Sitka Lutheran Church

Sitka Lutheran Church is an Evangelical Lutheran Church in Sitka, Alaska. Its first building was constructed in 1843 on what is now 224 Lincoln Street and was the first Protestant church in Alaska. The original church was built and its congregation established through the efforts of Arvid Adolf Etholén, the eighth Russian governor of Alaska. The land on which the church was constructed was deeded to the congregation in perpetuity by the Russian government at the time of the Alaska Purchase. The current church building is the third to be constructed on the site and was completed in 1967. It contains many of the furnishings from the original church, including its historic pipe organ and the altarpiece by Berndt Godenhjelm.

Many of the workers who came to Alaska to work for the Russian-American Company were from Finland and the Baltic states and most were Lutherans. The settlement of New Archangel (now Sitka) was the capital of Russian America. However, for the first 35 years of its existence, the only church there was the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel. In 1839 Arvid Adolf Etholén, himself a Swedish-speaking Finn, was appointed the eighth governor of the colony by which time there were approximately 150 Lutherans working in New Archangel. At the urging of Etholén and Ferdinand von Wrangel, a previous manager of the Russian-American Company, the Russian government agreed to establish a Lutheran parish there which would be part of the Lutheran diocese of St. Petersburg. Etholén arrived in Sitka in 1840 with his young wife Margaretha who was a devout Lutheran and Uno Cygnaeus who was to be the first pastor. While the new church was being built, the congregation worshiped in one of the rooms of the governor's residence, Baranof Castle.

The new church was constructed opposite the Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel and was officially consecrated on October 15, 1843. The building, which also contained a library and the pastor's residence, had no steeple. The Russian Orthodox bishop had insisted that it should not "look like a church" given its proximity to the cathedral. The books for the church library and many of the interior fittings for the church including the altar painting, The Transfiguration of Christ by Berndt Godenhjelm, were brought from Finland on the Etholéns' voyage to Alaska. The pulpit, from which sermons were preached in Finnish, German, and Swedish, was made from Sitka spruce by Finnish shipwrights working for the Russian-American Company. The church's pipe organ, made by Ernst Carl Kessler in 1844 was a gift from Governor Etholén and shipped from Estonia to Alaska in 1845. However, neither the Etholéns nor Uno Cygnaeus were to hear it played. They had sailed back to Finland shortly before its arrival.

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