This month in Presbyterian history

This month in Presbyterian history

A 10-foot hand pointing heavenward, a visit with Crimean War veterans and an inaugural national conference

In 1899, Sheldon Jackson met and sat with two Cossack veterans living on the isle of Unalaska who told him of the August 1854 siege of Petropavlovsky.

Jackson, by this point in his life, was constantly touring the Alaskan territory, usually aboard the U.S. Cutter Bear, and often accompanied by Captain Michael Healy. He’d first visited Alaska in 1877, on what would eventually become one of 26 trips in total. Then, he was an employee of the Presbyterian Church’s Board of National Missions in the West, sent to Alaska with the mission of evangelizing amongst the indigenous communities.

In 1885, he was granted the title of U.S. General Agent for Education in Alaska. By the early 1890s, schools connected to several denominations —Methodists, Baptists, Moravians, Episcopalians — had cropped up across the Alaskan landscape, from Fort Wrangell to Point Hope.

Sheldon Jackson, on behalf of the Presbyterians, had founded his fair share of mission schools. Although lauded for his devotion to educating and evangelizing the Alaska indigenous peoples, some of Jackson’s educational policies — such as banning the usage of Native languages at school — had long lasting, detrimental effects for the indigenous populace.

Within Jackson's collection of photos, there are two images of two different men who both fought in the Crimean War, and who now lived along the shore of Unalaska. On each photograph there is a brief caption written in cursive at the bottom that reads: A Cossack veteran that helped repulse the Anglo-French fleet – August 20-24, 1854. Petropavlovsky, Kamchatcha. Photo 1899.

To be “Cossack” is to be of East Slavic descent, someone who hails from the Pontic-Caspian steppe of eastern Ukraine and southern Russia. Petropavlovsky, which translates to “City of Peter and Paul,” is located across the Bering Strait from Unalaska, where Jackson was adventuring at the turn of the century. By the time Jackson was traversing the icy tundra of Unalaska, it had been 40 years since the end of the Crimean War.

A battle fought between Russia and an alliance consisting of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom, and Sardinia from October 1853 until February 1856, the Crimean War was brought about by the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the simultaneous expansion of Russia, and the preference shared by Britain and France to preserve the Ottoman Empire and maintain the balance of power in Europe.

In late August of 1854, Anglo-French forces attempted to siege Petropavlovsky, though the city never fell under their control. The captions mention that both men were present in Petropavlovsky-Kamchatcha at this moment in time, and were members of the active force that defended the city from siege. When 600 Anglo-French troops landed just south of the city, they were forced to retreat by a group of 230 Russian troops — fighting heavily, and with the force of twice the men, the Russian troops succeeded in repelling their adversaries from the city. By early September, the Anglo-French fleet had retreated from Russian Pacific waters.

These Cossack veterans, though they are not named in the captions of their photographs, shared their stories with Jackson in 1899, four decades after their successful repulsion of the Anglo-French fleet. And now, 120 years later, their story can be told once more. What a beautiful example of the wonders the archives hold!

In August 1952, the Religious News Service published a photo that proved the First Presbyterian Church of Port Gibson, Mississippi, was a hand above the rest.

Atop its steeple sits a 10-foot-tall human hand, sculpted and gilded in gold, with its index finger pointing heavenward. The "heavenward-pointed hand," as the Religious News Service called it when photographing it in 1952, has been a landmark for more than a century in the small town near the Mississippi River.

This RNS image went hand in hand with a heartwarming story about how the steeple "guided a lost cadet back to this Air Force base at Greenville, Mississippi. Suspecting that he was over Port Gibson, Cadet Frederick F. Huber of Jennings, Louisiana, radioed his control tower, 120 miles away, for instructions. After he was told to 'look for a hand above the church,' he found his way home within an hour."

Readers learn from the caption that the hand was originally fashioned out of wood, carved by a man named Daniel Foley, and covered with gold leaf — in 1952, the hand was made of galvanized iron and gold leaf, the wooden one having been replaced at the turn of the 20th century. In 1957, just five years later, RNS would publish another photo of the hand-topped-steeple in commemoration of the congregation’s 150th year.

First Presbyterian Church of Port Gibson was organized in 1807, the congregation meeting in a variety of venues until the current structure was complete in December 1860. Its first pastor was the Rev. Zebulon Butler, a native of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Butler is buried at Wintergreen Cemetery in Port Gibson —his headstone reads, "He was the founder of the Presbyterian Church of this town, and for 33 years its pastor."

Butler led the congregation in a building program for the first house of worship on this site, a smaller brick building than the current structure that was constructed between the years 1829 and 1831 and was host to the final meeting of the Synod of Mississippi and South Alabama in 1834. By 1859, church membership had grown so large that Rev. Butler urged his flock to raise funds for a newer, bigger church building — which they did, though he was not there to see it to completion. Butler died on Dec. 23, 1860; the first service held in the new sanctuary was his funeral.

How to memorialize their beloved and missed leader? During his sermons, it is said that Butler would often raise his fist in the air, jabbing a quivering index finger toward heaven. The members of the Port Gibson congregation decided to commission a sculpture of a hand, with index finger outstretched, to be placed at the tip-top of their building — mimicking the pastor's favorite mid-sermon gesture. Now, the church with the gold hand at its zenith is known across the nation; the hand has even made its way into the congregation’s logo.

August 1957 saw a crowd of 600 ministers and workers gather in Bandung for the first national Indonesian pastors' conference. The conference was sponsored by the Indonesian Council of Churches, an organization that was founded on May 25, 1950, in cooperation with World Vision, Inc., a "church-centered evangelical" organization out of Portland, Oregon, that had also been founded in 1950. World Vision had opened a second office in Korea in 1954 following the outbreak of the Korean War; during the early years of its existence, the group operated as a missionary service organization meeting emergency needs in crisis areas in East Asia.

The manifesto drawn up upon the founding of the Indonesian Council of Churches reads: "We believe that the Council of Churches in Indonesia is God's gift to us in Indonesia as a sign of true Christian unity towards on the formation of one Church in Indonesia according to the mandate of Jesus Christ, God and Head of the Church, to His people, for the glory of God's name in this world."

The theme of the August 1957 conference was "The New Life in Christ," chosen in part because of the "New Life Movement" that had been launched by President Sukarno that same month. Sukarno served as the first president of Indonesia, holding the office from 1945 to 1967. On August 17, 1957, "In an address marking the twelfth anniversary of the declaration of independence from Netherland rule," as reported by the New York Times, President Sukarno "formally called on Indonesia's 82,000,000 people to join his 'New Life Movement' in this 'year of decision' for the crisis-burdened nation."

While "Throughout t