"Our Sunday Best"

Kenai's Russian Orthodox Church in winter--early 1980s.

OUR SUNDAY BEST

MAY 2013

Today, celebrating the Sabbath is a commonplace occurrence. As is the case across the United States, churches dot the landscape of the central Kenai Peninsula, and a considerable number of peninsula residents attend regular services.

Peering into the history books to find the local origins of such a phenomenon reveals that those who first brought Christianity to the Kenai were also the first to write any history here at all. The local Natives had no written history at that time. The Russians introduced their new belief system, and they kept meticulous records in the process.

The Russian Orthodox Church established the first Christian presence in the form of 34-year-old missionary, Father Juvenaly, who arrived in Kenai in 1795 and began baptizing local inhabitants. He spent the winter of 1795-96 at Fort St. Nicholas (the first area Russian fur-trading outpost, established in 1795 by the Lebedev-Lastochin Company) and at the nearby village of Shk’ituk’t.

Juvenaly, who was part of a group of eight monks organized in 1793 in a Russia monastery and charged with preaching the Word of God to Alaska Natives, ran into trouble, however, after leaving Kenai in 1796. Although reports are conflicting, it appears that as he continued his missionary work westward he was killed by a group of Yupik villagers he was attempting to convert.

After Juvenaly’s death, the peninsula faithful settled for four decades of limited church involvement. Until 1840, Kenai was visited by missionaries from the Kodiak parish only every two to three years.

Then, in 1841, Father Nicholas (Igumen Nicholai) arranged the construction of the first Russian Orthodox Church in Kenai. Three years later, Kenai was officially established as an enormous parish. Father Nicholas’s 1859 diary noted that he needed two years to make the rounds of the villages in his care. Without benefit of any road system, he traveled from Kenai north as far as Knik, south to the tip of the peninsula, and east to the site of present-day Valdez. Typically, he traveled by bidarka, usually accompanied by an interpreter, an assistant, and his oarsmen.

The United States purchased Alaska in 1867, around the same time that Father Nicholas died. Over the next quarter-century, he was succeeded by Father Nikita, who had the church remodeled in 1883, Father Mitropolsky, and then Father Alexander Yaroshevich, who advocated successfully for the construction of a new church.

In April 1894, Russian Orthodox parishioners in Kenai received word that their construction petition had been approved

Russian Orthodox Church in Kenai, circa 1900.

by the Holy Ruling Synod in Russia. To help fund the project, the Alaskan Ecclesiastical Administration had sent along $400.

 Since the parishioners had detailed in their petition their expected expenses and listed all the materials they would need to complete the project, they wasted little time celebrating and got right to work. Under the guidance of Father Yaroshevich, construction began on a site just south of the rectory.

Each church family was required to donate five hand-hewn logs to the new church. The plan called for six-by-six-inch logs, bladed flat on each side (to form smooth walls and allow for easier stacking), and for dove-tails where the logs met to form perpendicular adjoining walls.

Construction supervisor Alexander Demidov’s inventory of expenses included $49.50 for 16,500 shingles, $57 for several kegs of nails, $8 for two wide-headed axes and a new hand-drill, and $50 for paint. Also included in the budget was $420 for four months of labor at $3.50 a day. The grand total was expected to be $916.31—more than $21,000 in today’s money.

The project proceeded as planned, and, in an October 1895 letter, Father Yaroshevich announced that the church was complete. In the spring of 1896—after Yaroshevich was transferred to Juneau—Kenai’s shiny new church was consecrated to God under the guidance of a new priest, Father Ionn Bortnovsky.

Domes on Kenai's Russian Orthodox Church.

In 1900, at a cost of an additional $300, the church was expanded westward and a belfry was erected over the new addition. At the same time, a white picket fence was constructed around the perimeter of the church grounds. After those renovations, the Kenai church remained virtually unchanged—except for repairs, repainting, and the installation of a concrete-block foundation—for the next century.

Father Bortnovsky returned to Russia in 1906, and Father Paul Shadura took over the following year. He remained in place until about 1950, and some long-time Kenai residents still remember him.

It was, however, during Shadura’s tenure that other Christian influences began to appear on the Kenai.

According to the scrapbook of Kasilof teacher Enid McLane, the Rev. Martin Ramsey (who was living at the home of Clayton and Lucy Pollard) in July 1938 presided at the “first Divine service” for the Kasilof School. More than a decade later, Lucy Pollard, who had been a missionary with a Baptist orphanage in Kodiak, became a matron for the Kasilof Community Church.

