Apostles: That's What Changed

 

Some years ago, my father sent me the above text on my birthday.   Linda and I left Louisiana in 1972 immediately after our marriage to live in Alaska.  We lived there about 40 achingly wonderful years.  We had learned to thrive in cool and cold weather.  Hot weather was not on our radar.

 

There was no criticism implied.  It was just an honest question.  We had recently moved to become part of the Bethel movement, which has its roots in Redding, California.

 

I had come to adult faith in my mid 30s.  Linda has been a Jesus follower most of her days.  We had in our years in Alaska some great, and a couple of not-so-great experiences, with churches in Alaska.  

After I thought about dad's question for a while, I replied with a very long message. 

 
What changed was, in a word, apostles.  The three apostle-led church communities of which we have been a part since going to Sweden (Word of Life Church in Uppsala, Anchorage City Church, and now Bethel) have changed the course of our lives.

When we took off for Alaska in 1972, it was to pursue a dream of a place and a way of life.....Alaska was the land of our dreams.  In the months before our marriage, we talked much about Alaska.  We read and looked at pictures.  And then we came to Alaska, and it was for decades living inside a dream.  The experiences we had there, the friendships we forged are bright in our memories....and if truth be told, a little painful today, because we miss them.

And then, unexpectedly, we found ourselves in Sweden, at a controversial (to many Swedes, anyway) church that operated in great faith under the leadership of an apostle, Ulf Ekman.  Apostles as a current force in the Church was a new concept to us then, until that time thinking of them only as a part of Biblical history.  What a sea change in our spiritual lives that was!  By the time we left Sweden, our dreams had changed from a place (Alaska) to a mission (the Kingdom).  We almost stayed, you know.

Back in Anchorage after five years of coming and going to Sweden, we connected with  Anchorage City Church, another church led by an apostle, Richard Irwin.  That was another powerful experience and great time of spiritual growth, and a time of intensive pastoral service.  In 2011 Richard turned the church over to his son, Rich, a fine young man with fire in his bones, a leader and a shepherd. 

About that time we were becoming more and more aware of the move of God in an unlikely (to us) place: Northern California.  So......we came here for a one year sabbatical....which turned into something else!

 

This church, Bethel,  also is led by an apostle, Bill Johnson, and interestingly, by a prophet, Kris Vallotton.  The entire five-fold ministry (Ephesians 4:11) is in powerful operation here.  Miracles are common here......real miracles, including cancer being completely healed.  Prophecy is common, even sometimes very accurate foretelling prophecy.  People come to the Lord every week at our church services.....about 10 at the 8am service alone last Sunday.  People are showing up here from all over the earth to be part of this movement.....a few we have met didn't even know about Bethel......they just know the Lord told them to go to Redding......and then they discovered the church.

Today, the church is about 9,000 people, but even more significant than the large numbers is the global reach of the church: thousands of churches are influenced by the ministry of this church, and if you count the ministry of music and praise song writing, the influence in the lives of men and women reaches into the millions.  Bethel Music songs are some of the most popular in churches around the world today.  

So....what changed is the influence of apostles in our lives.  Living in the context of apostleships changed our dreams from an amazing place (Alaska) to an amazing Kingdom.  Our dreams now are of the increase of His government and His Kingdom which brings all the good gifts of Heaven to Earth for all people.

It DOES feel strange to me sometimes to be in this seasonally very hot place.  But I know why we are here.....and the powerful impact this apostleship has had not just on Linda and I, but also in the spiritual lives of our family.

It also feels like the favor of God that the really hot days are relatively few, and even they begin with lovely mornings in the 70s.....and 2/3 of the year is generally pleasant.  And then there is this beautiful natural landscape of Northern California with wild country abounding, waterfalls, tall mountains, rivers, wildlife, friendly people.....we didn't expect it, but we love it!

You started this, you know.  It all began when you invited me at the turn of the century to go to Sweden with you and mom to see the land of my ancestors.  :)

I know you weren't asking for a treatise....but THAT is what changed.

Thoughts on Leaving Alaska

41 years ago this summer Linda I became newly-minted Alaskans.  We had married in late May, and took off that same afternoon with all we owned in a pickup truck headed for the 49th state.  Alaska was a shared dream, and for Linda, a dream birthed in her early teens.  To our surprise, our long Alaska season is coming to an end later this summer.  More on that later, but if you are interested, I'd like to tell you a little bit about our Alaska season.

