Unalaska, AK – This week, Unalaska's Church of Latter Day Saints closed to missionaries. With their neckties ties and collared shirts in place of sweatshirts and XTRATUFs, the young men who come here on religious missions stand out in a town with plenty of men with more economic concerns.

The two missionaries who were based here left Monday - one for Fairbanks and the other for Eagle River. The Mormon missionaries are always found in pairs, and they were each here for a few months. They filled a brief gap of no missionaries after having some present for two years uninterrupted. Don Clark is the branch president and he says that happens occasionally. While Unalaska's Church Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has had missionaries coming here for over a decade, and they haven't always come consecutively.

"They don't have a set deal where they have missionaries out here all the time. They've been coming and going since 1999," he says. "There's been some times all along when we haven't had missionaries here, and we've had young missionaries and senior missionaries out here. We just kind of bounce back and forth."

Clark says that this isn't because Unalaska's LDS Church is shrinking, nor is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' larger congregation getting smaller. He says the missionaries typically head to the places where there's the greatest demand for lessons taught.

"It's not any kind of curtailing of missionary service for the church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or for Dutch Harbor," says Clark. "It's just a cycle that they go through."

And who are the missionaries and what do they do, exactly? They're often men or women in their early twenties who spend two years in the service of the church and travel to different communities. But they can also be older members of the Church. Clark says that their work primarily involves working the community's LDS church and emphasizes that they have no interest in proselytizing to members of other churches in town. He also says that community service is a major component of what they do.

"They helped at the senior center, and they also helped out with the kids at the PCR when they were asked to. They try to do community service," says Clark. "It's not just church stuff."

While there are no set plans for any new missionaries in the future, Clark says it's possible that there will be new missionaries in the community in the New Year.