ASSIST News Service
PO Box 2126
Garden Grove, CA 92842-2126
e-mail: assistcomm@cs.com
www.assistnews.net


May 23, 2001

Contact Jerry Welch at 907-846-5333

THE ENGLISH MEDIEVAL LONGBOW MAKER WHO HUNTS BEAR, PREACHES THE GOSPEL AND PASTORS TWO CHURCHES ON PRINCE OF WALES ISLAND, ALASKA

By Dan Wooding

WHALE PASS, ALASKA (ANS) -- Can you imagine a pastor who makes English medieval longbows, and other bows and arrows, hunts bear and dear, and also takes care of two evangelical churches on a huge island that only has about  5,000 inhabitants, many of whom are involved in the lumber trade or are escaping from the authorities? (Pictured: Deer on Prince of Wales Island.)

Well, that's the unusual life of Jerry Welch, the white-bearded owner of the Welchman Longbow Company in Whale Pass, established as a logging community in the 1950s, and the pastor of the Whale Pass Community Church and also the Naukati Bay Alliance Church, both of which are affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance.  Pastor Welch, who is married with five children, sells his high-quality bows and arrows around the world.

His home is in Whale Pass, located on Prince of Wales Island, which is in southeast Alaska, and is a scenic mix of mountains, trees, waters and islands.  The island is the third largest in the United States, behind the big island of Hawaii and Kodiak Island, and is part of the Alexander Archipelago.  The next land to the south is British Columbia, Canada. Explorer Captain George Vancouver named the island in 1793 for the oldest son of King George III of England. (Pictured: Alaska Scene.)

Speaking of his work, Jerry said, "I am a crafter of English longbows, which is a traditional ancient weapon, actually considered a primitive piece of archery equipment, but one steeped in tradition and history and extremely fascinating.  I learned from a master bowyer who was a 1935-1936 world champion archer and a master bowyer for 40 years.  I learned a lot from him, I learned a lot from him and also another bowyer."

Jerry Welsh comes originally from Portland, Oregon.  "When I was in Oregon, I had been working for the State's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for 13 years as an OSHA inspector, and had moved on to private industry. I was working as corporate safety director for one of the large logging and sawmill corporations in Oregon and California.

"My wife Pat and I came up to do a little bit of bear hunting with my bow and arrow; we decided that we ought to start thinking about coming up and de-stressing our lives a little bit.  Little did we know that it was the Lord that put that in our hearts, and we came up 10 years ago in 1990 and the rest is kind of history.  I was able to start making bows almost, well not immediately.  It took me a while to build a place.  When we moved to Whale Pass there was no electricity, no telephones, it was an absolutely remote, out of the way community, and so we generated our own electricity and I just kind of moved on to some property that is owned by my best friend, who is now a pastor down in Carson, Washington, and I used what they call an Alaska mill -- a chainsaw with an attachment on it, and I cut lumber for five months until we had enough lumber to build a place.

"We have been living there for 10 years, and are now building a decent house after that many years.  But that winter after I had built the house I started working on bows.  We didn't know -- like I say this is going out on faith  -- I didn't know if they would sell.  I had a feeling that they would sell, but I didn't know, and so I started making bows about Christmastime and by May I had about 13 bows made. We decided that it was best to go where the longbow men were, and so there was a couple of big longbow shoots back east, one in Michigan, and there is one up in Alberta."

Jerry Welch says it wasn't long before he began to find buyers for his bows and was able to build up a business, which he sees as his tentmaker job to support his pastoral work.

HAD RUN AWAY FROM GOD

He admits that he was not a believer when he and his wife moved to Alaska. "That's not because I hadn't been raised in a Christian family, because I was," he said. "I had, like a lot of young men, run away from God for many, many years.  I didn't know why I was coming back to Alaska, because I came up here in 1965 and I stayed for seven years as a logger.  I logged in Thorne Bay and I worked my way up into supervision."

Eventually the job didn't work out too well and he left Prince of Wales Island in 1970 saying he would never come back.

"So, in 1990 I was wondering, 'why was I coming back.'  I didn't even like the place, yet I wanted to come back and I couldn't understand that at all.  To even make matters more confusing to me, I could feel God in it.  I didn't know what was going on.  I found myself driving and praying through Canada and thinking to myself, 'What are you doing?'"

