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Rob Scott is tall and strong, a man who went to college to learn about becoming a lawman.

He’s the outdoors type; he loves to hunt and fish. And he can shoulder a lot of wild meat on his 270 pounds and tramp it from the woods.

But his degree in criminal justice never led him to a career fighting crime. Scott got sidetracked from his original ambition and became a Baptist minister.

He said he had a life-changing experience in a church meeting in Boone. He’s answered a “call” to be pastor at an outpost that will test all of his skills.

“You shoot your own meat,” he said.

Scott, 36, is likely to wear his hunting gear and snow shoes more than a clerical robe in his new role as pastor of Dillingham Fellowship Church in “rural” Alaska, on Nushagak Bay, an inlet of Bristol Bay.

This isn’t Fairbanks, Anchorage or Juneau — it’s the real Alaska of “Call of the Wild” and the tough days of moving just enough ice and snow to gain a space to build a shelter for survival.

Bristol Bay is an arm of the Bering Sea. Cold!

Scott and his wife, Dana, couldn’t refuse the “offer” when the congregation of the tiny Southern Baptist church decided they wanted him as their pastor.

The Scotts, who left the comfort of traditional Brentwood Baptist Church in High Point in March after five years, consider this the opportunity they had been praying to take place in their lives.
“We loved the people at Brentwood,” Scott said. “They were good to us and we enjoyed being their pastor.”

It doesn’t matter to them that Dillingham is remote.

It’s the hub of an area about the size of North Carolina where there are 29 villages and a population of about 5,000 people who “need a relationship with God,” he said.

“Our hearts have always been with people who are unchurched,” Rob Scott said.

“I appreciate the individualism of the people in Alaska. I long to talk to those kinds of people.”

Dillingham Fellowship, which had been meeting for seven or eight years, officially became a church earlier this year.

Scott said it is the only Baptist congregation among seven churches in the area.

“This church already wants to plant (start) more churches,” he said.
“There is so much need and so little (financial) support,” he said.
Scott isn’t bothered about the possibility of having to take a secular job to supplement his income.

It doesn’t bother him that any job he might get promises to be heavy on physical labor or that bread is $5.75 a loaf, milk is $8.50 and gasoline is $6 a gallon.

“We want the Lord to use us,” his wife said.

“I never expected this when we got married but it doesn’t scare me,” she said.

The first pastor of the Dillingham group left nearly a year ago. Gray Erlacher, a native of Winston-Salem and a physician at the only hospital for hundreds of miles, has been interim pastor for eight months.

Erlacher and his wife, Karen, also moved to Dillingham to be involved in ministry there.

The church has increased to 45 members, and Erlacher not only keeps up with his medical duties, teaches and preaches but also has a preaching ministry on KAKN radio.

His sermons also can be heard at www.erlacher. podbean.com.
Karen Erlacher puts “every last ounce of her boundless energy into the youth of Dillingham, and the community can see the difference already,” her husband said.

A Christian youth center was about to close for lack of financial support. Karen Erlacher took on the challenge of being center director and it remains open, he said.

Erlacher, a member of the pastor search committee for Dillingham Fellowship, is glad that the church has Scott as pastor.

Of 90 applications received from advertising on a Southern Baptist Web site, Scott’s is the only one that received an excellent rating.

“We independently read and rated each one, and there were numerous highly qualified and anointed men in the group. Each of us scored and reviewed each resume, and then we met and compared our rankings,” Erlacher said.

The Scotts are undeterred about the physical challenges of living in Alaska.

“I’ve worked on a farm, cut heavy timber. I can run heavy equipment and do mechanical work,” he said.

His wife, a vegetarian until she married, can hold her own with the chores.

She knows how to work in a garden, and “I can kill a chicken,” she said.

Scott likes the idea of being in a place where there is not a lot of pomp and circumstance in the community, he said.

“In the regular church you try to build community. In Dillingham and other places like this, you already are community. You have to depend on each other for survival.”

Contact Bob Burchette at bburchette@triad.rr.com