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Hilo pastor wages a
Rod Thompson
new, uphill fight
Star-BulletinHILO -- Chuck Sanders served three combat tours in Vietnam and suffered two wounds.
Now he faces another battle: trying to revive a historic church in downtown Hilo in an age when many people simply are not interested in going to church.
The Rev. Charles Sanders believes God led him to Central Christian Church.
If so, God did not prepare a big welcome. Only six people attended his first sermon May 7. More recently, he had 20 people.
But it is easy to see why Sanders fell in love with the church. Its pleasant wooden exterior hides an unusual interior in which the pulpit is offset in a corner, partially surrounded by curving pews.
Although the church's pipe organ is gone, the giant pipes remain, providing a rhythmic visual background for the altar.
And the church, constructed in 1892 as the Portuguese Christian Church, has an unusual history.
Former pastor Dee McNabb said a group of Portuguese immigrants found a Bible -- unusual reading for them -- on their long voyage to Hawaii around Cape Horn at the beginning of the 1890s.
Later, when they formed their own Protestant church in Hilo, two communities of Protestant Portuguese in Illinois sent ministers.
Sanders also has a history. His parents divorced when he was 7, and he considered becoming a minister at age 12. A high school dropout, he joined the Marines, served in Vietnam, met his wife, Nani, in Honolulu, and settled near Seattle, working at a refinery.
When a refinery fire killed his crew, Sanders turned to God. "All right, Lord, I get the picture," he said. Sanders earned six higher-education degrees, including two doctoral degrees from religious institutions.
At his wife's urging, they moved to the Big Island a year ago. Sanders began counseling veterans and serving as a deacon at Haili Church. McNabb, 75, met him there and urged him to take over her ministry.
The old Portuguese church had changed over the years. The first non-Portuguese minister came in 1939.
Church member Bob Mushlitz, 70, met his wife, Geraldine Morgado, on the mainland in 1949. She brought him home to meet her family, and Mushlitz, with a lot of padding around his belly, played Santa Claus for the church kids in 1950, he said.
As late as 1977, Sunday School children were singing "Jesus Loves Me" in Portuguese, the church history says.
But Sanders is inheriting a different scene. Most of the few people who attend the church are growing old. The church needs a computer for record-keeping, electrical work and repair of its electric organ.
Sanders finds beer bottles and syringes on the grounds; the smell of urine is next to the building.
The problem, he says, is "latchkey" children who miss a grounding in morality while their parents work.
"We don't want to close the doors of this beautiful inner-city church," Sanders said. "These churches provide the moral standards we should follow and are a reminder of these standards every day."
