About Us
Get Involved
Give
History
The village of McGrath is one of over 200 villages scattered throughout the interior of Alaska. Home to around 300 residents, it’s located just over 200 miles from the road system, on the Kuskokwim River. Our church, McGrath Community Church, is the only evangelical option in town. Which far from being a sad thing, has actually been a wonderful experience as children of God from many different cultural and denominational backgrounds gather together to worship the Creator and learn from His word, united by a common adoring allegiance to Jesus Christ. As the MCC family grew and matured, the inevitable desire to expand ministry beyond our village grew.
In 2018 the Church’s ministry began to take on a new shape. As we sought to reach out to our neighboring friends and churches in other villages, we found ourselves being faced with two recurring issues. We needed to gather together with those we were trying to build relationships with, and we needed somewhere to be able to lodge our visiting friends. You see, McGrath being located where it is poses a lot of logistical obstacles for building and maintaining relationships. As a rule of thumb, we’re only accessible by plane. No roads in or out of our village. And so it goes for our neighbors. Some of whom have it even more difficult than us. We wanted to overcome the isolation that separated small Church bodies, but gathering proved not only logistically and financially burdensome, but also pointless if we had nowhere to lodge our guests.
One Wilderness was dreamed up as an attempt to address these two issues. In 2020 we purchased an abandoned lodge that had been condemned after a fire, and began the process of renovating it into a hotel and gathering hall capable of hosting large numbers of people. We then partnered with like-minded Christian organizations throughout Alaska to help overcome the transportation hurdles. SEND North, Missionary Aviation Repair Center, Arctic Barnabas, and even individual pilots worked together with their mechanics, pilots, aircraft, and support teams to fly to neighboring villages and transport people to and from our gatherings.
What the Lord has brought about in the years since 2018 is a huge network of people, churches, and organizations all working together to help facilitate regular gatherings of believers (and the curious) from interior villages in McGrath. Gatherings that serve to build and maintain intimate relationships as a vehicle for seeing the church edified and encouraged, and Christ’s name glorified. One Wilderness exists as a tool to help McGrath Community Church facilitate and organize all these moving parts.
Ministry
One Wilderness seeks to edify and encourage the church of the interior of Alaska, and all that that may entail. Behind the scenes we work to plan, fund, and host what we have come to call gatherings. This includes working with partnering organizations and churches to transport people safely to and from these events, arranging for partnering churches and families to come and help staff the events, booking speakers, raising the funds to carry out these tasks, and planning the events.
However, all the behind-the-scene activity has as it’s aim and passion edification and encouragement of local churches. There are around 250 villages scattered throughout the vast Alaskan interior wilderness. These communities are largely isolated from one another. 1 in 10 will have an evangelical church presence, and of these, many will be without leadership or even a weekly service. What does it look like for those churches in the interior, blessed with spiritual health and leadership, to minister to our neighboring church families? How do we build and maintain trusting relationships so as to be mutually edified and encouraged when we’re so uniquely isolated from one another? We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we do claim to have one answer. And that’s gathering together regularly.
We want our gatherings to be low (or no) cost to those attending, frequent, and brief. The low cost and brevity of the gatherings is to remove as many obstacles as possible for the guests. The frequency of the gatherings is to help achieve our church’s goal of developing lasting, trusting, and deepening intimate relationships. We are trying to host 6 gatherings a year. Each gathering runs from a Friday to a Monday. Participants are encouraged to make a donation if they are able, but there is no cost for attending. We break the six gatherings into three categories. Two gatherings are focused on church leadership, two are focused on marriages, and two are focused on gathering church families.
One Wilderness seeks to bring in excellent speakers to feed church leaders and couples. And when church families are gathered, we focus on learning about what the Lord is doing in each village and how we can be praying for one another. The name of the game is building relationships over meals, coffee, and through worship and bible study as whole family units. One final dynamic of One Wilderness is our desire to have the McGrath church family visit our neighboring communities between gatherings. The aim being building relationships in those communities as well as in our own.
