His legacy

Frontiersman

PALMER — Pastor Travis Watson came to Alaska in 1979 driving a van with few possessions to speak of.

But, Watson said, God had given him a mission to start a church and a Christian school.

From its start in an Anchorage mobile home, Manna Independent Baptist Church today has 70 parishioners and a $1.5 million church along the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

And Watson, 62, is retiring.

“My mind does not want me to leave, but my body tells me I have to,” Watson said. “My heart will always be here.”

Watson said he and his wife will be heading to Missouri to take care of her parents, both in their 80s. He said they want to see them through the last part of their lives. His own health is also a concern, Watson said. He’s had a handful of major surgeries in the past few years. He suffers from anxiety attacks and needs to de-stress. As a pastor, he said, stress is part of the job — if you’re the type who truly cares about the woes of parishioners, which he does.

“When I did get called to the ministry I thought I would die here,” Watson said. “God had other plans, and it would be foolish not to see that.”

It’s been a meteoric rise for the church, Watson said, success he attributes to God’s will.

Born in Missouri, Watson came to God as a 15-year-old in a Baptist Sunday school.

Later, working in a South Carolina grocery store, he watched nine people from his church get called to the ministry before his turn came. He told himself he’d take the first call he got. It came soon after from his former boss, who’d moved to Alaska to do church service full-time.

“We hadn’t heard from him in three years,” Watson said.

In 1979, he began working with an established church in Eagle River, setting up a Christian school. He worked as a produce manager to support his family. In 1980, he bought a trailer home in Anchorage and converted it into a church.

“I bought it for $5,000 and sold it for $32,000,” Watson said.

The mid-’80s was a downturn in the oil business and buildings were going vacant, Watson said. In 1983, with that $32,000, Watson moved the church to a building at 555 N. Gulkana St. in Palmer.

“We didn’t lose any families by moving to the Valley,” Watson said.

At the time, he had 19 families in his church. They came to the Valley and homesteaded, he said.

In 10 years, the church paid off its Gulkana Street building and sold it to another church, Watson said. The church then bought land along the Palmer-Wasilla Highway, where the it now sits. When construction began, $60,000 was all the church had.

“That’s enough to get your blueprints out of the way and maybe the trusses,” Watson said.

But somehow it happened, due, in no small part, Watson said, to God.

A work group from a Chicago church came to help install windows and insulation, working for free and fed and housed by Manna Baptist.

More help would follow.

“I had a man stop by and say, ‘I want to put your roof on for you,’” Watson said.

Watson told the man he’d love to have help putting the roof on and asked him to come by when they ready and he’d put him to work as part of the crew.

“I don’t think you heard me,” Watson recalls the man replying. He owned a roofing company and wanted to do the whole job for free.

One day during the construction Watson and other church members came to the building to find $2,000 in high-quality lumber sitting in the parking lot.

“I don’t know where it came from. Nobody does,” Watson said.

The Manna Christian Academy was also established as part of the new church, which gives Watson some of his happiest memories of Alaska. One memory that’s dear to him revolves around a couple of students whose father couldn’t afford tuition. Watson took them into the school anyway.

To express his thanks, the father turned over the dirt in his potato field, putting the potatoes on top of the ground, and let the kids come by and gather up as many as they could.

These days, Watson said, most Christian families are home-schooling their kids. The school graduated its final student this year.

“I hate to see him go and everybody does, but I think it’s, he’s put in 27 years in the ministry and with his health the way it is he needs to retire and enjoy his family and time while he can,” said Todd Condon, a church member for five years and a deacon for three.

Condon said he admires Watson for giving everything he has to the church. Though Watson isn’t perfect, he lives his life as an example to others.

“If you preach the way a Christian should live and you don’t live it yourself that’s not the way it should be,” Condon said.

But, Condon said, he knows the church is in good hands.

Watson said he’s leaving the ministry to pastor Steve Cardin, who will be coming from Montana with his wife, Patty, this summer. Watson’s retirement social and open house will be 1 to 3 p.m. May 31.

Cardin is a familiar face at the church, having filled in for Watson when he was going through some of his medical treatments. He received a 99 percent vote of the church as new pastor, Watson said.

“He is one of the finest men I’ve ever met in my life,” he said of Cardin.

Watson said that, in Missouri, he’ll likely check the church’s Web site frequently. He said he’s going to miss his church and the great group of families he’s worked with.

But to build, at God’s direction, a church from scratch and leave it debt-free and thriving, is an achievement of a lifetime, Watson said.

“Anything e put in my hand I’d use for his glory,” Watson said. “I never put my money in two piles; my money and God’s money.”

And it’s worked.

“Everything I’ve ever touched just turned into gold,” Watson said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.