A few weeks ago I was on a plane, and sitting a few seats over across the aisle from me was a Haredi Jew. I had seen Haredis before, but for whatever reason, I was intrigued by the man and spent a portion of the flight watching him. He read quite a bit from a book printed in Hebrew and at one point he was even working on a paper or some other document in Hebrew on his laptop. When they served the food they had a special kosher meal for him, which did not look all that appetizing (apparently his thought too, as he barely ate any of it).

As I watched him fiddle around with the food, I suddenly found myself a little frustrated, and I wanted to grab him by the shoulders, give him a good shake and say to him, "Why don't you get it? How can you immerse yourself in the Tanakh and not see that Jesus is the Messiah? How can you not understand?" After we landed and he went off to baggage claim I stood there for a moment watching him walk away as the thought continued to roll through my mind.

This past Sunday our adult Sunday School class was studying Romans 9, a passage in which Paul struggles with a similar frustration. His frustration is much greater than mine, however, since he laments the failure of his own people to put their faith in Christ as the promised Messiah. As we looked at the passage, I was struck by an element of Paul's struggle that was entirely lacking in mine. He says, in Romans 9:1-5,

I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit— I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.

When Paul thinks of the Jews, he has "great sorrow and unceasing anguish" in his heart. How great this anguish must be if he nearly wishes himself cursed and cut off from Christ for their sake!

It is to my shame that I did not feel sorrow and anguish for the Jewish man on the plane. Yet I shouldn't just feel sorrow for this particular Jewish man, or the Jewish people in general, but all those throughout the world who don't know the Lord. That sorrow comes more naturally, perhaps, if we are talking about those close to us who aren't believers, but when we start to think about those much more distant from us, both relationally and physically, it's much easier to let our thoughts pass over them.

Not so with Paul. He devoted his life to proclaiming the gospel to the world, and while he here confesses his anguish for the Jews, his life made it evident that he felt this sorrow for all those who did not profess faith in Christ. I am not saying, of course, that we all need to be career missionaries, but only that our hearts would be filled with the same love and compassion for the people in this world.

Lord, give us the heart of Paul that we too may earnestly desire to make the gospel of Jesus Christ known to the nations.

It's sometimes hard to come up with creative titles for these more historical and analytical posts I sometime write. But that's an aside, so let me get back into it. I’ve been reading through the book, Alaskan Missionary Spirituality, and posting a bit about the “Christianizing” of Alaska, the efforts of both Orthodox missionaries from the 1820s and on, and later Presbyterian missionaries from the 1920s (read Post 1 and Post 2). As with most history, it’s difficult to get an unbiased view of the work there. If you read what I posted, it’s easy to praise the work of the Orthodox there, and to be sympathetic to the victimization of the native population.

But we need to be fair to the work of the American missionaries as well. Certainly today I don’t think we would approve of their methodology; but they, as we are, were a product of their time. It’s always easy to condemn things in the past, but to be fair I think we need to somewhat gracious. The book I’ve been reading is certainly anti-American in its approach. This is what it says:

Alaskan history, like all history, is written from a particular point of view. Seen from the perspective of the dominant Anglo-American culture, the Aleuts are an insignificant minority inhabiting a remote and inhospitable region. They retain characteristics of an alien and ‘un-American’ culture, which informed visitors to the state think should have been abandoned long ago. The history of the Russian colonial period is simply stated. The Russians (being, as everyone knows, inherently wicked and brutal people) invaded Alaska, devastated the fur seal, sea otter, and Aleut populations in a century-long massacre that ended only because the fur market profits fell abruptly or the fur seals were extinct. The Aleuts, according to this version, were exploited, demoralized, enslaved and decimated. Liberty and justice for all arrived in 1867, after which the real history of the territory began…The natives contributed virtually nothing. They were victims or spectators in the real history of Alaska (23).