Linda and me in Fairbanks, 1974

Except for three 10-month periods of living in Uppsala, Sweden over five years, and more recently 9 months in Redding, California, we have been Alaskans since 1972.  We have lived in Fairbanks, Delta Junction, Juneau, Douglas, Anchorage, Delta Junction (again), and most recently, Anchorage (again).

Our children Glen and Katie joined us in Fairbanks early in our time in Alaska.  While they have been "Outside" many times; like us, Alaska has been geographic, work, and cultural "center".  Both live in Alaska today.  I won't tell any more of their story; it is theirs to tell or not.  It has been great for us to grow together as a family in Alaska.

In that time, I worked at odd jobs, served at KUAC FM/TV at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, retired after 25 years with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Wildlife Conservation Division, served as a pastor at Delta Christian Center and Anchorage City Church, developed and sold the Alaska Outdoors Supersite, served as a volunteer firefighter, hunted, fished, trapped, flew hundreds of hours in small aircraft over wild country, wrote a book, floated rivers, built a hovel and then a real house from the ground up, lived without electricity or running water, ate a lot of moose, caribou, halibut, deer and crab that I brought home, did some really smart stuff, more than a little boring stuff, and some really, really dumb stuff, had the crap scared out of me more times than I can remember, raised chickens and pigs, kept bees, climbed mountains, made many great friends and a few enemies, facilitated and taught marriage courses, lit really big fires on purpose, encountered the griz, experienced wild country few have ever seen, helped re-launch a faltering church in an Alaska community, gotten up close and some times way too personal with large wildlife, gotten seasick and puked on big water, officiated at marriages and a funeral, floated backwards in a canoe on a wilderness river in the dark, sent VHF amateur radio transmissions via knife-edge diffraction over the Alaska Range and bounced others off auroral curtains to "the lower 48", camped out below zero, nearly frostbit my nose, escaped early death several times (the backwards-down-the-river time being the first of them), watched the northern lights dancing like green, purple and red fire overhead, heard wild wolves howling as we sat by a wilderness campfire, and generally had a glorious time in almost every corner of the Great Land.

Linda had her own share of Great Land adventures working as a teacher for Alaska State Operated Schools, the Fairbanks North Star Borough, and the Juneau School District, a radio service company, and the Alaska Outdoor Council.  She also served as a pastor in the same churches as I, and raced to the aid of Alaskans and visitors time and again as a Delta Junction Emergency Medical Technician.  She visited the North Slope, stayed for days in Bush Alaska far from roads, learned Morse code and radio theory, slept in the back of pickup trucks, backpacked in the Fortymile Hills, cooked on wood fires, wood cook stoves, over white gas, propane, electric and buffalo chip fires.  Well, maybe not the buffalo chip part, but it sounds good, and she could have :}.  She has also camped below zero with young children, ridden snowmachines, three-wheelers, four-wheelers, our horses, cross country skis, bicycles, helicopters, small aircraft, float planes, canoes, rafts, and an old `72 Ford pickup that we put 200,000 miles on. She has dipped salmon out of a scary river -- and then cleaned and cooked them, showed kids how to make snow angels, helped teens graduate, made way more really great friends than me, taught two amazing young people at home, worked with me on a business that finally got off the runway, and generally been the coolest Alaska chick ever.

I'm telling you all this because I have been looking back over this season to see where we were, what we did, who we connected with, what we did to impact our communities, and what it all meant.  Today, in the waning days of this summer and this larger season in our lives, I want to say that we always love connecting with friends....especially now before we leave.  In mid August, the movers are coming to our south Anchorage home and packing us up.  We're boarding an Alaska Airlines jet a few days later.  We'll be at our new house in Redding in Northern California late on August 18th.

Why are we leaving Alaska?  Well, it started as a 9-month sabbatical at the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry and this is how it has turned out.  That's another story and the beginning of a new season, but if you are interested, there's more detail in the post Seasonal Change.

We are looking forward to this new season in our lives, but I gotta tell you, it feels strange to leave Alaska; both the country and many friends here.  Both are deeply engraved on our hearts, and I know there will be times in the months and years ahead when we wistfully remember this glorious Alaska season in our lives.

The Castle, the Cathedral and the Smokestacks

In a beautiful city whose skyline boasts the distinctive shape of a castle of Swedish kings and the soaring spires of the flagship cathedral of the Church of Sweden, the very tall smokestacks of Uppsala's Vattenfall seem at first a little out of place. But I came to understand over the course of a year spent there recently that they, like the castle and the cathedral, are monuments in their own right. 

