Missionary Who Served Alaska Villagers for 72 Years Celebrates Her 100th Birthday
This missionary has chosen to devote 72 years of her life in one of the most challenging places in America—Alaska, the largest state in the United States by area but the most sparsely populated.
Nicknamed The Last Frontier and located in the northwest extremity of North America, Alaska has also been identified as one of the least religious states of the U.S. in terms of church membership, along with Pacific Northwest states Washington and Oregon.
In Alaska's forbidding climate and geography, Presbyterian missionary Alice Green has found her heart and home. And now, as she celebrates her 100th birthday this month, she is being honored for making "God, the Holy Spirit and Jesus loving and understanding" to the various ethnic groups who populate Alaska.
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Green served Presbyterian congregations made up mostly of Alaskan natives and Koreans while in Anchorage. She also worked at the Alaska Native Medical Center as a chaplain, according to Alaska Dispatch News.
But she made her biggest mark in Savoonga, one of Alaska's smallest, most remote villages.
There, Green lived in a small house and used sled and dogs to travel and share the gospel to villagers. She was with these people in various occasions in their lives, officiating funerals and hosting games for the kids.
She also helped build a church whose weekly service was always jam-packed with nearly all of the town's 250 residents.
Jenny Alowa, one of the church parishioners, said Green will long be remembered by the people whose lives she touched deeply.
"We shaped her and she shaped us. Both ways. She was part of us. There was no color line, no nothing. Because her heart was in the right place," Alowa told the Alaska Dispatch News.
"She was not that type of typical missionary—'shame on you'—you know those things. She made God, the Holy Spirit and Jesus loving and understanding," Alowa said.
Green said she has fallen in love with the people of Alaska. "The reason I liked it so much was because they were such fine people," she said.
Green retired from her missionary work and left the village in 1982 when she turned 65.
But she kept serving the people of Alaska even in her retirement, leading a Bible study at a local church. She finally stopped at the age of 98 when her vision began failing.
Green still lives in Anchorage, Alaska.
According to a study made by the Pew Research Center, Alaska is home to a higher-than-average number of people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion, with more than one-in-four Alaskans (27 percent) describing their religion as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, compared with 16 percent among the adult population of the rest of the U.S.