Often it’s easy to make judgment calls on historical issues such as this. With this information, it’s very easy to write off the American efforts as completely unhelpful. That’s a big stretch, and an unfair call. Certainly, the forced assimilation of native populations in the U.S. has led to a lot of problems---alcoholism, drug addiction, violent crime, suicide, and domestic violence---and an ever bigger sociological problem, that of lack of identity. Rightly so, these problems are now recognized by most as the result of policies that could have been designed and implemented in more helpful ways.

Still, it is hard to believe that missionaries like Jackson and Hall came to Alaska with entirely wrong motives. I am sure that their intent was to honor God and serve both their church and their country as best as they could. But they were a product of their time, and because humanity is sinful, they got things wrong, just as we do today. The purpose of history is not to focus on what was wrong, and whom harm was done to, but to take those lessons and figure out how we can make things better today.

We can learn a lot from the missionary approach of the original Orthodox missionaries. And to be sure, we have. Mission strategies today are much more in line with that particular approach. We can also learn from the problems with the American approach in how we treat indigenous groups. Finally, native people groups themselves, I think, can learn from studying these accounts of history how to preserve (or perhaps recapture) their identity in the face of opposition that requires them to adopt dependency-based identities.

The fact also remains that Aleut culture and identity suffered under American assimilationist policies, and while new churches were started, it can hardly be stated that the gospel flourished. The fact also remains, though, that Aleut culture had originally flourished with the arrival and missionary work of the Orthodox missionaries, and the presence of Orthodoxy still remains today.

Within a generation their condition was considerably improved because without being forced to abandon their traditional culture, without any radical overthrow of their world view, without loss of their language and self-esteem, they were at the same time becoming productive members of a new society, a culture in which they themselves soon came to play an important and determining role (25).

But that is history now. All that remains is not to point fingers and pass judgments, but to know the history, learn the lessons, and move on.

For me, however, looking at the history but also looking to the future, I think we need to pray for the gospel to spread and for workers to be raised up in a state that once had earnest and devoted missionaries, but is now one of the most spiritually-needy areas of North America. And we can take the lessons we've learned from the past and apply them to whatever work is to be done there now.

Reading further in the book I've been paging through, Alaskan Missionary Spirituality, I came to a part discussing the history of American efforts to assimilate the native populations.

After Alaska was transferred to the United States, the influence of the Orthodox began to wane considerably. With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a variety of problems arose for the Alaska mission. All financial support ended, some Soviet officials began to lay claim to land titles in the state, and when the American mission declared itself administratively independent of the Russian Orthodox Church, they were labeled schismatics by the Moscow Patriarchate. It was only fifty years later that they finally gained their independence, establishing the autocephalous Orthodox Church in America.

There were other problems as well. Mass migration of Eastern Europeans to the east coast of the U.S. meant that Orthodoxy’s center in the country was shifted to the major cities of the East, leaving Alaska out in the cold (no pun intended). But there were bigger problems still for the Orthodox in Alaska, particularly the natives who had converted.

Dr. Sheldon Jackson and Dr. S. Hall Young came to Alaska as Presbyterian missionaries. Dr. Jackson, using his family’s social and political connections in the White House, was appointed the first Territorial Commissioner of Education. The twin goals of his term in this office were the Christianization and assimilation of the native population. Jackson felt that the only way to avoid the catastrophic experience of Indian wars…was to bring Native Americans into the public mainstream much in the same way as public schools were doing with the millions of Southern and Eastern European immigrants flooding into Ellis Island about this time (21).

Of course, this was nothing new, as practices such as this had been typical of American expansion into the West as well. It is reflective of the pragmatism of the day. But unlike the Indian Wars in the lower 48, there would be no

military confrontation on the battlefield, [but] the war in Alaska would be fought in the classroom, with the full authority of the federal government backing the monolingual, English-speaking, Protestant missionary-teacher (22).

What Jackson, Young, and the government had not been expecting, however, was that the Aleuts were not like other native Americans.

The main problem with the Aleuts was that they did not fit the expected stereotype. They were already educated, already literate, and already Christian. In fact, they had been teaching other tribes to read, and had sent missionaries to other regions for generations. Articulate enough and politically aware enough to resist Jackson’s educational policies, they soon began to protest (22).

