New pastor settling into Valley

WASILLA — Robbin Robbert didn’t always know he’d be a pastor.

Just for most of his life.

“I look back at artwork when I was a kid, and I did have some of myself in the pulpit,” he said.

Another time, he got detention for baptizing some of his friends’ stuffed animals.

Robbert said both of his parents were teachers at a Lutheran grade school. His earliest career dreams were of following his parents into teaching.

But one day his dad was upset that another teacher had asked him to change a light bulb in an overhead projector.

“You become a pastor, then you don’t have to deal with that,” Robbert said.

So the moment he started on the path to being a pastor involved light, he joked, but in this case, the light of a projector rather than the light of inspiration.

Robbert took over as pastor of King of Kings Lutheran Church in Wasilla June 1. Hearing Robbert and the president of the church’s congregation, Andrew Liebig, describe it, finding a pastor for a church is almost like finding a wife.

Both parties spend a lot of time thinking it over, exchanging photographs and emails. Liebig said the church spent a year searching for a pastor. Retired pastors covered services in the interim.

The church is part of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. And when it needed a new pastor, the Synod sent a list. Robbert joked that he wasn’t their first choice.

“A lot of them didn’t want to come all the way up here,” Liebig said.

But Robbert is from Wisconsin and when they called him March 25 he said he wasn’t scared away by Alaska’s climate.

“I said, ‘Hey, that doesn’t sound that bad at all,’” Robbert recalled.

Three weeks later he accepted the position.

And, like in a marriage, his new family worried if there’d be room for him. Literally.

“We said, ‘Well, this guy’s got five kids. How are we going to fit him in the parsonage?’” Liebig recalls.

Turns out Robbert’s two oldest kids were heading back to Wisconsin to finish up high school and the parsonage had an office that worked well as a fourth bedroom. The congregation even built him a fence that, Robbert joked, they told him was just tall enough to keep the family’s five small dogs safe from swooping eagles.

He said he and his family are enjoying Alaska. His former home of Weyauwega, Wisc., has a population of only 1,800 people. Compared against that, Wasilla is positively metropolitan.

“This is big city living for us,” Robbert said.

So far this summer he and his family have hiked Bodenburg Butte, rode the tram at Alyeska, visited Matanuska Glacier and taken a trip to Talkeetna where they didn’t manage to see Mount McKinley, but did share a Seward’s Folly — the massive, five-pound burger at the West Rib Café made famous on the Travel Channel show “Man Vs. Food.”

Weyauwega was his first church he served after completing his seminary training. But it was familiar ground. His dad was from there.

“My grandma was a member of my congregation,” he said.

But aside from the lack of Schwann’s ice cream and the lack of cheese factories — there were three nearby back in Wisconsin — Alaska and Wisconsin have many similarities.

“Sometimes I forget. I feel like I’m in northern Wisconsin and I’m outside and then I look up and there are the mountains,” Robbert said.

You can’t see that in Weyauwega.

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