About Us
Helping Hands Alaska was founded by Jason and Jonie Mellinger in 2018. Jason moved to Alaska to pursue training for missionary aviation in January of 2002 and met Jonie a few months later, while she was training in the nursing field with a desire to do missionary work. After they were married in 2005, the left almost immediately to begin a decade of service as an Aircraft Maintenance Specialist and Registered Nurse.
But God had bigger plans and has guided through the years to get them the experience, training and skills to do many more things than they ever imagined for the Kingdom of Heaven. After having served throughout southeast Asia for almost a decade they moved back to Alaska in 2016 to use the same skills of service and helping with the Alaskan village missionaries and pastors, that they had been using internationally.
Our desire now is to help any like minded, gospel teaching missionary, mission, or pastor that is living in the Bush Villages of Alaska. If their purpose is to reach people with the true gospel and their mission statement and doctrine aligns with ours, we will work to alleviate their physical needs and problems as much as possible to help make their llives and ministry easier, more efficient and less hindering to the goal of new believers, discipleship of existing believers and a mature, healthy New Testament Church.
We are often installing heat systems, electrical wiring, plumbing, building or repairing churches and houses, mechanical work on generators, chainsaws, boats, aircraft, vehicles, four wheeler or motorcycles or just about anything else that the missionaries need. Whether they don’t have the skills or simply don’t have the time to work on these things, we want to make sure that they are not distracted from their calling to build relationships with those in their village. Over the years there aren’t too many things we haven’t been able to do to help keep the missionaries teaching the Bible, instead of worry about problems they aren’t able to deal with themselves.
Find out more here in our 30 minute detailed video of every day life and ministry here at Helping Hands Alaska:
What We Believe
The Bible
We believe in the absolute authority, accuracy and inerrancy of the 66 books of the Bible; its full verbal inspiration through the men chosen by God to produce the original manuscripts and its all-sufficiency and final authority as the Christian’s rule of faith and practice, to be used as a guide and standard for our growth in Christ. (Proverbs 30:5; Isaiah 40:8; II Timothy 3:16, 17; II Peter 1:19-21)
Jesus Christ
We believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God equal to God the Father, conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, and that He is true God and true man. He lived a sinless life and therefore was found worthy to sacrifice Himself on our behalf to pay for our sins, and then to raise from the dead to defeat sin and death and sits with God as the only mediator between God and man, and will come again, hopefully by the time you read this, to reclaim his Church and usher in the New Heaven and New Earth. (Matthew 1:20; Luke 1:35; John 1:1, 12, 14; John 12:45; 14:9; I Timothy 2:5).
The Holy Spirit
We believe that the Holy Spirit is God, equal with the Father and the Son. He exists to convict us of sin, guide us to righteousness and help us understand our sin nature and need for a redeemer. Like in the first church, he comes at the instance of our conversion and request for Jesus to save us from ourselves, and will remain with us and guides, teaches, witnesses to, sanctifies and helps the believer with power for living each day to come closer to being like Christ. He provides us with personal gifts which purpose is to edify the Body of Christ and we are to not squander those gifts, but to freely offer them in the service of the Lord. (John 16:8-11, 3:3-7; Ephesians 1:13; II Corinthians 13:14;John 14:16-17; Romans 8:14-27; I Corinthians 12:12, 13).
Salvation
We believe that salvation is a free gift given to anyone that believes and asks for it. It is given grace through faith, and no physical or religious effort will qualify us. All who receive by faith the Lord Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are born again of the Holy Spirit, thereby becoming children of God, changed at the innermost level and will show fruit that those changes are affecting all aspects of our lives. And as we aren’t able to do anything to earn Salvation for ourselves, we are unable to do anything to have it taken away. His sacrifice was sufficient to cover our sins the first time we accepted the Gift and nothing we do can make Christ’s sacrifice insufficient and to believe so places ourselves on a higher level than Christ.
(Ephesians 2:8,9; John 3:3,7; 1:12; 10:27-29; Romans 8:14-17).