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The parish of St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Juneau has a reason to celebrate. After spending years without a regular priest, the church has welcomed Father Simeon Johnson to join as its rector.

Father Simeon, 37, moved to the area with his wife and two children at the end of June.

After finishing with his education at a seminary in New York, he was prepared to take a position in Colorado. When that plan fell through, he went looking for other work.

"Obviously God had different plans," he said. "The Juneau parish needed a rector, I needed a place to live that wasn't my father's basement."

Father Simeon said he has been delighted with the unforeseen turn of events, however.

"So far I've fallen in love with this parish, with this community, with this building and with Juneau," he said.

One of the first orders of business, he said, is building the parish's community back. The church has not had a regular priest since Father Michael Spainhoward left Juneau three years ago.

"When there's not a regular priest, people get out of the habit," he said. "Spirituality is like any other muscle. If you don't exercise it and use it, it atrophies."

Father Simeon will also be dividing his time between Juneau and St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Hoonah, which has not had a regular priest since 1994.

"Right now we're not making big changes," he said. "Like any business, if you come in as a new manager and you start changing things too quickly, you could break the stuff that's working and then nothing is working in the transition."

Father Simeon actually comes with a business background, and experienced his conversion to Russian Orthodoxy later in life. He said his first encounter with his faith came in high school while traveling in Russia two decades ago, when he was invited to dinner with an archbishop.

"He just had a different ethos," Father Simeon said. "There was an inner peace in him, but also a down to earth, pragmatic reality there, like we don't have to get into how many angels dance on the head of a pin."

Earlier in his life, Father Simeon said he didn't see his conversion coming.

"There was a point when I was in high school if somebody would have told me 'Twenty years after you graduate you're going to be an Orthodox priest in Juneau, Alaska' I might have smacked them upside the head."

Though the church calls itself Russian Orthodox and employs Russian architecture, Father Simeon said it is mostly a Tlingit parish.

"This particular parish was founded when the Tlingit community sent people to Sitka and then San Francisco to meet the bishop," he said. "A few Serbian miners helped cut the timber."

The church is decorated with iconostas, a wall decorated with religious icons dating back to the late nineteenth century. The building itself, constructed in 1894, is a historic landmark worthy of preserving, Father Simeon said. Given the age and the nature of the local conditions, there are several concerns with keeping the place in good shape, one of his goals with the church.

"This is the oldest orthodox church in Southeast Alaska, the oldest continually used building as well," he said. "This is a rain forest, earthquake zone ... you know, just the moisture takes its toll on an all-wood building like this."

Father Simeon said that for now, he is focusing on what matters: the community. Doing something as simple as offering a cup of coffee to a visitor can make a big difference, he said.

"A lot of it is listening," he said. "When it's the tourists coming through it's my job to talk. When it's our people it's my job to listen."

The church will be holding Vespers Saturday evenings and liturgy on Sunday mornings. Father Simeon said there are plans to hold some weekday services as well.

Richard Radford may be reached at richard.radford@capweek.com.