Unalakleet, Alaska, population 700, sits on the shore of the Bering Sea. Everything, including mail, groceries, and people, arrives by plane. When a blizzard grounds the runway with 20-below-zero winds, everyone has to wait it out. This is where Joel Oyoumick Jr. grew up.
Oyoumick’s father, Joel Matthew Oyoumick, served as pastor of Unalakleet Covenant Church for thirteen years and remained deeply involved with the church as a board member for decades. Oyoumick attended Covenant High of Alaska, a boarding school that shaped leaders across the state. He still remembers Bible classes that met in brutal cold spells because the building had run out of heating oil.
“I wanted to be a pilot for as long as I can remember,” Oyoumick said. After high school, he attended Covenant Bible College in Canada, he earned his private pilot’s license, and for seven years flew mail and freight for a cargo airline serving more than seventy villages across western Alaska. “That became a great way for me to have some kind of relationship with people in each of those villages,” he said.
In 2013, Oyoumick became the first Alaska Native pilot for Missionary Aviation Repair Center (MARC), a ministry based in Soldotna. He says two sermons convinced him God was calling him into a ministry of flying. One came from Pastor Ron Hutchcraft of On Eagle’s Wings Ministry, a radio broadcast that ministers to First Nations peoples across the US. Hutchcraft talked about waiting until you feel ready—how if you delay that long, you might never step into ministry at all. The other sermon has faded a bit from memory, but both hit home.
Curtis Ivanoff, then field director of the Evangelical Covenant Church of Alaska and the first Alaska Native to hold that post, called it a milestone. “I’ve seen Joel grow up in the Covenant Church and grow in his faith along the way, and it is wonderful to see him take such a step of faith,” he said.
The roots of MARC trace back to Covenant missionaries Roald and Harriett Amundsen, who served in Nome and Unalakleet for 20 years before founding the aviation ministry in Soldotna in 1964. Mark Swenson, who worked as a pilot for MARC, called Oyoumick a catalyst, hoping he would “encourage other Alaska Native men and women to follow his lead.”
This past season, MARC flew 428 kids and staff to five camps across thirty-six villages, packed nine at a time into Cessna Caravans and King Air 90s. Pilots like Oyoumick fly these routes because the alternative would be punishing: a camper flying commercially from Bethel to a camp near Unalakleet might have to route through Anchorage, turning an hour’s flight into two full days of travel. MARC flies directly instead, getting kids to camp faster and at less cost.
The flights are like a typical youth group bus ride. “They’re definitely very excited, especially the younger ones. They tend to not have much of the volume control!” Oyoumick said. Older campers plug in earbuds; the younger ones just yell. He doesn’t mind either version.
“We’re transporting these kids to be able to hear the gospel and be in a safe place,” he said. “That’s pretty much what it’s all about—being able to get kids to camp in the summertime to hear about Jesus.”
Spring brings different cargo and a different register of joy. A high school ministry from Grace Christian High School has been returning to the same handful of western Alaska villages for almost twenty years, teaching in classrooms by day and running open gym and outreach at night. One outreach brings Broken Wall, a Christian band, to perform daytime school assemblies and full concerts at night—part of a suicide-prevention initiative. Oyoumick flies the gear in one plane and the musicians in another, depending on the year. He loves watching the gym fill up with people who rarely get to hear live music, and seeing how they respond.
A job that depends on Alaska weather comes with its own safety risks. Every flight gets a risk analysis, driven mostly by weather, sometimes by maintenance, and decided jointly by the pilot in command and a dispatcher on the ground. “If there’s too many things building up against the safety of that flight, then we’re not going to go,” Oyoumick said. He does dispatch duty for other pilots as often as he flies himself. “We all value each other’s opinions,” he said. A canceled ministry trip is a disappointment, but he never makes the call alone.
MARC tries never to fly a leg empty. If a plane is headed west, Oyoumick and other pilots swing by Home Depot or Walmart to fill the cabin with lumber or food for whatever rural ministry needs it on the other end. “We try to help take the financial burden off of ministries in rural Alaska,” he said.
The ministry runs on a support-raising model. The Oyoumick family travels for deputation roughly every four years, visiting churches to share their story. Their home life absorbs his irregular schedule—weekend flights earn him comp time during the week; longer trips earn a day back. His family homeschools their three boys, which makes the swings easier to manage.
When superlatives are tossed his way, Oyoumick is more likely to shrug. “If people lived up here,” he said, “they would come to know and understand.”
The mail routes taught him the villages, and ministry gave him a reason to keep flying back.