The purposes of the castle and the cathedral were fairly obvious, but I did not for some months understand the purposes of the smokestacks. They were not far from our house, and each time I stepped out, I could see them over the tops of the trees near our house. I thought they were simply industrial smokestacks. 

A neighbor explained them to me one day in excellent English. The heat always on during cold days and nights in our multi-unit house was piped to us from the Vattenfall (= waterfall) plant, he said. Electricity comes from the same source; augmented, of course, by a regional electric power grid. 

What surprised me about what he said was that waste burnables are also burned here, and contribute to heat and light. It was a cool afternoon, but even so, the smoke was not very visible. Efficient scrubbers cleaned most of the particulates out of the smoke stream. 

Nearly all of Uppsala is heated from the plant at the base of the Vattenfall smokestacks. Steam radiates out through the community in subterranean corridors. Radiators in the floor or along the walls or in heat exchangers are always on in inverse proportion to outside temperature. Individual radiator controls allow for variation within a building. 

We had pieced together much of the rest of the system over our preceding months in the community. We had learned early on that trash must be separated before disposal: source sorting it is called. The signs - in Swedish -- on the garbage containers outside our row house were cryptic at first, but my lexicon clarified that the biggest was for burnables. Another was for organic material - compost. Others were for cardboard or heavy paper, hard plastic, and metal. Disposal trucks came on a regular schedule to haul away one or the other. Our house association paid for this. 

We could throw away plastic drink containers if we wanted, but the fact was we were strongly motivated to return them to a grocery store. The bigger containers had a return deposit fee of about $0.40. Besides….it was fun to put the bottles in the automated return devices. We put them in headfirst, waited for the green light and put in the next bottle. Crates of beverage bottles could be returned for credit in specialized machines in larger stores. Beverages packaged in aluminum cans had automated machines, too, and printed credit slips just like those for plastic. We would hand the bar-coded credit slip to the cashier, and reduce the overall price for our grocery items. 

 If you looked at my list above closely, you might have noticed the absence of glass waste, newspapers and magazines. Glass items we cleaned and brought to large round-top containers scattered around the community marked "colored" and "clear." Swedes use more glass in packaging food than we do. Light bulbs had to go into yet another container, as did dry cell batteries. Newspapers and magazines we placed in a central location in the common area of the house. They were bagged monthly and left out for the recycling trucks. 

We never threw away anything large, like a television set, a car, or a computer, but each of these have disposal procedures as well. I think the largest item I disposed of was our small Christmas tree. I cut off its limbs, cut the trunk in half and placed it among the burnables. Sometime later it returned to us in the form of electricity and heat. 

There is more to the recycling system than I have indicated here. Our limited command of the language kept us from more fully understanding its intricacies, but what we saw impressed us with its integration and completeness. We never thought it onerous or complicated. We quickly adapted to life with multiple disposal containers. 

While we observed a bit of litter in some particularly public places, by and large, Sweden is an exceptionally clean country. A well-entrenched recycling system contributes to that, but I believe it is also true that most Swedes are temperamentally inclined to keep their surroundings clean. 

Pollution is a fact of life wherever people live, but Swedes have done an impressive job of reducing the fouling of their air and water. The waters of Lake Mälaren flow in several channels through Stockholm, the capital and largest city. In the summer months, some Swedes fish right downtown - and the fact that they can and do eat their catch is a remarkable testament of their national commitment to clean air and water. 

While I recognize great differences exist between Sweden and Alaska, there may be some lessons for us here. Uppsala is about the latitude of Homer, and the climate is somewhat similar to Anchorage, although a little warmer in winter. 

People in Uppsala don't seem to think much about recycling and sorting their waste…it's just the way these people live. It is an obviously more expensive system than that here, but seems to me to have advantages in reducing waste and energy costs. 

My first glimpses of Uppsala took in with admiration the huge spires of the cathedral. Built beginning in the 13th century, it is a national treasure and a testament to the Christian heritage of the nation. Only slightly newer, the castle occupies a commanding hill nearby. Unusual in shape, it is still obviously a building of significance in the community. 

While I admire these two edifices, I find my imagination returning again and again to the tall Vattenfall smokestacks and the carefully organized system of recycling and reuse they represent that is so well applied in this ancient Swedish city.

I originally published this in 2003, I believe. A shorter form of this also appeared in the Anchorage Daily News.