Kunéix Hídi Northern Light United Church in Juneau hosted an acknowledgment and apology service for the racist closure of Memorial Presbyterian Church.
Sasha Soboleff, son of the Rev. Walter Soboleff, at a service of acknowledgement and apology at Kunéix Hídi Northern Light United Church in Juneau on Oct. 8, 2023.Updated: seconds ago
But Soboleff and his family never received anything resembling an apology from Presbyterian leadership — that is, until Sunday. Soboleff had revived the church in the years following his first service in 1940, which welcomed both Alaska Native and non-Native congregants during a time when segregation for Alaska Natives was commonplace. Worshippers from all across the region could tune into weekly radio broadcasts of the popular pastor’s sermons, which were broadcast in Tlingit and English.
Sunday’s reconciliation service included three formal apologies from Rev. Bronwen Boswell of the General Assembly, Rev. Laura Terasaki of the Northwest Coast Presbytery, and Jim Alter of Kunéix Hídi Northern Light United Church. She continued, “Today we acknowledge that during those early decades leading up to Memorial Presbyterian Church’s 1962 diamond jubilee, Presbyterians remained so fixated on a Victorian notion of Indigenous peoples’ inferiority that Presbyterians were actively failing to remove the beam of bureaucratic barbarism from of our own eye.”
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