pat loughery

Orthodox Alaska
by Michael Oleska
St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press (1992)
225 pages

Description of the Book
The Christianization of native Alaska is the story of conflicting cultures (American and Russian), theologies (Protestant and Orthodox), and approaches to the native cultures.

The book discusses the historical background of orthodoxy, the Russian church, and the Russian culture in the late 1700’s. It then gives a historical analysis of the successes of the Alaskan mission and its development as a culture within the Alaskan culture. It finishes with the next historical stage for the Alaskan people, as the Russian government withdrew from Alaska and ceded control to the Americans, giving access to American protestant missionaries with a very different worldview.

Interpretation of the Book
The Alaskan mission of the Russian Orthodox church is one of the key examples of Orthodoxy’s ability to recognize the host > and work within it, identifying spiritual markers within the culture that have value in communicating the Christian faith. The Orthodox faith’s cosmology meshed well with that of the native peoples in Alaska, and the Orthodox willingness to see the good in native cultures was a strategic decision that made allies with their neighbors, unlike the approach taken by the Protestant missionaries who saw the native cultures as inherently wrong and evil, and sought to educate the natives out of their paganism.

Application
The development of a missional theology is deeply embedded in the culture of those missionaries who are being sent. The author argues quite positively for the worldview of the Orthodox church, at all times preferring the Orthodox way to the protestant ways, and it is difficult to separate cultural pride from historical reality (if the author’s pride in his church’s mission is biased in any way).

But the question of whether the culture of the host community has anything good in it continues today for those of us called into postmodern and/or suburban cultures. For many, both postmodern and suburban cultures have “nothing of value” in which the Gospel can or should take root. The Alaskan Orthodox approach to mission is very similar to the Celtic way, identifying and working within the host culture to rally around common touchpoints that point the way to Christ.