In 1939, Walter Covich, a young missionary with the Slavic Gospel Association, visited Kenai and held special services in the village.

According to the SGA’s official website, the Slavic Gospel Association traces its history back to 1934 and the city of Chicago. Its founder, the Rev. Peter Deyneka, who had come to the United States from Belarus at the age of 15, believed that he had a life mission to share his newfound Christian views with the people of his homeland, and his ministry had sprouted from this belief.

In 1925, he had traveled and preached extensively in Belarus. While there, he had established a relationship with the churches of the Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists. But in the early 1930s, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had intensified persecution of the churches, making it impossible for Deyneka to travel to his homeland. Convinced that he could still help Belarusian churches from the United States, he and a small group of Chicago-area businessmen met in the back of a shoe store and founded the Russian Gospel Association, later renamed the Slavic Gospel Association.

Throughout the 1940s, SGA missionaries (and some missionaries from other faiths) served the Kenai area.

On Aug. 22, 1945, Olga Erickson and Violet Able were flown in an SGA missionary plane to Kenai, where they occupied the old two-story George Pederson home that had been purchased by the SGA and remodeled (under the supervision of Covich, working as a missionary in Port Graham) to include a chapel meeting room downstairs and an apartment upstairs.

This building later became the Kenai Bible Chapel, the first Protestant place of worship in Kenai.

The Kenai Bible Chapel sometime in the 1950s.

In 1947, SGA missionaries Gladys Erdman and Florence Dalbow began directing Kasilof Community Church meetings in the homes of parishioners. Meanwhile, Erickson and Able served in Kenai until 1948, when they were transferred to other villages. They were replaced by Walter and Eldy Covich, who took charge of the expanding missionary work at Kenai Bible Chapel and remained in Kenai until 1955.

As the second half of the 20^th century began, Christian-based churches were expanding rapidly, becoming considerably more varied and frenetic.

The Catholic Presence

A photograph from Once Upon the Kenai depicts an odd-looking Catholic mass from June 1955 in Kenai. The words in the ceremony may have been the usual fare, but the setting certainly was not: The scene was the Western Corral Bar, where an altar had been erected from two oil drums, a sheet of plywood, and an old white bedspread.

Father Thompson presided as parishioners arrayed themselves around the outside of the counter. On the wall behind the congregation were alcohol-related posters, and drink-mixing implements could be seen behind the bar.

Life was more primitive for the Catholic faithful in the early days—and, truth be told, such was life for the congregations of many early churches on the central Kenai Peninsula.

Catholic services on the central peninsula began in 1951in the home of Frank and Marge Mullen, who had moved out of their 14x16-foot cabin when Marge became pregnant with their third child and were temporarily renting a place near the Soldotna bridge from the brothers Alex and Marcus Bodnar.

The Mullens, who had lived briefly in Anchorage in the mid-1940s and had remained in contact with the Catholic hierarchy there, had been informed that if they arranged a place of worship, an itinerant priest from Seward could make regular monthly visits to the area once the roads were passable in the spring. Thus did Father Arnold Custer, whom Marge called “a great old Jesuit,” bring mass to the masses on the western Kenai.

Later, the parishioners determined that Catholic services should be moved closer to the population center, so the meeting place was moved to Kenai, with Louisa Miller arranging the locale wherever space was available—from her own café to Kenai Joe’s bar, from the old Territorial School to the Carpenters Hall. They even met sometimes at Wildwood Army Station, when a Catholic chaplain was flown down from Anchorage to hold services in the Quonset hut that served a base chapel.

Marge Mullen remembers that many of the church venues had their own peculiarities: Mass in the café, for instance, might be enhanced by the smell of freshly baked bread, while the smells in the bar might include ashtrays and the vestiges of old beer.

During 1955 and 1956, area Catholics employed volunteer labor to build their first church in Kenai, constructing it with logs purchased from Fred House’s sawmill. On Sundays during the cold months, according to Once Upon the Kenai, the church was heated by an oil stove lighted early in the morning by Lillian Hakkinen “in hopes of removing the chill before time for services. Often it would fail to do so, and sometimes the priest would have to say mass in gloves and boots.”

In 1956, the peninsula was accepted as a mission parish by an Oregon-based Redemptorist order, which sent four priests to tend to the various congregations. The priests served primarily as pastors, but they also began St. Theresa’s Camp near Sterling and furthered the construction of new churches, including a larger Kenai facility, Our Lady of the Angels, which was finished in 1969.

