Every Saturday night or Sunday morning, Danny Courson sends the pastors in St. Clair Baptist Association a text to encourage them.
“I ask them how I can pray for them that week,” said Courson, St. Clair’s associational mission strategist. “It’s opened a lot of opportunities for them to share situations with me.”
But a while back, he learned of a specific set of pastors who didn’t have that kind of support — the 21 pastors who serve in the Tanana Valley Baptist Association in Alaska.
“When I found out they hadn’t had a director of missions since 2011, it just really burdened me,” Courson said. “I had a burden for those pastors that they needed someone to talk to, to confide in, to share prayer requests with.”
Supporting pastors
He asked if there was a way he could volunteer as their associational missionary during Alabama Baptists’ partnership with Alaska Baptists.
Jae McKee, director of missions and church planting for the Alaska Baptist Resource Network, told him he thought that was a great idea and encouraged him to reach out to the association to see if they would be interested.
When Courson did, the answer was a resounding yes.
“Before Christmas, I flew up there just to meet with the pastors and encourage them,” he said. “It was a great experience. We had guys who drove two-and-a-half hours just to be able to sit down for lunch, talk about ministry, share their needs and concerns and put a name and a face together.”
In Alaska, everything is so spread out that there are not a lot of people close by for pastors to share their concerns with, he said.
‘Regular communication’
But now they have Courson checking in on them. They get his weekly texts. He knows what’s going on in their churches.
“We have regular communication to encourage them, find out their needs and pray for them and line them up with partners who can meet their specific needs,” he said.
He’s planning to visit twice a year to have those conversations face to face, and he’s planning to take pastors up there too who could establish partnerships with the churches.
“Jae asked me if I could recruit more associational mission strategists to do the same thing,” Courson said. “It’s a tough context, with everything so spread out, but most of the pastors are long-term pastors up there. They know the context. They just need encouragement and help along the way.”
Igniting a passion
Ric Camp, associational mission strategist for Shelby Baptist Association, has also been working to encourage pastors in Alaska for the past two years. He went there on a vision trip in February 2022 and realized how isolated the churches there were.
Since then, he’s helped in a variety of ways, but most recently he took a group of pastors predominantly from Shelby Association to lead workshops on evangelism, disciple making, deacon ministry, children’s ministry and student ministry.
“We had a great turnout,” Camp said. “It was basic training to get them together and encourage them, and they were just hungry for it.”
He said the experience was also good for the church leaders he took with him from Shelby Baptist Association. It “really ignited in them” a passion to look for opportunities to serve there, and many of them are looking at partnerships individually, he said.
Not only that — their October 2023 training trip was the launchpad for something new. Kevin Blackwell, executive director of Samford University’s Ministry Training Institute, went with them on the trip to lead some of the sessions. After talking with Jim Hamilton, pastor of Anchor of Hope Church in Kenai, Alaska, the two decided to start an MTI group there for ongoing theological training.
Meeting needs
“There’s a tremendous need up that way to train folks in Scripture,” Blackwell said. “They started this term with a class on biblical interpretation, and Jim is doing a great job teaching it.”
Blackwell said he would love to see this expand in Alaska.
And McKee said he would love to see more associations in Alabama get involved in efforts like those led by Courson and Camp.
“Those two guys in those associations have taken up the gauntlet,” he said. “They took the partnership seriously and have continued to come up. To have someone in that role who cares for our pastors and church planters at that level has been a big blessing.”
For more information about how to partner Baptists in Alaska, visit alaskabrn.com/get-involved/mission-opportunities or email McKee at jae@alaskabrn.com.
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