In the end, with all support from Russia cut off due to the Bolsheviks, the assimilationist policies won by default.

There is a significant population of Orthodox Christians in the state of Alaska, and this largely has to do with the efforts of Russian Orthodox missionaries in the state in the mid-1800s. In the library at RTS earlier this week, I saw the book, Alaskan Missionary Spirituality, on the shelf between a number of other Orthodox-related books. I checked it out and paged through it over the last few days. It caught my eye because I spent a short time in the state in 2005, and pretty much fell in love with it. Also, in the city of Sitka I visited St. Michael's Cathedral, where I first learned about the Orthodox presence in the state.

The original missionaries came from the Valaam Monastery originally in Finland (now Russian Karelia), and set out to start a mission in traditional Orthodox fashion:

From the beginning the goal of the Valaam Mission to Alaska was to…establish an American Church, respecting and employing the languages and artistic culture of Alaska within the community of Orthodox churches. This has been the vision of SS. Cyril and Methodius, the Macedonian missionaries to the Slavs centuries earlier (7).

Interestingly, while it may seem that indigenous cultures in places like Alaska would be drastically different than the culture of Orthodox missionaries coming out of Finland and Russia, there actually existed elements of a common foundation that allowed Orthodoxy to flourish as it did.

Every mission needs first to assess the religious traditions and spiritual milieu into which it hopes to bring the Christian gospel…Traditional societies, as have existed since homo sapiens first appeared, have almost universally shared certain common attitudes toward fundamental human experience. They perceive time, space, and nature in ways remarkably different from those of the post-Renaissance West, but in close harmony with medieval and Eastern Christian world views (7-8).

The traditional religion of the indigenous tribes of Alaska is largely that of shamanism. Orthodox missionaries certainly did not seek a syncretistic Christianity meshed with traditional shamanistic religion, but used it more as a springboard from which to present the faith.

The missionaries effectively communicated with the Sugpiaq in the Kodiak region, preaching to them the Christian gospel without directly attacking the traditional shamanistic world view of the natives. They sought, as best can be determined from the archives, to present Christianity as the fulfillment of what the Alaskans already knew rather than its replacement (13).

The Orthodox missionaries had many converts, and the Church grew quickly up until the point that Alaska was transferred to the United States, after which it slowed for a number of reasons. It's presence is still evident in many places in Alaska, including its many parishes and one of three Orthodox seminaries in the United States.

Since church on Sunday night, I've been doing a lot of thinking about being a "laborer for the harvest." I've felt a real affirmation of my calling to go into the ministry after I heard the sermon. It made me squirm in my seat with the preacher's call to really seek to follow the Lord's calling and to be a laborer for the harvest. After the sermon during the offering, the lady on the piano started playing "I Love to Tell the Story" and I had to struggle to keep my emotions in check.

Anyway, last night I had my Foundations of Missions class where the professor urged us to consider sacrificing our cushy lives here in North America and going to serve somewhere in the slums of a third-world megacity. It's been tugging at me since then (realizing it's only the morning after, but anyway...) I became really interested in missions a year or two ago, and what I thought I'd really like to do is to serve in Europe and play a part in the work of the Church there. However, once I got thinking about it, my thoughts turned to the idea that I was just trying to say I wanted to do God's work while disguising the fact that I don't want to give up the comfortable lifestyle I lead. I started to become aware of that struggle within myself just recently. I'll make no bones about it: I'd love to stay in the West, have a nice house, nicely polished late '60s Chevy's, and a bit of money in the bank. The thought of making the sacrifice to go to a completely undeveloped part of the world and giving up everything I have to serve the marginalized scares the living daylights out of me. I don't know if I could do it. The struggle in my mind now is living up to what Isaiah says in ch. 6:8--"Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I. Send me!'" What incredible boldness on the part of Isaiah. I only pray that I may be filled with that too. I desire deep within my heart to serve God wherever He wants to use me. But actually living up to this is going to be a real struggle.