The Catholic Church in Soldotna, circa 1962.

Another of the new churches was Soldotna’s Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which was mostly completed by the end of 1962 on property donated by homesteader Marvin Smith. The church included the work of a half-dozen recently transplanted (and previously unemployed) Irish stonemasons who had been living in Anchorage at the time.

Under the direction of the first pastor, James Van Hommisen, the Irishmen drove a truck out Snug Harbor Road in Cooper Landing and then climbed into the mountains to find just the right rounded stones to employ in the construction of the front and back walls of the church.

While their work on the structure was greatly appreciated, according to Mullen, their participation in the church’s first midnight mass on Christmas Eve 1962 was not so highly regarded.

Parishioners on that sloppy wet night began arriving at about 11:30, and the stonemasons were on hand with flashlights to guide the congregation into parking spaces; however, Mullen said, the Irishmen had been doing some early Christmas celebrating and therefore did more staggering and stumbling than accurate direction-giving.

Indoors, where poinsettias had been arrayed to add beauty to an unfinished construction site, the Irishmen strolled in and extinguished their cigarettes in the holy water fountain. They sat backwards on the kneeling benches instead of forward in the pews, and when Jean Bardelli (now Brockel), who was wearing the lace stockings she had just received from her mother, went forward to play the organ, they directed wolf-whistles at her.

“At least the electricity was on, and the heat was working,” Mullen said.

The Growing Protestant Influence

Elsewhere on the central peninsula, church activities may have been somewhat less rollicking but were definitely on the rise.

In 1950, the First Baptist Church of Kenai, affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, was formed but soon disbanded.

Also during that time, Carl Zehrung and his family moved to the peninsula to establish a Church of Christ. For the first year, they rented space each Sunday in an old log building that was used as a dance hall, a theater and a candy store during the rest of the week.

That structure is believed to have been the second-oldest building (after the Russian Orthodox Church) in Kenai. It was originally the Interlocked Moose Horn Club, thought to have been constructed from logs held together with wooden pegs at least as far back as 1890, possibly by hunting guide Andrew Berg.

The building had been moved on skids to its location on Cook Avenue in 1940 by the Monfor family for commercial purposes. After the Zehrungs built their own chapel in Kenai in 1951, the old building was used again by another congregation just a few years later.

In 1956, the Rev. Carl Glick, Sr., and his wife Betty arrived in Alaska from Palmstown, Penn., as missionaries for the Assemblies of God. In 1957, they purchased the entire Interlocked Moose Horn Club building and had it jacked up so that a basement and a new foundation could be installed.

Meanwhile, a few miles away in Soldotna, the Methodists were marshalling their energies.

The first Methodist church in Soldotna, 1956.

Both of the first two Methodist churches in Soldotna were hauled from the Kasilof area and brought whole across the Kenai River bridge. During both of these moves, adjustments had to be made because the smaller church sat a little too high, while the larger church sat a little too low.

The earliest Methodist church on the western Kenai Peninsula was the first church structure in all of Soldotna. It was originally known as the Kasilof Methodist Church, and it pre-dated the now more established Methodist church in Kenai. According to information in the photo archive at Kenai Peninsula College, the one-story, one-room building—complete with greenish exterior walls, white-painted door and window trim, and a red roof—was moved out of Kasilof once a greater Methodist population grew in Soldotna.

Probably in late 1951, church members agreed to move onto property donated by homesteader Maxine Lee at Mile 0.5 of the Kenai Spur Highway, and they hired Homer Freight Lines to jack up and haul the structure. At the bridge, they realized that the top of the building would strike the overhead steel supports, so they had to partially deflate the tires on the trailer in order to create the proper clearance.

Rev. Gene Elliott with Methodist church youth, 1952.

A photograph taken in April 1952 shows a small group of Methodist children posing with itinerant Moose Pass minister, Gene Elliott, in front of the new church, which, with its small oil stove and thin walls, was difficult to heat in the winter months. Area Methodists used this church until the mid-1950s when a new, and much larger, church was built in Kenai.