Beliefs
Standing behind this organization is McGrath Community Church, a Bible believing church. We like to say, if the Bible teaches it, we believe it. Now obviously that isn’t very helpful in defining our actual doctrinal distinctives, but it is a helpful statement when considering our unique context. In nearly all (if not all) of the interior villages where an evangelical church exists, that church is the only evangelical gathering. No matter your views or background with regard to spiritual gifts, the end times, the Lord’s supper, baptism, the age of the earth, worship style, church polity, the nature of God’s sovereignty in salvation, or bible versions, if you love Jesus and want to gather with His family to worship and learn of Him, you have only one option. Out here, believers don’t have the benefit of churches in every shape and color. If a church can’t figure out how to faithfully and courageously preach the word of God, while at the same time maintaining an environment of unity and patience and understanding, then it will relegate brothers and sisters for whom Christ died to sorrowful isolation.
One Wilderness seeks to keep these two convictions in the forefront of our ministry. Christ’s church must be edified and encouraged in and through the Word of God, and all it teaches, without exception. And, in keeping with the Word of God, the edification and encouragement of Christ’s church through the Word of God is a process that requires patience and love at every turn. Further, we hope and pray that part of the edification of the church will include the salvation of new members into God’s family. This means that we want people to know what we believe because we are not ashamed of these truths but see them as beautiful. We also want people to know who we are and what kind of encouragement they are going to receive with us. However, we do not post our beliefs as requirements for attending our gatherings. That said, there is a difference between attending our gatherings and ministering at our gatherings. We do seek to build relationships with “Like-Minded” churches and organizations. So, following is a list of our deeply held doctrinal beliefs, beliefs that will be shared by those ministering in conjunction with One Wilderness.
- We believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. Which holds that there is one God. There are three equally divine persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit.
- We believe in the inspiration, authority, knowability (clarity or perspicuity), inerrancy, and sufficiency of the Word of God.
- We believe in the gospel. That eternal life is a gift of God that cannot be earned, is attained by grace alone through faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ, who being God, became man, lived a perfect life, was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead as a substitutionary payment for the sins of the world.
- We believe in the eternal, conscious, and terrible punishment of the lost by God in Hell.
- We believe in the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit, which includes His giving to the church spiritual gifts.
- We believe in the universal church, which consists of all those, past, present, and future, that have believed in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
- We believe in the great commission. The church is charged with the responsibility of bringing the gospel message to all peoples, of all ethnicities, cultures, languages, and geographical locations.
- We believe in the physical return of Jesus Christ.
- We believe in sanctification of believers. All believers are called to grow in holiness, evermore conforming their lives to the character of God and submitting themselves to His will as revealed in His word.
Leadership
One Wilderness, as a registered non-profit organization, has a board of directors. This board together, with the McGrath Community Church, truly functions as a ministry team. We have a large group of brothers and sisters in Christ, each with different perspectives, gifts, passions, and responsibilities. What we do, we do together. We seek the Lord’s direction together, problem solve together, plan together, and minister together.
While this ministry team dynamic means that everyone has a voice and decisions are made in the context of a Christ-following community, we do still have several people that have voluntarily taken on specific responsibilities. These are the members of our One Wilderness’s 501c3 board.
Dwight Wenger
Dwight serves as a missionary pilot and flight instructor for Missionary Aviation Repair Center, in Soldotna, Alaska. He also pastors a church, River of Life, in the same city.
Joyce Turner
Joyce serves as our board secretary, and is pretty much solely responsible for keeping us organized and complaint. She is a long-time McGrath, Alaska resident that has faithfully served the church and the local school district for decades as a teacher and administrator.
Brad Sturm
Brad serves as our Director. He served as a church planter in central Mexico before moving to McGrath to serve as a pastor/elder at McGrath Community Church.
Norm Sturm
Norm, Brad’s dad, worked in the field of public safety as a firefighter/paramedic and emergency manager since the late 70’s. He now serves as a pastor/elder in Christ Community Church in Sierra Vista, Arizona.
Joe Troyer
Joe serves as our board treasurer. With a background in carpentry and bookkeeping he has a heart for the Lord and ministry, serving as an elder/pastor at his church and on the board of Freedom House, an addiction recovery residency program in Soldotna, Alaska.
Barney Funk
Barney grew up in Western Alaska as a missionary child. He now lives in McGrath working as the local Post Master, and serving McGrath Community Church as a pastor/elder.
