Greetings from the NPC office, and from nearer the North Pole—the Covenant Church of Alaska!
When you think of “Third-World,” you normally do not think of the United States of America. Yet there are a few Covenant pastors who reside in Bush Alaska who live without running water and flush toilets, in homes that are sub-standard, and are hundreds of miles from the nearest road system. North Pacific Conference churches have generously contributed for the past two years to remodel the parsonage in the village of Scammon Bay where we are forging a partnership with the church and the village. The NPC sent work teams to the village in July 2008 and June 2009. We hope to continue taking groups to Scammon Bay.
Scammon Bay Covenant Church is celebrating a recent development; they will be welcoming a new pastor this spring. The church has been without a pastor for nearly three years. Jason Stromstad, a recent graduate of North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, is from Minnesota, and he believes that God is calling him to Scammon Bay. He is being supported in part and sent by his home church in Roseau, MN and will be ordained this summer at the ECC Annual Meeting. He has served in Alaska during the 1980s at KICY and also in recent years at our Bible camp in Unalakleet. In cooperation with the Roseau Covenant Church, I (Rodney) have asked Pastor Stromstad to finish raising the financial support necessary to be a missionary pastor in Scammon Bay. His situation is not a lot different from many of our missionaries to foreign countries. Scammon Bay Covenant Church could still benefit greatly from a financial partnership with the North Pacific Conference.
The recent economic downturn has had little effect on these communities whose unemployment has exceeded 80% for decades. That is why most Bush Alaskan churches, including Scammon Bay, are not able to pay their pastor much of a salary, if any at all. The cost-of-living in Bush Alaska has always been very high, but with the skyrocketing fuel prices from last year, oil to heat the homes reached nearly $7.50 a gallon! And a loaf of plain white bread neared $5.00!
We are sending this letter in advance to prepare you for a telephone call from Pastor Stromstad. He will also be attending Leadership Matrix on March 6th. He would love to meet with you and/or your mission committee just to tell his story. We are humbled by the strong sense of his call, his determination to go to a place that is literally located in “the utter most parts of the world” and by his love for the people of Scammon Bay, who are very eager for him to arrive. Please be open as to how the Lord may have you partner with both the Scammon Bay Covenant Church and Pastor Stromstad in the future. Jason Stromstad can be reached at 269.779.4588.
Thank you so much for your prayerful consideration in this mission. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
Fellow servants for His sake,
Rodney J. Sawyer, Field Director—Evangelical Covenant Church of Alaska
Mark Novak, Superintendent—North Pacific Conference
Living Hope Center Update
It was so exciting when Mercy Walk was able to send the grant they had secured for the restoration of the basement of the Living Hope Center in Targu Jiu, Romania. I thought you would enjoy reading in Lavinia Dreana’s own words the rationale and progress of the restoration.
“The Living Hope Center is going though historical times. For many years we have been working with children, sick people, families, teenagers and leaders in order to reach our mission of bringing healing in this broken country of ours, a country that was robbed and put in spiritual, social and economical darkness for so many years by a merciless communist regime.
One of our great passions all these years was to grow and equip leaders around us, to train people to do the things we had been doing, to help people grow to a higher level of knowledge and leadership.
For doing so, we organized a lot of training sessions and conferences where the speakers were strong Christian leaders, like pastors and missions leaders, professors, directors of schools and business people.
But in all these years we were split in different small rooms, forced to rent out all sorts of limited facilities that lacked even the basics.
In spite of all these, the vision kept on going… and going… but with the hope that ONE DAY we will get to have a Christian Conference and Family Center all properly equipped for equipping the Christian leaders that Romania so desperately needs.
The construction work for the new Center began on March 2, 2009 and we want to invite you to walk side by side with us as we accomplish one of the greatest dreams of our mission work in the South of Romania.
It’s not an easy job as we are facing a lot of obstacles, but it’s a dream that MUST come true for the benefit of hundreds and thousands of people who will be reached through the leaders that will be trained in this center.
We will send pictures along the process so that you are kept up with the progress. We are so thankful for the $28,000 Grant that Mercy Walk has sent for the restoration.
May God bless you for all your support, efforts, sacrifices and generous hearts all along this road! You are greatly appreciated and honored by us and the people in TJ!”
