View from the Pew
A look inside Hawaii's houses of worshipBy Mary Adamski
Saturday, February 2, 2002
Their history as a church is important to the Rev. Samuel Saffery Jr. and members of Liliuokalani Protestant Church in Haleiwa, and understandably so, since it is linked to early Christian missionaries and to Hawaii's last monarch, whose name it carries. Liliuokalani Protestant
Church steeped in historyThe graves in the tidy, flower-dotted churchyard include those of the Rev. John S. Emerson and his wife, Ursula, who founded the church on Oahu's North Shore in 1832. "The only land they owned is that plot," Saffery tells a visitor, "not like some of the missionaries who accumulated a lot."
And don't overlook the queen's clock, said longtime member Emmaline Causey, pointing to the large timepiece on the back wall.
Queen Liliuokalani, whose summer home was nearby, presented the seven-dial clock on Jan. 1, 1892. The curious item, which bears the letters of her name in place of numbers, was a gift from England's Queen Victoria. Parts and clockmakers being hard to find, the calendar clock is now stilled, no longer measuring days, weeks, months, leap years and phases of the moon.
Sunday mornings provide comforting links to the past. The 1833 vintage bell is rung manually. Worshippers pass through the 1910 stone archway escaping near-gridlock traffic heading for high surf down the coast or shave ice across the street.
Saffery, 90, in his 20th year as pastor, is also a link. "Daddy always told me, whatever you read in the Bible, there's a blessing and a warning," he told the pre-service Sunday school. He referred to his father, Samuel M. Saffery, who was pastor from 1940 to 1971.
Sunday's service provided a lively change from the norm. Along came Kamehameha Schools chaplain Kordell Kekoa and his associate, Sherman Thompson, with seven teenage preachers on the circuit in a religion outreach program. The school's Deputation Team was created to train students to lead worship services and send them out to help Hawaii churches that are without full-time pastors.
Saffery relinquished the pulpit to the youngsters. Kiel Dela Pena gave basketball team comparisons in a lesson on unity. Pono Enos used a paper-cutting trick to produce a cross and held the crowd's attention to his words as well as his fingers. Desiree Koanui made a stretch in comparing the church to Jack in the Box restaurant but got some audience participation, an evangelical-type response from the staid congregation as they followed her direction to "Say aloud: The Lord loves me. I love the Lord."
The young evangelists' sincerity, if not preaching skill, won rounds of applause from the congregation. Different though their style may be from Emerson's and Saffery's, it was a sign of hope that the church has a future as well as a past.
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Mary Adamski covers religion for the Star-Bulletin.
Email her at madamski@starbulletin.com.