He said that, before returning to Alaska with a trailer containing yew (to make the bows) and a boat, he and his wife Pat decided to swing by and go to a longbow shoot in Montana. "There were about 400 registered longbow men there, in a camp right beside were some wonderful men who were some of the best trick shooters I have ever seen," said Jerry.  "They had a Christian trick-shooting ministry. These guys came over and would talk to me, and I found myself in tears many times, just feeling God in my life.  So I told them this and it was just like they went crazy.  They jumped up and down, they started singing, and they grabbed me and hugged me and called me brother, and patted me on the back. I think if God had told me what I was coming back to Alaska for, I may not have come up here.  I would have laughed at the concept of me being a pastor." 

When Jerry and his wife arrived in Whale Pass, they were welcomed by Dave West, who had just settled there after retiring from the police force in Ketchikan as a 17-year veteran street cop.

"Before he arrived, Dave had called me up he said, 'Jerry, I'm holding Bible study in Whale Pass.'  What that said to me is that he is not like he used to be when we were running around as wild kids in Portland.  He told me that he had given his life to the Lord. I told Dave that I felt God was calling me and I don't know why. He just broke down and wept over the telephone.  And you got to see this guy - I mean he is 285 lb, 6'3", of nothing but muscle, a tough cop. But God has softened his heart and he started the ministry in Whale Pass.  There were quite a few Christians in Whale Pass at that time because that's when the land sales had just come up and people were moving in, building houses, and so, just by association, he discovered that there were several believers in camp and they wanted to have a Bible study, so David said he would run the Bible study." (Pictured: Norma Wooding arriving on Float Plane at Prince of Wales Island)

After about six months of the Bible study, the attendees said they would like to have a Sunday worship service and so the church began, at first meeting in a community hall, with weekly Bible studies and prayer meeting at other people's homes. Then Dave's father, a pastor in Carson, Washington, came down with brain cancer, so Dave and Glenda, his wife, went there to take care of him and his mom, and they were gone for six months.

"So, nobody else was capable, when it came to taking over the Bible study and the church," said Jerry.  "When they were gone the church part kind of stopped, but I continued on with the Bible study.  I didn't feel qualified to do the Sunday service.  So, they came back for a while, for about another six months, because his dad got better, and then he got worse again so they went back down, and they were down there for another six months. 

"Well, by that time I picked up the Sunday service while he was gone. Eventually it hit me.  This is why I was sent to Alaska and that Dave's not coming back."

He said that one day Dave called him to say he wasn't coming back, and had been called to a new church and that he knew it was God's will for Jerry to take over as pastor.  When Jerry protested that he did not have the training, his friend said, "You've got to understand that who God chooses, he qualifies."

After a while he knew that the church body in Whale Pass needed to have their own building.  "In Naukati, we had the property drop right in our lap, but in Whale Pass there was no such thing forthcoming," said Jerry.

But he managed to find a plot of land that was suitable for the new building.  "By that time we had 20+ people going to church, and it was a thriving community of 125 people," he said.

Dave called him and said that he had found a group of sixteen people who were willing to come to Whale Pass to help construct the church building. "As time went by, each one dropped out.  Finally, I discovered that he had one 70-year-old man and his wife who were willing to come - and they did.  We just couldn't get anything going.  My sawmill broke down; the transmission went out in it and both of my chainsaws went, the transmission in my pickup went, and it became obvious that that's not what God wanted.  So the couple left and went south.  I was wandering around the house one day and I'm wondering what was going on. Then I realized that I had been guilty of pushing God out of the way and trying to do it on my own.  I repented immediately and told God that if He wanted to give us a church building he would have to do it because my arrogance would sink the project. (Pictured: Winter at Whale Pass.)

"All along I had felt that I needed God to help me in this ministry and He had helped me every bit of the way.  People were getting saved and people were growing, but none of this was in my power.  If the building in Whale Pass was to rise out of the muskeg (a bog of North America), God was going to have to do it."

SHORT-TERM OUTREACH MINISTRIES

The very next day, he received a telephone call that told him, "Hi, my name is Gary and I understand you want to build a church." He said he had a group of volunteers from the Olympic peninsula in Washington States who called themselves Short-Term Outreach Ministries (S.T.O.R.M.) He said that one of his team had attended a Promise Keepers meeting in Eugene, and had overheard some guy saying that somebody wanted a church built in Whale Pass.  He told Jerry, "We just feel that the Lord has spoken and wants us to come up and help build your church."