On Jan. 15, 1955, Pastor Quincy Murphree mailed two postcards to every boxholder in Kenai. The first card read: “Dear People: If you are interested in a Methodist Church in Kenai, fill in the attached postcard and return it to me at once. Do not fail to register your interest in one of the provided places.” The second card read: “I am interested in a Methodist Church in Kenai and will (A) become a member ____, (B) I do not care to become a member, but will attend regularly ____, (C) most of the time ____, (D) occasionally ____.  My name is ____________________.”

Based on the results of this survey, the Kenai Methodist Church was born, with the first service being held on Feb. 13 in the Civic Center with 37 people in attendance. Although someone had tampered with the furnace, leaving the indoor temperature at 33 degrees, the faithful were not deterred. In fact, on Easter Sunday a few weeks later, 77 people showed up to worship.

The following week, 19 individuals joined the church on Charter Membership Day. Two years later, a large new church, constructed with nearly 2,000 hours of volunteer labor and located next to the Kenai School, was consecrated. The tiny Soldotna church was abandoned and transformed into an office building for the Coastal Drilling Company.

By 1965, however, Soldotna Methodists, tired of the weekly commute to Kenai, wanted their building back. Coastal Drilling complied. The old church—now renamed Soldat Kriste (“Soldier of Christ”)—was picked up and hauled again, this time to a wooded lot just north of town, where it served the congregation until 1968, when a new two-story Methodist parsonage was built nearby, and services were held in the much more spacious parsonage basement.

Meanwhile, moves were afoot to create even more room and a real church. Property on Binkley Street was purchased, and a merger between the congregations of Soldotna and Kasilof was formed.

The building about to become Soldotna United Methodist Church passes over the Kenai River bridge in early August 1968.

Built next to the Tustumena School in the mid-1960s under the direction of Pastor John Shaffer, the Tustumena Church of Christ the Victor, with its striking diamond shape and sky-piercing sanctuary, was jacked up on Aug. 2, 1968, placed on a flatbed freight hauler preceded by a truck bearing a sign, “EX-WIDE LOAD,” and aimed toward Soldotna.

The church was so wide that the movers decided to transport the building only between the hours of 4 and 6:30 a.m., a time they determined when traffic would be lightest. The 15-mile journey took two days and was slowed at the river because the entire structure had to be jacked up so that its bottom could pass over the top railings of the new bridge that had replaced the old steel-girder assembly.

The first worship service at the new location, now called Soldotna United Methodist Church, was held on Aug. 18.

Peninsula Church Miscellany

In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, several other area churches also got their starts, including the Kasilof Community Church (organized in parishioners’ homes starting in about 1947, in an official church building by 1958), Soldotna Baptist Church (1959), the First Baptist Church of Kenai (started in 1950 and disbanded, reorganized in 1965), and, in Soldotna, the Christ Lutheran Church (1962), the Church of the Nazarene (1962), the Church of God (1962), and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (1968).

The Soldotna Methodist Church, despite its start back in the early 1950s, was not even close to being the first Methodist church on the peninsula. That honor goes to the Seward Methodist Episcopal Church, which was constructed in 1907 by its first pastor, Louis H. Pedersen, who had arrived in town two years earlier.

Seward had a number of churches that began nearly or more than a century ago. Among them are: the Christian Science church (now defunct), which began in the community library in about 1915; the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, which was begun by Father Phillip Turnell after his arrival in June 1905; St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, in which the first services were held by the Rev. F.C. Taylor on June 12, 1904; and the Seward Lutheran Church, the members of which began meeting occasionally starting in 1917.

The first pastor of Soldotna’s Christ Lutheran Church was Richard J. Tuff. During the construction of the church in 1962, a small white sign nailed to a birch tree next to the main church sign announced in block letters: “TEMPORARILY MEETING IN SOLDATNA THEATER.” Built originally in the shape of a cross, the church has been known for decades for the fine acoustics in its sanctuary.

When the First Baptist Church of Kenai was reorganized in 1965, it began with 10 members who met initially in the National Guard Armory on Forest Drive. The Rev. Kelly Dickson became the first pastor, and soon thereafter a two-story church building was erected at the corner of 2^nd and Birch streets.

The Rev. Ray Mainwaring, an early pastor for the Kasilof Community Church, was also a member of the Kenai Peninsula Fellowship, which started Solid Rock Bible Camp near Soldotna in 1958. He left his pastorate in 1966 to become the first manager of KRSM (K-Solid Rock Ministries) Radio.

A search through a recent telephone directory indicates the presence of dozens of churches throughout the Kenai Peninsula, including perhaps two dozen each in both Kenai and Soldotna.