 
preacher so that they can administer the sacraments and care for the 
ordinary pastoral ministry in a village. The lay preachers might receive 
practical `apprenticeship' training at either Barrow or Fairbanks. There 
should be a program for their continuing education. ... If a lay preacher 
functioned faithfully over a period of 10 years, the Presbytery should 
consider his/her ordination, taking his/her practical experience into 
account." 
 
While militating for indigenous leadership for the Arctic church, 
Straatmeyer also served as pastor of First Presbyterian churches in 
Fairbanks and Wasilla and helped establish two new congregations in the 
Fairbanks area - First Korean Presbyterian Church of Fairbanks and New Hope 
Presbyterian/Methodist Church at North Pole. More recently, he has worked 
in new-church development at Big Lake - the Church of the Reformation, a 
mission of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Evangelical Luthern 
Church in America. 
 
Barrow, more than 300 miles above the Arctic Circle on the frozen-solid 
Arctic Ocean, may seem an unlikely spot for a presbytery meeting in 
February. Luckily, the delegates arrived during what the Inupiat regarded 
as a heat wave. The wind chill was 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. For 
much of January it had been 80 to 100 below. 
 
Whatever the weather, there was a compelling reason to come to Barrow, a 
city of about 4,200 people, two-thirds of them Inupiat, for this meeting: 
Utqiagvik Presbyterian Church was celebrating its 100th anniversary. 
("Utqiagvik," the Inupiaq place-name for the present site of Barrow, means 
"the place where people go to hunt snowy owls." The less-fortunate Inupiaq 
name of another remote Eskimo settlement, Anaktuvuk Pass, means "the place 
where the Caribou defecate.") 
 
Utqiagvik Church was organized on April 2, 1899 - Easter Sunday - with 13 
Eskimo communicants who didn't understand English, and a white missionary 
pastor who couldn't speak Inupiaq. 
 
After a century, the pattern holds, generally: Utqiagvik is still an 
all-Inupiat congregation with a white pastor - the Rev. Michael Stuart  - 
who doesn't speak the native language or feel much at home in the native 
culture. 
 
Today, however, some things are different. There is an associate pastor, 
the Rev. Mary Ann Warden, who is an Inupiat. Nearly all the Eskimos are 
fluent in English. And many worship texts, including the Scriptures and 
scores of popular hymns, have been translated into Inupiaq. 
 
Some Inupiats see evidence of racism in the fact that few white 
missionaries have learned to speak or write any of the native languages. 
They point out that white educators have often required Inupiat children to 
speak only English at school, and have punished pupils who dared use their 
own tongue. White Presbyterians tend to see the language issue in a more 
benign light; they say learning the language would have consumed so much 
time that other ministerial duties would have been neglected. 
 
A good number of white citizens of Barrow attend services at Utqiagvik at 
least occasionally, but none has yet applied for membership. Worship 
services are held in both languages - English in the morning, Inupiaq in 
the evening. The church has a busy, growing youth group, but most younger 
natives cannot read or speak Inupiaq. Most Alaskans seem to believe the 
native languages inevitably will die out within 50 years. 
 
Membership in the Barrow church peaked around 1963 at approximately 750. 
Today it stands at a little over 300. 
 
The church was about three months old when Yukon Presbytery was formed. 
 
The presbytery, whose headquarters is in Anchorage, is part of the Synod of 
Northwest-Alaska. It includes 22 churches with a total membership of 3,383 
- an increase of 46 over the past year - and total receipts for 1998 of 
approximately $4.7 million. The presbytery has 40 ministers of the Word and 
Sacrament on its rolls. The ordinations of Gologergen and Akootchook bring 
to five the number who are Native Americans. 
 
About 120 people flew to Barrow for the meeting and the centenary 
celebration, among them the Rev. Neil Munro, who served briefly as pulpit 
supply at the Barrow church in 1954 after similar stints in the Fairbanks 
area and later worked as a presbytery and synod executive; and Bonnie 
Wartes, who accompanied her husband, the Rev. Bill Wartes, to Barrow in 
1951 and shared in his ministry through 1958. 
 
On the evening before the meeting started, the people of Utqiagvik 
Presbyterian held a welcoming potluck dinner, followed by Eskimo drumming 
and dancing. Their guests seemed to be of two minds about slabs of maktak 
(raw whale skin and blubber, black, pink and chewy), but were sold on the 
dancing, which calls to mind the ritual stomp-dancing of the Maori people 
of New Zealand in the distant South Pacific. 
 
Presbyterian Women of Yukon Presbytery, meeting separately, held a 
"consciousness-raising" session on domestic abuse, reportedly a growing 
problem in Alaska, and brainstormed for ways in which it might be 
appropriate for the church to respond. 
 
Utqiagvik Presbyterian's youth group sponsored a waffle breakfast and a 
T-shirt sale during the presbytery meeting, raising almost $1,000. 

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