Jerry thought that he was referring to the next spring and said, "Well you sure are welcome. When are you coming up?" The man replied, "We're sitting at the Alaska ferry terminal right now ready to board.  We're going to be there Monday."

Jerry tried to say that he didn't have any board cut, his sawmill didn't work, his chainsaws were broken and his pickup had broken down.  The man replied, "Don't worry about it.  God will take care of that."

True to the man's word, the team came and began building the church from scratch in record time.

OUTLAWS?

When asked if he would give some insight into the individuals that he is ministering to, Jerry replied, "The people who live on this island are really independent.  That's what makes them unique.  Most are hardworking; honest folk but we also have a tough element. They rebel against any kind of authority, including church authority.  They don't want to hear anything about what God has in store for them.  They feel that all God does is restrict them from the sins that they dearly love and want to participate in.  So I would say that out in the bush where people kind of hide away and do their thing, they are not only running away from civil authority but they are running away from spiritual authority.  So it is very difficult to reach them.  To get to them, you pray and pray and pray, and then all of a sudden you start seeing people and they start waving at you. Pretty soon they smile at you, then they'll come over and start talking to you, and pretty soon you have a chance to witness and invite them to church."

When asked what these people were running from, he said, "Most of them are into drugs, alcohol.  They are totally dysfunctional.  They are very dishonest, you might say.  They don't think that stealing is wrong.  Stealing is just something they expect other people to do to them, so therefore that's what other people should expect of them.  That's something that often comes up in church with new converts."

I wondered if some had moved to Prince of Wales Island because they were on the run from the law?

"Well, sometimes they are on the run from the law, but the law here right now is getting pretty sophisticated and so we don't see too much of that anymore," said Jerry. "There was one guy this winter that was hiding out in Whale Pass, but the law got him. Whale Pass is known, too, for its marijuana growing operations in the US Forest Service land around Whale Pass.  They have raided that.  We have the drug and alcohol black helicopters coming over all the time.  However, what's happening, is that some of these old hippie druggies are starting to grow up, they're maturing and their kids are getting to a point where they're saying, 'I don't want my kids to grow up like me.' So, they're starting to stop those kinds of operations and even start to associate with Christians.  Again, it's God working in these faraway places. (Pictured: Jerry Welch conducting baptism in Whale Pass.)

He added, "There is that outlaw mentality here on the island and it goes right along with their individualism.  I think you'll find that it goes right along with their determination not to get an education, determination to live off of others, to live off the system, and yet that's all kind of shutting down around them.  What we're seeing is that these people are having to take another look at their lives and I can see that it is God working.

"The outlaw is still there, but his time is short and even though you might think that the Alaska bush is kind of equivalent to Tucson in 1850, like Tucson the bush is coming into the 21st century, and they realize that there is really no place to hide anymore."

His latest project is to complete the building for the Naukati Bay Alliance church.  The congregation is worshiping in the fellowship hall of the building each Sunday even though the building is only half completed.  They just have to sheet rock the outer room and put in the utilities in it and they believe the whole project will be completed, but the church has run out of money to complete it.  But he knows that this too will be finished in God's time.

Jerry Welch is certainly a most unusual minister of the Gospel.  And he's learned to not only shoot straight with his English longbow, but also from the Word of God.  And there are many people on the island who have found Christ through his straight-shooting approach to God's Word.

Jerry Welch can be contacted at P.O. Box WWP, Whale Pass Ketchikan, AK 99950-0280, USA.  Phone/FAX: 907-846-5333.
_____________________________________________________________________

Dan Wooding is an award-winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife, Norma.  He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and founder of the ASSIST News Service.  Wooding is also the author of some 39 books, (the latest of which is a second printing of "Blind Faith" with Anne Wooding, his 93-year-old mother who was a pioneer missionary to the blind of Nigeria (ASSIST Books).  Wooding was for ten years was a commentator on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC.  Many of his articles can be found on the assist website at www.assistnews.net.
__________________________________________________________

Note: JPEG pictures to illustrate this story are available on request from Dan Wooding at assistcomm@cs.com.

** You may use this story with proper attribution.

To be added or deleted from this list, please send a message to Dan Wooding at assistcomm@cs.com.