She grew up in southern California and became a nurse in Anchorage, where she met the man she’d later marry. She stayed in Alaska, raised three sons and welcomed seven grandchildren. After 37 years in nursing she “felt the call to drop that and go into ministry.”
Now Heather Smith is the commissioned lay pastor at Kuukpik Church in the village of Nuiqsut. “We are about as far north as you can go in Alaska,” she says, “and then you turn right.”
Smith serves a congregation of 42 in a town of about 550. She started as a commissioned lay pastor doing pastoral care in her home congregation, Trinity Church in Anchorage. Then her husband grew ill and died, and she told David Dobler, who then led the Presbytery of the Yukon, that she felt called to work with native people.
“He started sending me to the villages that did not have pastors,” for a week or two or three at a time, Smith said. She did that for a year and was well received, but “I just had a yearning to settle somewhere, instead of just come and go, come and go.”
When the Kuukpik congregation decided to try to call a pastor, Smith was willing to give it a try. Between her husband’s pension and her own retirement benefits, she has a financial cushion, so “I can live pretty comfortably without a lot of finances” from the congregation. She stays in Nuiqsut for two months, leaves for a month to visit her family, then comes back — a rotating schedule that keeps her connected both to her grandchildren and her congregation.
The presbytery pays her travel costs; the congregation provides a manse and covers utility costs. “I am blessed here,” Smith said. “I just feel so much like I am in a place where God called me, created me for … I really love these people.”
She has considered going to seminary — she’d been an elder and deacon for years — but feels she’s working right now where the need is. “God has been training me all along,” Smith said. “Everything I’ve ever learned, I’m putting to use here now.”
Some in the village, as in the rest of the world, struggle with alcohol and drug addiction and domestic violence. “The hardest thing is to help these people get into a place of sobriety so they can actually hear the word of God and respond to it,” Smith said.
She has seen wonderful things. A family of five children asked to be baptized recently, after all having come to know Jesus in Vacation Bible School. Their parents, who don’t go to church, were accepting. Smith has just performed her fifth wedding and has two more scheduled this summer, some for couples that have been together and have children, but now have decided to marry.
“I’ve always had this sense that I was supposed to be praying for healing, that’s why I went into nursing,” Smith said. “This is healing of their hearts. This is healing of past wounds. It’s a different kind of healing that God’s called me into.”
